Disney Data Dump December 11 2024

Observed Crowd Levels December 3 – 9

That’s a nice early December! Oddly, it’s not much lower than the week after Thanksgiving. So not as much of a drop as other post-holiday periods this year. Annual passes don’t start seeing blockout dates until December 19th, so it’s possible that passholders are visiting Festival of the Holidays and trying to get last visits for the year in before they get blocked out. All tiers of APs are blocked starting 12/19 other than the most expensive – Incredi-Pass. But there will be so many out-of-state visitors that those blockouts won’t be noticeable.

No Jollywood dip at Hollywood Studios on the 7th, so that’s worth calling out. But Magic Kingdom is still seeing its glorious crowd level 1 days on party days. And, as mentioned above, EPCOT has the highest crowds of any park. Part of this is thanks to a major headliner being closed, but it’s also a big draw for local visitors.

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 43% of the time. Not spectacular, but much better than the past month or so. And, 75% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get a C for our predictions in the past week. As has been the trend since this summer, crowds continue to be lower than expected. No under-estimates – only over-estimates. In the past week, if you had simply subtracted 1.5 crowd levels from any park prediction on any day, you would have been closer to reality. That’s lower than the past 5 or 6 weeks, and closer to being in the margin of error. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 4 crowd levels, at Hollywood Studios on December 9th. HS was predicted to be a 7 and ended up being a 3. Lucky you, if you were in the Studios that day!

Attraction Downtime December 3 – 9

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4.7% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a strong uptick, enough to put us over our historical average. This week, EPCOT was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 6.6% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. And since EPCOT is already struggling with attraction capacity thanks to the refurbishment of Test Track, all of that downtime definitely had an impact on wait times.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on December 4th. On that day, 8% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was also on December 4th at EPCOT – a nice clean combo of our worst park and worst day overall. On that day, 14% of attraction capacity was lost at EPCOT due to unexpected downtime. EPCOT was open for 12.5 hours on  the 4th, so 14% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park being shut down for 105 minutes – almost 2 hours.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, The Seas with Nemo and Friends was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. The ride was unexpectedly down for 17% of the week. It was followed closely by Rise of the Resistance (also 17% but slightly lower) and Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (16%) – the fourth week in a row that those two headliners have been at or near the top of the list. The worst day for The Seas was on December 4th, when the ride was down for 50% of the day. But there were other pretty unreliable days too.

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: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (24%), Magic Carpets (21%), Winnie the Pooh (20%), TTA PeopleMover (18%), Big Thunder Mountain (17%), Pirates of the Caribbean (16%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (14%), Mickey’s PhilharMagic (13%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo (50%), Cosmic Rewind (24%), Spaceship Earth (13%)
• Hollywood Studios: Tower of Terror (27%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (27%), Slinky Dog Dash (11%)
• Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (29%)

Boo. Hiss. Right after I shouted out the short rope drop downtime list from last week … the pendulum swings the other way. Hard. This was a nasty rope drop week, especially at Magic Kingdom. Applause for Space Mountain and Tron holding things down. That’s increasingly becoming the most reliable rope drop strategy at MK. Start at Space for early entry, and then get in line for Tron right before official park opening.

Cosmic Rewind is here again. This is really concerning at this point. It used to be one of the most reliable attractions in all of WDW, but it’s having a lot more morning downtime. And downtime in general.

And then the Sunset Blvd attraction duo is on the list. At least as long as one of them is up you can hop into either line and have a very short first wait of the day. But with both down, you’re in trouble. Even more concerning, cast members in this area (more than others) will let you stay in line all the way until the park actually opens, so you don’t even have a heads up to maybe go wait for something else instead.

Wait Times December 3 – 9

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 63 minutes (81 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 62 minutes (122 minutes last week at Rise of the Resistance)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 57 minutes (71 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 54 minutes (63 minutes last week)

Things are pretty much back to “normal” with the highest waits at each park this week. Rise had less overall downtime, and so its average wait time was cut in half compared to last week. All other top wait times were cut by at least 9 minutes too. This is consistent with overall crowd levels dropping in early December.

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 (40 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 21 minutes (23 minutes last week)

Even park-wide averages are significantly down compared to last week. These are both just a minute higher than the week before Thanksgiving, which itself was remarkably low. Lots of room for these to go up – significantly – before the end of the year.

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 72% of what was posted. This is a big jump up from what we’ve been seeing recently, and it’s also significantly above the 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 40 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait less than 29 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Gran Fiesta Tour. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 39% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 15 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 6 minutes instead. Almost a third 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 December 3rd and 9th, we had almost 1600 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was jimg1960, with 44 overall timed waits – 41 standby waits and 3 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, jimg1960! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: December 10 – January 6

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 10th will already be in the past when you read this post. We’re back in the future!

I’ve got a LONG look forward today because over the next few weeks, data dumping just isn’t going to happen. Each data dump requires a lot of timely data pulling and writing, and the holidays are working against us for the next few weeks. On December 18th, I’ll be in Walt Disney World and won’t have time to pull the data or write this article. Then the following two weeks are Christmas day and New Years day. I like spending time with my family, so I’ll be doing that.

But not all hope is lost – you’ll be seeing some “Best of 2024” posts between now and the end of the year. And then we’ll pick back up with data dumps in January.

Between now and then we’ve got what should be the most crowded weeks of the year at Walt Disney World. We’ve got may another week of low crowds before school districts start letting out, and then crowds will increase and stay high through the new year. Some districts start back second semester as early as January 2nd, but there are enough that stay on break longer that crowds should still be high by January 6th.

If you’re travelling to Walt Disney World between now and our next data dump, rely on tried and true strategies – going to Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios on party days. Avoiding EPCOT on the weekends. Utilizing rope drop and early entry if you can.

Were you at Disney in the past week? Or are you visiting in the next few weeks? Let me know below!