Disney Data Dump July 24 2024

School principals have started emailing schedules of activities for the next month, local stores are full of backpacks and all sorts of notebooks and writing utensils, and my kids have seemingly outgrown every outfit they worse and loved during the last school year. That can only mean one thing – Halloween season at Walt Disney World? Okay, we’re not quite there yet, but we’re certainly in wrapping-up-summer mode. So are families sneaking in a summer vacation before they get into school year prep? Or are the parks just as empty as the rest of this summer? Let’s check out the data!

Observed Crowd Levels July 16 – 22

This overall view of crowd levels is almost exactly the same as last week – including the overall average crowd level of 4, and the two days that popped up to a crowd level 5 (Wednesday and Monday). That means things are slightly more crowded than they were at the beginning of July. But this isn’t a crush of summer crowds. If anything, it’s families trying to squeeze in their summer vacation before August and its school supply shopping and meet-the-teacher events really get into motion.

All things point to August being a gloriously uncrowded month, even if we see things more in the “moderate” range at the end of July. Coincidentally, I have two trips planned in August …

This is the second week in a row (at least …) that we’re seeing some pretty clear summer trends at the park level:

• Animal Kingdom is remarkably steady. If you’re trying to plan park days to hit low crowds, leave Animal Kingdom as your “filler” day that you can move around as needed. Because day of the week almost never matters here.
• Magic Kingdom is more crowded during the front “half” of the week, and empties out over the weekend. This behavior is interesting, but won’t matter for much longer. Once party season starts, party day/non-party day is going to be the determining factor for crowds there.
• EPCOT is seeing its highest crowd levels on the days where it offers Extended Evening Theme Park hours (Mondays). AND Magic Kingdom is seeing its highest crowd levels on the days where it offers Extended Evening Theme Park hours too (Wednesdays)!  This could be coincidence, but it’s something to keep an eye on as we transition into the fall and winter when these extended hours shift around to other parks – Hollywood Studios instead of Magic Kingdom in late September and October, and then Animal Kingdom instead of Magic Kingdom in November and December.

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 the exact same as last week, and still far below the normal. 75% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we achieve a C for our predictions in the past week. That’s trending better since the last two weeks. And for the third week in a row, 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. It’s a safe bet that crowds are going to be two or more levels below what is showing in the calendar this summer. The biggest miss of the week was at EPCOT on the 16th, when the crowd level was predicted to be a 7 and it ended up being a 3. That’s a big difference in your touring day!

Attraction Downtime July 16 – 22

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 5.4% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s above average, even for summertime with its regular afternoon storms that impact outdoor attractions. And just like last week, Animal Kingdom was the park with the worst downtime issues overall, losing 7.3% of its capacity to unexpected downtime in the past week. This is a weird new trend, because historically Animal Kingdom is pretty reliable.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on July 22nd. On that day, 12% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime – that’s one of the highest percentages seen on any day … ever (barring things like hurricanes). And the worst park-day was at Magic Kingdom on Monday, July 22nd. On that park day, 19% of the capacity was lost at Magic Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. Big big big ouch. Magic Kingdom was open for 13 hours on the 22nd, so 19% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for 148 minutes – basically 2.5 hours of just everything being shut down.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past week was Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which was unexpectedly down for almost 30% of the past week. Since this is the newest and most in-demand attraction at Walt Disney World right now, continued reliability issues are making a big impact on peoples’ vacations. The worst day for Tiana was on July 20th, when the ride came online for the day at 9:30 am and operated until just after noon, when it went back down for almost the rest of the day – it was only operational again for about 45 minutes around 3 pm. July 16th wasn’t much better, because it was down almost half of that day too. Weather-related closures were definitely a big deal this past week, but Tiana’s is certainly an outlier. The next-biggest impact of outdoor downtime was at Kali River Rapids, and it was “only” down 17% of the week.

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 (57%), TTA PeopleMover (14%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (14%), Under the Sea (14%)
• EPCOT: Journey Into Imagination (25%), Frozen Ever After (14%), Cosmic Rewind (14%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (53%), Tower of Terror (14%)
• Animal Kingdom: TriceraTop Spin (15%), Dinosaur (14%), Expedition Everest (12%)

It was a weird and somewhat bad week for rope dropping at WDW – which is sad in the seasons of afternoon rain storms. It should be a great time for getting things done in the morning before the parks get soggy! Tiana and Rock’n’Roller Coaster are the big stand-outs here, being down for over half of their first hour of operation this week.

The good news is that the “typical” rope drop candidates at Hollywood Studios had a good week, and anyone heading to Pandora or Africa at Animal Kingdom also had a smooth morning.

Wait Times July 16 – 22

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 64 minutes (last week was 70 minutes)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 87 minutes (last week was 88 minutes)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 52 minutes (last week was 58 minutes)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 60 minutes (last week was 60 minutes)

While overall crowd level was the same as last week, the biggest headliners with the longest waits actually saw slightly lower wait times than they did last week. Slinky having an average posted wait that is close to 60 minutes in the summer is still next-level bonkers to me.

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 34 minutes
• Lowest: EPCOT, average park-wide posted wait of 22 minutes

The average posted wait time at both EPCOT and Hollywood Studios dropped by an astounding … one minute compared to last week. EPCOT better enjoy its lowest wait time reign, because it’s going to come to a halt once party season starts at Magic Kingdom.

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 64% 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 just over 38 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Seven Dwarfs Mine Train – which, just like the past two weeks, is a first-time winner of this category! At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 47% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had an 60 minute average posted wait, the average actual wait was likely just 27 minutes. A much different feel than the hour that was posted! And not bad at all for the biggest line out of any at the Magic Kingdom in the past week. 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 July 16th and July 22nd, we had just under 900 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was Clock6, with 27 overall timed waits – all in the standby lines. That’s hard mode! Thanks for all of that timing, Clock6! We’ll see if someone else can take the crown next week. TheFugitiveGuy still holds our weekly record, with 52 timed waits in a week.

Looking Ahead: July 23 – August 5

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. Next Tuesday, I’ll be attending a technical conference with my family in Wisconsin. In fact, my big kid and I are co-facilitating a session on the “family” track where we’ll be teaching kids of attendees about electricity using playdough circuits! But all of that fun comes at a cost, and next week’s Disney Data Dump is that cost. So let’s look ahead for two weeks in case you’ve got a trip planned in that time.

These next two weeks are essentially the end of summer season at Walt Disney World, as far as the calendar is concerned. In fact, on August 5th, even ticket prices start turning a corner – becoming about $10 per day cheaper than they are throughout most of July. I don’t think this is enough of a drop to inspire new waves of visitors to crush the parks. In fact, I suspect crowds will stay in this 4-ish range through the end of July, and then we may even see a dip heading into August. There are no special events on the calendar until August 9th (the first Halloween party), so no unusual crowd patterns should emerge.

As far as weather is concerned, we’re still firmly in the middle of afternoon thunderstorm season. This will continue to impact your afternoon touring, downtime at outdoor attractions, and overall wait times at the parks. If you’re going on a particularly soggy day and you want to outlast the other drenched humans, pack up backup shoes and socks and stick them in a locker at the beginning of your park day. Then after the rain stops, go and change into dry footwear. You can stick your wet shoes/socks and ponchos, jackets or umbrellas back in the locker and continue on with your day. Dry feet make all of the difference!

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!