Disney Data Dump August 21 2024

Welcome to the weekly Disney Data Dump, numbers fans! I’m especially excited to dig into the past TWO weeks of data today, because it covers my most recent trip to the World with my big kid from August 10-13. I can tell you that I made a lot of anecdotal observations, which I’ll be sprinkling throughout this week’s article.

One interesting note to start – the table service restaurants where we dined had no available reservations around the times when we booked. But most of them were only 25-66% full. The one exception was ‘Ohana, which was very much filled to capacity. Meal times were incredibly slow – much different than the normal rush to clear tables so more visitors can dine. I think Disney might be lowering staffing at dining locations to save some money. There isn’t high demand for most of them anyway thanks to low crowds and budgets being pointed elsewhere.

Observed Crowd Levels August 6 – 19

Let’s separate out these two weeks and talk through the trends we can see across each. First was August 6th through 12th – where there was a bit of a “bump” in crowds (if you can really call it that) as a bunch of families seemed to try to squeeze in one more bit of family vacation before the school year started. This week had an average crowd level of 5 – which is the highest we’ve seen all summer. Still … it was only an average of 5.

Then we have August 13th through 19th where most of those families headed back home for the start of “fall”. The average crowd level dropped down below 4. This points to a nice, uncrowded end of summer and beginning of fall before school holidays start tempting more people to visit in October and November.

Once we dig a little deeper into the park-by-park crowd levels, things get even more interesting. The very earliest days of these two weeks were all remarkably steady. Every park was hanging out around a crowd level 6 (or so). But then party season started on August 9th! Now, we’re still early enough in the fall calendar that there aren’t parties 3 or 4 nights a week. So we’re not going to see the wild swings in crowd level at Magic Kingdom yet. But we can still easily pick out August 9th, 13th, and 16th as party dates here. August 18th wasn’t a party date, but still had low crowds. That’s more due to weather than anything else, though.

We’re also starting to see an interesting trend where Animal Kingdom and EPCOT have (relatively) heavier crowds than Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom. This is at least partially due to the fact that Animal Kingdom and EPCOT have so few attractions (rides, not entertainment) compared to the other two parks. Operationally, there is less room for people to spread out and lower wait times. And if one of those few attractions goes offline, it has a bigger impact on wait times overall.

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 we have 28 different crowd level predictions to evaluate each week (and therefore 56 predictions to evaluate this week). 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 two weeks, Touring Plans predictions were either spot-on or within 1 crowd level 73% of the time. That’s finally in line with historical performance, thanks to TP predictions getting slightly lower in time for a summer slowdown, and instead crowds picking up from where they were the rest of the summer. Lower predictions and higher real crowds helped close the 2-crowd-level gap we’ve been seeing most of the summer. 87% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we achieve a B for our predictions in the past week. That’s the best performance we’ve seen since the re-start of the Data Dump. We’re still seeing a skew toward overpredictions, but it’s not nearly as bad as it has been in the past few months. The biggest misses of the week were at Hollywood Studios on August 14th (when 7 was predicted, but the actual crowd level was 3), and at Magic Kingdom on August 13th (when 5 was predicted, but the actual crowd level was 1). August 13th was a party day at Magic Kingdom, which you can expect to have very low crowd levels for the rest of August and September.

Attraction Downtime August 6 – 19

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past two weeks, it comes out to 4.2% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s pretty on par with what we expect in the late summer, thanks to its almost-daily afternoon rain storms. And back in a spot that it’s starting to occupy with concerning frequency, Animal Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 4.6% overall downtime over the past two weeks. That’s part of the reason we’re seeing it with elevated crowd levels compared to the rest of the parks.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on August 11th. On that day, 8% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. And we have a tie worst park-day – at Animal Kingdom on Sunday, August 11th AND Monday, August 12th. On those park days, 13% of the capacity was lost at Animal Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. Animal Kingdom was open for 10 hours on the 11th and 12th, so 13% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for 78 minutes each day.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past two weeks was Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which was unexpectedly down for approximately 16% of that time. The worst day for PeopleMover was clearly on August 11th, when the ride was down for 49% of the day. Of course, this had to be the day I was in Magic Kingdom, with a LLMP for Tiana’s that got cancelled and then the ride never opened back up. But I digress.

Rope Drop Downtime

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

• Magic Kingdom: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (30%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (14%), Space Mountain (13%), TTA PeopleMover (12%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo and Friends (14%), Frozen Ever After (11%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (15%), Runaway Railway (14%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (11%)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (21%), Dinosaur (10%)

The bad news is that every park was impacted by some bit of rope drop downtime, which is a departure from two weeks ago when EPCOT and Animal Kingdom emerged unscathed. The good news is that other than Magic Kingdom, there were still good and reliable rope drop options at every park (Pandora attractions at Animal Kingdom, Remy at EPCOT, and Slinky at Hollywood Studios).

Magic Kingdom continues to be tricky, though. Now that Peter Pan’s Flight is back online, that’ll take some pressure off of Seven Dwarfs and Space at rope drop, but really those are the best early entry rope drop options and they both struggle a lot first thing in the morning.

Wait Times July 23 – August 5

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 73 minutes (two weeks ago was 67 minutes)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 85 minutes (two weeks ago was 78 minutes)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 59 minutes (two weeks ago was 55 minutes)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 56 minutes (two weeks ago was 61 minutes)

Thanks to that last little surge (emphasis on little, not on surge) of vacationing families during the first half of August, most of these highest wait times are slightly higher than the previous two weeks. The only exception to this is Seven Dwarfs, which benefits from party day wait times dragging down the overall average. Thanks, party days! [insert cheesy 90s high-five here]

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: Hollywood Studios, average park-wide posted wait of 36 minutes (was 34 minutes two weeks ago)
• Lowest: EPCOT and Magic Kingdom tied, average park-wide posted wait of 23 minutes (was 22 minutes at EPCOT two weeks ago)

With just three party dates in the past two weeks, Magic Kingdom has seen some lower wait times – but not quite enough to totally steal away the lowest overall wait time from EPCOT. But I fully expect that flip to happen by the time we get to September with its more frequent parties. More parties = more short party days = more low crowds = lower wait times overall!

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 66% of what was posted. This is slightly above our historical average, which means that posted wait times are just a bit more accurate than normal. But even so, if the posted wait time was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait just less than 40 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Living with the Land! At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 45% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 30 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited 13.5 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 August 6th and 19th, we had over 3000 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was mbcollins, with 72 overall timed waits – 37 Lightning Lane waits, 31 standby waits, and 4 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, mbcollins! More impressively, 68 of those waits all came in the second out of our two weeks, so mbcollins claims the crown to our weekly record, with 68 timed waits in a week.

Looking Ahead: August 20 – 26

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 20th will already be in the past when you read this post. Pretend you’re time travelling. It’s fun.

Weather-wise, what you’ve seen the past few weeks is what you’ll get the next few weeks. Nothing is guaranteed other than death, taxes, and afternoon thunderstorms in Orlando in August. Bring your poncho or rain jacket or umbrella, have some dry socks in your bag, and you’ll get through just fine. It’s also a good time of year to plan your outdoor attractions for the morning to avoid weather-related downtime.

There are two parties this week at Magic Kingdom – on August 20th and 23rd. Wait times will be gloriously low on those days, and the 7 am virtual queue for Tron stays open for much much longer on these days too, if that’s an attraction you’re especially interested in riding without pay for LLSP. Other than those days at those parks, expect overall crowd levels in the 3 or 4 range throughout the next week with no special events or big crowd draws, and lots of kids being back in school.