Disney Data Dump July 17 2024

Welcome back, Disney Data Fanadians! (That’s my favorite suggestion from one of my favorite people for what we should call ourselves). After a roaring comeback for the Disney Data Dump last week, it’s time to settle in for the long haul. I’m so glad that so many of you are here and reading along with me, and I’m looking forward to hearing about your trips as we progress week by week. After all, data by itself is just numbers. When you add the stories, that’s where it comes alive!

Observed Crowd Levels July 9 – 15

Compared to last week, crowds are up! … by one whole crowd level, from an average of 3 to and average of 4. Still nothing like we’d generally expect to see in the middle of summer travel season. But, we’ve got a Wednesday and a Monday coming in hot at crowd level 5 overall.

The big difference between last week and this week was at Magic Kingdom, which averaged out a crowd level 3 for the week, which is double its average crowd level from last week. Hollywood Studios had low-to-moderate crowds all week, and Animal Kingdom stayed steady between crowd level 4 or 5. EPCOT is the only park that hopped up above average crowds on any day last week, with a crowd level 7 on Monday the 15th. Apologies to anyone in EPCOT that day – you got the dud of the week.

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. 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 21% of the time. That’s better than last week, but still far below the normal. 67% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we achieve a D for our predictions in the past week. And once again, all misses were skewed to overpredictions. This is good for people who like to be pleasantly surprised by low crowds, but bad for advance planning based on real crowd conditions. The biggest miss of the week was at EPCOT on the 14th, when the crowd level was predicted to be a 6 and it ended up being a 2.

Attraction Downtime July 9 – 15

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4.6% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s pretty in line with a historical average for the summer, thanks to rainy afternoons. Oddly, Animal Kingdom was the park with the worst downtime issues overall, losing 7.6% of its capacity to unexpected downtime in the past week.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on July 14th. On that day, 8% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime – thanks, rainy weather. But the worst park-day was at Animal Kingdom on Wednesday, July 10th. On that park day, 14% of the capacity was lost at Animal Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. Animal Kingdom was open for 10 hours on the 10th, so 14% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for 84 minutes – almost an hour and a half of those 10 hours. Ouch.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past week was Kali River Rapids, which was unexpectedly down for almost 28% of the past week. A really bad week for folks wanting to cool off at Animal Kingdom! The worst day for Kali River Rapids was July 12th, when the ride was down for 45% of the day. There were several other days that it was closed at least a third of the day. Kali, like other outdoor attraction, is susceptible to weather-related closures. But something else was happening here too, because the outdoor attraction with the next-highest amount of downtime for the week (which was Slinky Dog Dash) “only” had 16% downtime.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are this week’s problematic offenders, with the percentage of downtime during the first hour of the day in parentheses:

• Magic Kingdom: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (31%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (26%), Big Thunder Mountain (20%), Space Mountain (18%), Haunted Mansion (14%)
• EPCOT: Spaceship Earth (18%), Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (14%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (28%), Slinky Dog Dash (13%)
• Animal Kingdom: Na’vi River Journey (11%)

This was a really bad rope drop week for Magic Kingdom. Four of the five major attractions (thanks for being reliable, Tron) were down for a significant portion of the first hour of the day this week. Tiana’s missed almost a third of its rope drop time, Seven Dwarfs missed over a quarter, and Big Thunder and Space Mountain both missed almost a fifth. With Peter Pan being down for a refurb, it’s rough finding a reliable rope drop option at Magic Kingdom right now.

Rise of the Resistance also had more struggles than normal this week, which paired with some rope drop issues at Slinky Dog Dash too.

Wait Times July 9 – 15

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 70 minutes(last week was 65 minutes)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 88 minutes (last week was 84 minutes)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 58 minutes (last week was 55 minutes)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 60 minutes (last week was 56 minutes)

These are our pretty steady “winners” of these categories. Just like we saw the crowd levels barely inch up from last week, we’re seeing those average posted wait times inch up too. Not huge increases, and still not anywhere close to the times we’ll see later this fall.

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 35 minutes
• Lowest: EPCOT, average park-wide posted wait of 23 minutes (just barely less than Magic Kingdom … again)

The average posted wait time at EPCOT went up by a whopping one minute this week, while Hollywood Studios saw an increase of 3 minutes. Even so, we’re in solidly-low territory with these numbers.

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 62% of what was posted. This is slightly below our historical average, which means wait times are inflated a little bit more than normal. If the posted wait time was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait just 37 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Flight of Passage – which I think is, like last week, a first-time winner of this category! At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 50% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had an 88 minute average posted wait, the average actual wait was likely just 44 minutes. Not bad for the biggest line out of any park in the past week. Just 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 July 9th and July 15th, we had almost 1200 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was TheFugitiveGuy, with 52 overall timed waits – 21 in the Lightning Lane, 11 in Standby, 2 in Single Rider, and 3 with a Virtual Queue. Thanks for all of that timing, TheFugitiveGuy! We’ll see if someone else can take the crown next week.

Looking Ahead: July 16 – 22

This coming week looks to be some more of the same – park hours are a little limited during the week and then extended by about an hour per park for the weekend, so there might be a slight uptick in crowds that Disney is expecting. But I don’t think we’ll be surging anywhere past that overall crowd level 5. Other than the 17th (which looks clear), there are still going to be at least the reliable afternoon thunderstorms. Make sure you’re prepared for the rain so that you can outlast those who aren’t as well-equipped as you!

Were you in the parks last week? Or are you looking forward to a trip in the near future? Let me know in the comments!