Disney Data Dump – April 9 2025

March was surprisingly mild, and now April has entered the chat saying, “Hold my Dole Whip.” The first full week of the month brought crowd levels that looked more like late summer or early fall than what should be peak spring break—some of the lowest waits we’ve seen all year. Even a runDisney weekend that impacted 3 out of the 7 past days couldn’t budge the needle much. That all means you’ve got another data-rich, crowd-light edition of the Disney Data Dump to dive into. Let’s see just how slow this spring has been!

Observed Crowd Levels April 1 – 7

If last week we called this Slow Spring, this week is even Slower Spring. These crowd levels look more like August or September – not early April. We’re starting to see some Easter-related bumps in the past couple of days. But … bumps up to crowd level 4. If Springtime Surprise had any impact on crowds from the 4th through the 6th, maybe it was some higher wait times on Saturday. But it’s hard to really see any difference. Last week I predicted an average crowd level of 4, and it was even lower than that. Very remarkably low crowds. Congratulations if you got to enjoy them last week!

In the first four days of April, crowds were low everywhere. Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios both averaged a crowd level of 2.5. Crazy. And then when things started picking up on the 5th-7th, they mostly picked up at EPCOT and Animal Kingdom. Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom are still absorbing their crowds well. EPCOT and Animal Kingdom don’t have enough attractions to do that. But – at the risk of being a broken record – both parks have plenty of non-line things to keep you entertained even if lines get a little long.

Performance of Crowd Level Predictions

Each week, I give you a very transparent look into how the TouringPlans crowd level predictions performed. Each day at each park is one data point, so each week we have 28 different crowd level predictions to evaluate. Any time a prediction is within one or two crowd levels, things won’t really “feel” much different than what was predicted. Being off by 3 or more crowd levels is where you might feel that difference in wait times throughout the day.

In the past week, Touring Plans predictions were either spot-on or within 1 crowd level 11% of the time. Two weeks ago we had much better than average predictions. Last week was average, and this week may be our worst performance ever. Only 22% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get a very low F for our predictions in the past week. As has been the trend since … at least summer 2024, all misses were over-predictions. No under-estimates – only over-estimates. In fact, all 3 of the “Within 1 CL” results were overpredictions by one crowd level. In general, if you had subtracted 3.5 crowd levels from the predictions at every park every day, you would’ve been much closer to the truth. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 7 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on April 1st. On that day, the park was predicted to be a crowd level 9, but only ended up being a crowd level 2. Hollywood Studios was also overpredicted by 6 crowd levels on April 2nd.

Attraction Downtime April 1 – 7

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 3.5% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a low number compared to our historical average in our weekly tracking, even though it’s slightly higher than last week! This week, Magic Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 4.3% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. Thankfully, crowds have been pretty light at Magic Kingdom anyway, and that overall downtime isn’t too bad.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on April 5th. On that day, 5% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. But the worst park-day of the week was on April 6th, at Animal Kingdom. On that day, 7% of attraction capacity was lost at Animal Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. Animal Kingdom was open for 12 hours on the 6th (a rare 8 pm closing!), so 7% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park being shut down for just over 50 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Pirates of the Caribbean was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. The ride was unexpectedly down for 9% of the week. It’s one of the lowest “winning” percentages we’ve had, so I guess we’ll take it. I think it’s also worth noting that PeopleMover was just behind, also rounding to 9% downtime for the week. The worst day for Pirates was on April 1st, when the ride was down for 30% of the day. A sad April Fools Day on Tortuga.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are problematic offenders from the past week, with the percentage of downtime during the first hour of the day in parentheses:

• Magic Kingdom: Pirates of the Caribbean (60%), TTA PeopleMover (25%), Mickey’s PhilharMagic (24%), Space Mountain (16%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (13%), it’s a small world (12%), Haunted Mansion (10%)
• EPCOT: Journey Into Imagination (30%), Frozen Ever After (24%), Seas with Nemo (21%)
• Hollywood Studios: Runaway Railway (22%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (16%)
• Animal Kingdom: Dinosaur (11%), Expedition Everest (10%)

Last week I called out Magic Kingdom for its terrible rope drop results. And this week is no different. Thank goodness for Seven Dwarfs, Peter Pan, and Tron all doing well. Because almost everything else is full of land mines if you’re trying to take advantage of short lines early in the day.

Frozen has also been popping up more frequently. Bad news for families that are trying to head there during early entry. It makes more sense now to start at Remy or Cosmic Rewind and then bop over to Frozen if it’s up after your first ride.

Shout-out to Hollywood Studios for being pretty decent in the past week. Rise and Slinky are both on a reliability hot-streak. Fingers crossed that it stays that way!

Wait Times April 1 – 7

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 55 minutes (was 64 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 56 minutes (was 72 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 65 minutes (was 74 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 67 minutes (was 85 minutes last week)

As a reminder, two weeks ago all of these numbers were in the high 80s or 90s. And now two headliners had average posted waits under an hour, and the other two were just above an hour. This is crazy for spring at WDW. I don’t know what more to say about it.

Parks with the Highest and Lowest Average Wait

These parks likely won’t change week-to-week unless something ridiculous happens, but these data points will give us a high-level view of how wait times are trending from week to week.

• Highest: Animal Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 34 minutes (was 39 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 22 minutes (was 25 minutes last week)

Animal Kingdom stays at the top of the charts thanks to “high” wait times at Flight of Passage, Na’vi River Journey, Kali River Rapids, Kilimanjaro Safaris and Expedition Everest with nothing to balance them out. Still, wait times are low everywhere. An average of 22 minutes at Magic Kingdom is something we usually only see during party season when the parks are empty on party days. Even Hollywood Studios had an average posted wait of just 28 minutes. Any time that park drops below 30 minutes, it’s something important to look at.

Most Inflated Posted Wait Times

We all know that Disney inflates their posted wait times on purpose. They have many reasons for doing this. Some are totally understandable, and some are potentially more problematic. We can figure out how much posted wait times are being inflated by comparing submitted actual wait times from the Lines App and the posted wait time when the person timing their wait entered the line.

Over the past week, actual wait times in the Lines App averaged 73% of what was posted. This is significantly above our historical average. That means that posted wait times were more accurate last week than normal. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait a little under 44 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Spaceship Earth. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 42% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 20 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited about 8.5 minutes instead. Less than half of what was posted. Remember to always check the Lines app for predicted actual waits instead of believing what is posted.

This Week’s Wait Time Rock Star

Between April 1st and 7th, we had almost 1300 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was gmcc, with 55 overall timed waits: 12 standby waits, 39 Lightning Lane waits, and 3 single rider waits. Thanks for all of that timing, gmcc! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: April 8 – 14

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 8th will already be in the past when you read this post. Welcome to the future, travelers!

We’re not going to stay this lucky forever. Let’s just call that out now. The second (and arguably largest) wave of Spring Breaks is coming. Many schools across the country are off next week, so we should see wait times starting to increase over the weekend and throughout next week. Still – this isn’t going to be crowd level 9 or 10 horror stories. But it should be more than crowd level 2-4. Let’s call it 6 or 7ish if I had to guess. But I also thought runDisney last weekend would make more of a bump than it did, so what do I know?

Weather is looking just about perfect – sunny with highs in the upper 70s to mid 80s. Enjoy your time before things start heating up more heading into the summer!

Were you in the parks this past week? Or are you headed to Orlando soon? Let me know in the comments below!