Disney Data Dump December 27 2023

Happy Holidays! To those of you in the parks last week or next, may you be blessed with an intrepid spirit and tireless legs. For those of us at home, may we ignore the jealousy toward those spending the most magical time of year in the most magical place on earth. These two weeks before the start of 2024 should be the most crowded of the year. We saw the start of elevated crowds at the end of last week, but was that a storm-related blip or the beginning of the onslaught? Let’s find out!

Observed Crowd Levels December 19 – 25

Well … that could’ve been much worse? In fact, if we compare the same dates from last year, crowds were an average of 1 full crowd level higher. The same number of Magic Kingdom parties happened during that week too, so that wasn’t artificially deflating the crowd levels at all. Usually the week after Christmas is more crowded than the week before, so I expect we’ll see some higher wait times and crowd levels coming up.

Paying attention the Magic Kingdom party schedule was very key at the end of last week. On party days, Hollywood Studios always hit a 9 or 10, and on non-party days, Magic Kingdom hit a 10. Ouch. But then once parties wrapped up for the year (RIP, empty party days), both parks just stayed sort of moderately high but not miserably high.

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 64% of the time. Not spectacular, but better than the rest of the November-onward period. 89% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we get a B+ for our predictions the past week! Much better than the recent past. More importantly, predictions were more balanced than we’ve seen in many months. Huzzah! The two biggest misses of the week were both off by four crowd levels. The first was a prediction of a crowd level of 6 at Magic Kingdom on the 20th – the only non-party day in between 3 party days leading up to Christmas. That day unsurprisingly ended up being a 10. Then on the 23rd, EPCOT was predicted to be crowd level 7 but topped out at a 3 instead.

Attraction Downtime December 19 – 25

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 3.1% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s one of the lowest numbers we’ve seen all year! Hollywood Studios is the park with the most capacity lost for the third week in a row, averaging out to 4.1%.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on December 21st. On that day, 6% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. But the worst park-day was at Animal Kingdom on December 23rd. On that park day, 12% of the capacity was lost at the park due to unexpected downtime. Animal Kingdom was open for 11 hours on the 23rd, so 12% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for almost 80 minutes. Thankfully, all of that downtime didn’t appear to impact the overall crowd level, which ended up as a 5 for the day during a crowded week.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past week was – disappointingly – Rise of the Resistance, which was unexpectedly down for 15% of the past week. That’s the second time in three weeks that Rise has had the most downtime of any attraction. The worst day for Rise, by far, was December 19th, when the ride was down for 62% of the day. Most other days it had less than 10% downtime. Yay?

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are this week’s problematic offenders:

• Magic Kingdom: Pirates of the Caribbean (unavailable for 19% of its first hour of the day), Space Mountain (unavailable for 16% of its first hour of the day)
• EPCOT: Test Track (unavailable for 12% of its first hour of the day)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (unavailable for 26% of its first hour of the day), Runaway Railway (unavailable for 15% of its first hour of the day)
• Animal Kingdom: DINOSAUR (unavailable for 14% of its first hour of the day), Expedition Everest (unavailable for 13% of its first hour of the day)

Other than Rise, nothing here is a major problem. Most of these percentages are (relatively) low, and there are other good rope drop options at each park that didn’t have early downtime issues.

Wait Times December 19 – 25

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 100 minutes (70 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 86 minutes (75 minutes last week at Rock’n’Roller Coaster)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 67 minutes (69 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: Space Mountain, average posted wait time of 60 minutes (63 minutes last week at Seven Dwarfs Mine Train)

Okay it’s something of a weird week. Flight of Passage had an incredible uptick in wait times, while most other headliners didn’t see similar behavior. We’ve rightfully got Slinky Dog Dash unseating Rock’n’Roller Coaster (it had a more stable week). Remy saw a drop in wait times, and Seven Dwarfs dropped so low, on average, that Space Mountain overtook it for highest wait time at Magic Kingdom for the first time since I started tracking!

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 53 minutes (37 minutes last week)
• Lowest: EPCOT, average park-wide posted wait of 35 minutes (25 minutes last week at Magic Kingdom)

With the end of party season comes the end of the reign of Magic Kingdom with the lowest average posted waits! EPCOT takes the “bottom” spot and will likely stay there until next party season. But also … ouch for those overall increases.

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 less than 38 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 47% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if Buzz had a 30 minute posted wait, you probably would’ve waited just 14 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.

Actual Wait Time Rock Star

The Actual Wait Time Rock Star for the past week was … passesforsix, who submitted 37 actual wait times through the Lines App over the last 7 days! These included 22 Lightning Lane waits, 12 standby waits, 2 single rider waits and 1 virtual queue wait. Many thanks to passesforsix for all of that timing! It’s not quite enough to take first place away from our all-time leader, TheFugitiveGuy.

Looking Ahead: December 26 – January 1

This should be the most crowded week of the year. Should be. But I’m admittedly not convinced. I think that ship may have sailed with the Spring Break crowds earlier in the year. Because crowds just haven’t been keeping up with expectations, even after adjusting the crowd calendar after a weak summer. And averages leading up to Christmas in the 7-ish range don’t point toward a bunch of 10s over the next week. Undoubtedly things will get more crowded, but it doesn’t look like they’ll max out. But maybe I’ll be surprised!

If you’re in the parks this week, take advantage of those exceptionally long park hours at Magic Kingdom. Tired families will be bailing out after fireworks, and things should get more and more pleasant as you get closer to midnight.

The parks will also be downright chilly this week (for Florida anyway), so make sure you pack lots of nice warm layers. You don’t want to be paying gift shop prices for Disney sweatshirts!

A Final Note

Starting next week, the Disney Data Dump will be taking a bit of a pause. I’m ramping up edits on the 2025 edition of the Unofficial Guide, and since it’s basically a large textbook, that takes quite a bit of my time. Not to worry – you’ll still be seeing data-driven posts from me around here, like calendar retrospectives and other more spontaneous analyses. And once book edits calm back down, I’ll be back with regular data reviews!

I’ll next be in the parks January 9-14, so make sure to stop and say hello if you see me!