Disney Data Dump August 28 2024

We’ve made it, Disney Data friends! The end of summer is almost here, and so it’s one of my very favorite times of the year in Disney parks. It’s what I’m calling the Lovely Labor Day Lull (we can all get matching t-shirts for next year). And this year it seems to be starting even a little earlier than normal. That shouldn’t be surprising to anyone who has been following these posts all summer. The summer was already low, then we saw the smallest of upticks in early August for last-minute family vacations. But even that bottom has now dropped out, and if you can stand the heat and humidity, it’s the best time of year to visit Orlando to avoid crowds.

Observed Crowd Levels August 20 – 26

This is the lowest average crowd level (3.4) that we’ve seen for the month of August! Those last-minute school trips and even most holidays from Europe are wrapped up and we’re seeing our Lovely Labor Day Lull rolling in a little early this year. Yes, the weather is still miserably hot. But wait times should continue to be really low throughout the next couple of weeks.

Just like last week, it’s pretty easy to pick out the party days at Magic Kingdom … because they were all crowd level 1. Even our “reliable” Animal Kingdom and EPCOT crowd levels that tend to hover steady throughout the week saw dips over the weekend and into Monday. So we know this isn’t a blip. It’s definite a resort-wide emptying out of all of the parks.

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 week, Touring Plans predictions were either spot-on or within 1 crowd level 46% of the time. After a stellar performance for the past two weeks, this is once again a big dip below historical performance. But, 93% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we achieve a rare A 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 – not a single park-day was underpredicted at all for the past week. The biggest misses of the week were both at Hollywood Studios – on August 23rd when TP predicted an 8 and the actual crowd level was a 4, and on August 24th when TP predicted a 6 and the actual crowd level was a 3.

Attraction Downtime August 20 – 26

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past two weeks, it comes out to 4.9% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a little bit higher than the past few weeks, but nothing out of the ordinary for the season of summer storms. And for the first time in a while, Hollywood Studios was the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 6.3% overall downtime over the past week. Thankfully it didn’t seem to impact overall wait times very much.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on August 26th. On that day, 7% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. And the worst park-day of the week is a handy combination of the worst day of the week and the worst park of the week – August 26th at Hollywood Studios. On that park days, 12% of the capacity was lost at the Studios due to unexpected downtime. Hollywood Studios was open for 12 hours on the 26th, so 12% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for over 86 minutes that day.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

For the second week in a row, the worst offender of the past week was Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which was unexpectedly down for approximately 30% of the week – much more downtime than we usually see in this top spot. The worst day for Tiana’s was clearly on August 24th, when the ride was down for 51% of the day. But this was closely followed by August 26th, when it was down 50% of the day. On the 24th, Tiana didn’t open until after noon – and on the 26th it didn’t open until after 3 pm.

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 (41%), Space Mountain (19%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (18%)
• EPCOT: Spaceship Earth (25%), The Seas (22%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (26%), Runaway Railway (14%), Rise of the Resistance (13%)
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

Not a terrible week for rope drop, but not a great one either. The reopening of Peter Pan’s Flight at Magic Kingdom means that is once again the most reliable rope drop option in the park. You’re rolling the dice by getting into line for Space Mountain and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train first thing in the morning. The big headliners at EPCOT haven’t had issues, and there have been no problems at Animal Kingdom.

Hollywood Studios continues to be tricky. Thankfully, Slinky Dog Dash has had a good summer. Rock’n’Roller Coaster continues to be plagued by downtime even after lengthy refurbishments each of the last two years.

Wait Times August 20 – 26

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 64 minutes (73 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 74 minutes (85 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 54 minutes (59 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 52 minutes (56 minutes last week)

Significant decreases in posted wait times at all of the headliners this week! Only two attractions across all of WDW even had average posted waits over a hour. And that’s the average, so you know there were plenty of times during the day where the posted time was under an hour. Plus actual wait times were even lower. It’s an easy time of year to tour the parks.

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 33 minutes (36 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 22 minutes (23 minutes at EPCOT and Magic Kingdom last week)

I’m really hoping that Hollywood Studios average does its exceedingly rare dip below 30 minutes next week after Labor Day. That’s when you know it’s really the perfect time to be in the parks. But we’re already seeing Magic Kingdom and its low overall averages thanks to those party days! And actually, if we narrow things down to just party days, Magic Kingdom’s average overall posted wait was just 18 minutes. That’s crazy.

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 TTA PeopleMover! At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 43% 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 just over 8 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 20th and 26th, we had over 1700 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was preef, with 97 (!!) overall timed waits – 34 Lightning Lane waits, 59 standby waits, and 4 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, preef! This is obviously the new winner of highest number of timed waits in a week. Congrats on claiming the crown! And good luck to anyone trying to overtake that top spot in the future.

Looking Ahead: August 27 – September 2

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 27th will already be in the past when you read this post. Welcome to the future.

We’re already seeing the back-to-school plummet of wait times, and that’s only going to continue. There are some very clear indicators that the next two weeks are going to be gloriously uncrowded, as per usual for the time around Labor Day each year:

• 8/27, 8/28, 9/3 and 9/4 are all good-to-go days for Annual Passholders. That means Disney is convinced that the parks are going to be empty enough that they can handle passholders showing up anywhere.
• Pirate Passes are blocked out Saturday, Sunday and Monday 8/31-9/2. Any day this year where Pirate Pass has been blocked out has been shockingly empty. So let’s all choose to not be shocked anymore. There isn’t enough non-local travel to make the parks crowded those days. And with many locals kept out too … you should definitely head to the parks if you’re able.

Beyond that, 8/27, 8/30 and 9/2 are all party days at Magic Kingdom. Combine already-low crowds overall with party days, and you’ll feel like you own Magic Kingdom if you visit on any of those dates. Food and Wine Festival kicks off on August 29th. That means on that day, you’ll want to avoid the World Showcase and any food booths – unless visiting on opening day is important to you. Otherwise, it’ll just mean that World Showcase is more crowded than usual especially on weekend evenings.