Disney Data Dump December 20 2023

Welcome to the sprint to the end of the year! We’re in that interesting transition time between early December and its festive, relatively empty parks; and late December and its most merriest and most crowded weeks of the year. A well-timed storm this week made that transition even more sudden and apparent – but we’ll see if the parks truly fill up or if the trend of lower-than-expected crowds closes out the year.

Observed Crowd Levels December 12 – 18

Well look at that – we enter a week until Christmas, and things just go crazy. Whoever you are with children already out of school, I’m jealous. It’ll be interesting to see if crowds really turned the corner just like that, or if Monday was just a really bad Monday thanks to everyone being cooped up during the rain. I’m guessing the crowds are here to stay for a bit.

Bunches of different things going on in the past week. Magic Kingdom had a lot of parties (12th, 14th, 15th, and 17th). But the 16th was also a total washout, which kept wait times lower everywhere and made the non-party day peak at Magic Kingdom stay low. There are only a few more Christmas parties to be had, so you’re running out of time to take advantage of the party day lulls.

Performance of Crowd Level Predictions

Each week, I’m giving you a very transparent look into how our 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. Any time a prediction is within one or two crowd levels, things won’t really “feel” much different than what we predicted. Being off by 3 or more crowd levels is where we’d like to be more accurate because 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. Not great, but pretty on par for the past month or so. 64% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we only get a D for our predictions the past week. And the two trends that I started pointing out last week continue. The first was that we’re skewed toward over-estimates. The average difference between predicted and observed crowd levels this week was -1.8 (almost double last week’s average), which means that on average you could have subtracted 2 full crowd levels from every park-day estimate and you would have been more accurate.

Second, Hollywood Studios is still a big outlier. Its average difference was -3.1 crowd levels for the past week. In fact, the biggest miss of all was on December 16th, when the predicted crowd level was 9 and ended up being a shocking 2 instead. Now, we can blame the rain for some of that. But there was also a 5-crowd-level overprediction on the 14th that didn’t have anything to do with the weather.

Attraction Downtime December 12 – 18

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 3.3% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a significant decreased compared to what we’ve been seeing for the past couple of months. Hooray! Hollywood Studios is yet again the park with the most capacity lost throughout the week, averaging out to 5.3%.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on December 16th. On that day, just over 5% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. But the worst park-day was at Hollywood Studios on December 15th. On that park day, 9% of the capacity was lost at the park due to unexpected downtime. Hollywood Studios was open for 12 hours on the 15th, so 9% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for almost 65 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past week was – oddly – Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, which was unexpectedly down for 17% of the past week. At least it’s not Rise of the Resistance! The worst day for Remy was December 13th, when the ride was down for 65% of the day. There were a couple of days with 10-20% downtime too. A sad week for Rat fans.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are this week’s problematic offenders:

• Magic Kingdom: Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (unavailable for 35% of its first hour of the day)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (unavailable for 22% of its first hour of the day), Test Track (unavailable for 18% of its first hour of the day)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (unavailable for 31% of its first hour of the day), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (unavailable for 23% of its first hour of the day)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (unavailable for 23% for its first hour of the day)

Not a great rope drop week, friends. Things were mostly okay at Animal Kingdom. But Big Thunder having continued wake-up problems means crowds don’t get distributed well at Magic Kingdom. And EPCOT and Hollywood Studios both had rough weeks with multiple headliners with frequent downtime.

Wait Times December 12 – 18

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster, average posted wait of 75 minutes (95 minutes last week at Rise of the Resistance)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 70 minutes (79 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 69 minutes (69 minutes last week at Frozen Ever After)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 63 minutes (63 minutes two weeks ago)

We have the third unique winner of the highest wait time in three weeks at Hollywood Studios. Anecdotally, Rock’n’Roller Coaster has been having very spiky wait time for several months now and is frequently the highest posted wait time in the park at any given moment. So it finally had a bad enough week to take the overall win. Yay? Otherwise, things stay pretty steady at the other parks thanks to the balance of really uncrowded stormy days and a really really crowded Monday.

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 37 minutes (38 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 25 minutes (26 minutes last week)

Now taking bets on what these two numbers will look like during our next update. Yikes.

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 63% of what was posted. This is very in line with our historical average. If the posted wait time was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait under 38 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is it’s a small world – which I think is a first-time winner of this category! At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 38% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if its a small world had a 30 minute posted wait, you probably would’ve waited just over 11 minutes instead. About a third of what was posted. Remember to always check the Lines app for predicted actual waits instead of believing what is posted.

Actual Wait Time Rock Star

The Actual Wait Time Rock Star for the past week was … hbfly, who submitted 35 actual wait times through the Lines App over the last 7 days! These were all standby waits, so thank you to hbfly for going the difficult route! It’s not quite enough to take first place away from our all-time leader, TheFugitiveGuy.

Looking Ahead: December 19 – 25

This coming week shouldn’t be the worst … but it’s not going to be the greatest either. Plenty of families are getting out of school for the year and heading down to warmer weather for the most wonderful time of the year. We’ve got three more Magic Kingdom Very Merry parties, and then the week of late hours in the parks begins.

If you don’t care about crowds but do care about just have tons of time inside the park, this is the time of year where you should thrive. Beginning on 12/24, you can enjoy Magic Kingdom from 8 am to midnight – and it’ll stay that way through the end of the year (even longer on New Years Eve).

The weather will hopefully hold for the next week, with plenty of sun and highs in the 70s. Get your park time in now!