Disney Data Dump December 4 2024

How is it December already?! I feel like yesterday we were talking about how summer still isn’t peak travel season at Walt Disney World. Summer and the beginning of Halloween parties, naturally. And here we are now, past the big Thanksgiving holiday and all of its crowds (you’ll find out that this is mostly sarcasm), and in one of my favorite weeks of the year to be in Walt Disney World. You’ve got all of the holiday decorations and foods, but very low crowds because the big holiday travel week is over and kids across the country are back in school getting their last few weeks of learning in before winter break.

But just how “crowded” was that Thanksgiving break? Let’s look at the data!

Observed Crowd Levels November 26 – December 2

The bars aren’t all green, so there’s that. But this in no way looks like a “normal” Thanksgiving week at Walt Disney World either. The behavior is right – crowds peaking on Monday (which was a crowd level 7, and included in last week’s blog), then decreasing through the weekend. But the scale isn’t right. I think at this point after months and months of consistent lower-than expected crowd levels, we can chalk it up to two things:

1. There is just some “slack” in demand right now. But not as much as the crowd levels seem to imply. Resorts are booking up (but maybe Disney has taken some capacity off of the market), and parks still feel crowded.
2. We may be in an era where normal wait time-to-crowd ratios are just off. Why? It could be a few reasons, including the transition from Genie+ to LLMP and ILL to LLSP. That certainly messed a little with capacity and demand. But even more impactful was the revamp of DAS earlier this year. I know this is a very sensitive subject – so I want to be very clear that I’m not saying the revamp was a good or bad thing. I’m only commenting on how it’s clearing impacting wait time data. For the same “feels like” crowds, standby and lightning lane waits are all down. That’s because fewer people overall are using the lightning lane, and so both queues are moving faster than they were under the same crowd conditions before the overhaul.

Plenty of Magic Kingdom party days to look at here, with reliably low wait times on those days. But we also see some more of the new-for-this-year Jollywood Nights party day behavior. It’s not as dramatic as the Magic Kingdom, but Jollywood Nights days are pretty steadily coming in at crowd level 2 or 3, even when surrounding days are more crowded. This is almost certainly thanks to the party starting (and therefore park closing) and hour earlier than it did last year. Last year there was no difference between party day and non-party day wait times at Hollywood Studios, but it’s a pretty clear trend this year.

The great news here is that Hollywood Studios doesn’t close THAT early to day guests on Jollywood Nights … nights. And you can still see Fantasmic before you head back to your resort or to another park. So if you’re travelling between now and the end of the year, this is definitely a new trend that you should take advantage of.

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 29% of the time. Much lower than even the low performance of the past month. And, 58% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get an F for our predictions in the past week. As has been the trend since this summer, crowds continue to be much lower than expected. In the past week, if you had simply subtracted 2.5 crowd levels from any park prediction on any day, you would have been closer to reality. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 6 crowd levels, at Hollywood Studios on December 2nd. HS was predicted to be a 8 and ended up being a 2. This is not only due to overall lower crowds, but also that Jollywood Nights party day behavior.

Attraction Downtime November 26 – December 2

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 3% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s back down from a recent upward trend, and it’s lower than the historical average. This week, Hollywood Studios was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 4.1% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. Thankfully, this is still a pretty low number overall, and didn’t have much of an impact on wait times at Hollywood Studios throughout the week.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on November 30th. On that day, 5% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime (that’s one of our lowest “winning” numbers for this category ever). There is a tie for the worst park-day of the week – on November 30th at ECPOT and on November 28th at Hollywood Studios. On those days, 8% of attraction capacity was lost at each park due to unexpected downtime. Thanks to long park hours and still a relatively low downtime percentage, this didn’t have much of an operational impact at either park.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Rise of the Resistance was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. It’s been a while since we’ve seen Rise at the top of this list! Rise was unexpectedly down for 19% of the week. It was followed closely by Tiana’s Bayou Adventure – a continuation of some new unreliability for that headliner too. Easily the worst day for Rise was on November 28th, when the ride was down for 53% of the day. But there were three other days with at least 20% downtime 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: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (35%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (18%), Winnie the Pooh (17%), Space Mountain (15%), Buzz Lightyear (11%)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind (33%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (42%)
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

Thankfully this is a MUCH shorter list at every park compared to last week. Still, there are some heavy-hitters with large amounts of downtime first thing in the morning, including Tiana’s, Cosmic Rewind, and Rock’n’Roller Coaster.

Wait Times November 26 – December 2

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance, average posted wait of 122 minutes (75 minutes last week at Slinky Dog Dash)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 81 minutes (66 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 63 minutes (53 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 71 minutes (61 minutes last week)

We haven’t had a shift in the highest-wait attraction at a park since TRON converted to standby. But for the first time in a long time, Rise of the Resistance had MUCH higher wait times than Slinky Dog Dash for the past week (Slinky was 75 minutes last week and 76 minutes this week). This is thanks to two things – more people using LLSP this week, plus a bunch of downtime for Rise. That combo means that everyone using LLSP gets prioritized when Rise comes back up, and other guests flood the standby queue, sending wait times sky high.

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 40 minutes (32 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 23 minutes (20 minutes last week)

Last week we split the week in half, and the back half had very similar average posted waits to what we’re seeing above. Still, last Christmas, Hollywood Studios’ average waits were almost an hour. And even Magic Kingdom in the heart of party season was at half an hour. So there’s a lot of room for these wait times to go up between now and 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 67% of what was posted. This is close to our historical average. Overall, it means that if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait about 40 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Na’vi River Journey. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 47% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 50 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 24 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 November 26th and December 2nd, we had over 1000 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was ma14, with 54 overall timed waits – 30 lightning lane waits, 22 standby waits, and 2 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, ma14! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: December 3 – 9

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 9th will already be in the past when you read this post. We’re back in the future!

If you’re going to take advantage of my Jollywood Studios day advice, you’ve only got one party this week to take advantage of, and that’s on December 7th. Magic Kingdom parties are much more numerous, on the 3rd, 5th, 6th, and 8th. I haven’t called it out before, but we’ve also got the very rare Extended Evening Theme Park Hours at Animal Kingdom, which could allow you to be in the park until the late, late hour of … 8 pm.

This week still has some “cold” Florida days in it too. Plenty of lows in the 40s that will feel very cold and trick a bunch of unprepared people into buying sweatshirts. That’s fine if it’s the way you want to go, but you could also be prepared and buy yourself a cheaper warm layer before you get to Orlando.

 

Were you in the parks last week, or are you headed to Orlando soon? Let me know in the comments below!