Disney Data Dump: March 26 2025

After a quick little three month break … we’re back! I apologize for the hiatus, but we’re just in time to get you prepared for Spring Break season! We’ll look at last week and take a peek at what might be coming in the next week or so to get you prepared for any upcoming vacations. Thanks for your patience, and for continuing to follow along!

Observed Crowd Levels March 18 – 24

Now if that’s not consistency, I don’t know what is. But here’s the thing … it’s consistently average. In the middle of Spring Break. Now, 2025 Spring Break crowd avoiders have some things working in their favor. Easter is late this year, which helps spread out the weeks that school districts select for their Spring Breaks. That should lead to results like this, where crowds are higher than they’ve been for most of this year, but not unreasonable.

Even still, though – my family was on Spring Break last week. We didn’t go to Disney. We opted for an even more expensive vacation (the things I’ll do for my kids …) and headed west to ski in Colorado. And that really was PACKED. Ski rental companies were physically running out of skis. My big kid got brand new skis because they had to break into next year’s stock to fulfill our reservation. Ski schools were overflowing their legal capacity. Highly efficient lifts had 20+ minute waits.

What does any of this have to do with Disney? Spring Break is still travel season. And last week was a popular one. But the WDW theme parks either absorbed the crowds well, or didn’t attract many of them in the first place.

At first glance, nothing may look particularly surprising at a park-by-park level either. BUT. Glance through and try to pick out the two most crowded parks (relatively speaking) on each day. Were they the two parks you expected? Maybe not. But it reflects a trend that’s been developing over the past few years and really kicking into higher gear in the past few months. HS and MK have higher capacity overall, with more attractions and entertainment to “absorb” their crowds, especially if something unexpectedly goes down. AK and EP don’t have that same luxury, and it shows in higher average crowd levels.

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 71% of the time. That’s one of the best results that we’ve seen in the past year. And, 89% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get a B+ for our predictions in the past week. As has been the trend since … as long as I can remember at this point, all misses were over-predictions. No under-estimates – only over-estimates. So, overall, crowds still tend to underwhelm. Good news if you’re in the parks. Bad news if you’re Disney. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 3 crowd levels, which happened on three different days at Hollywood Studios within the past week.

Attraction Downtime March 18 – 24

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 2.9% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a very low number compared to our historical average in our weekly tracking. It’s pretty clear that Disney is trying to keep things running for a more crowded season. This week, EPCOT was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 4.1% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. And since EPCOT is already struggling with attraction capacity thanks to the refurbishment of Test Track, that downtime definitely had an impact on wait times.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on March 21st. On that day, 4% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. (But that’s one of the lowest “winning” percentages we’ve ever had). But the worst park-day of the week was on March 20th, at both Hollywood Studios and EPCOT. On that day, 7% of attraction capacity was lost at both parks due to unexpected downtime. EPCOT and Hollywood Studios were both open for 12 hours on the 20th, so 7% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park being shut down for 50 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Space Mountain was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. The ride was unexpectedly down for 15% of the week. Not only is that decently high, it’s also almost double the downtime for the next-worst attraction. The worst day for Space Mountain was clearly on March 21st, when the ride was down for 83% of the day. Apologies if you’re a Space Mountain fan and were in Magic Kingdom that day!

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: Winnie the Pooh (16%), Space Mountain (13%), Pirates of the Caribbean (13%), Mad Tea Party (12%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (10%)
• EPCOT: Frozen Ever After (14%)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash (28%), Alien Swirling Saucers (14%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (13%)
• Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (19%)

This week’s rope drop downtime is a bit of a mixed bag. The biggest watch-out is Slinky Dog Dash. Anytime a major rope drop draw like that is down for over a quarter of its first hour of the day in a week, it’s a big problem. And it means you certainly need to have a backup plan if you’re planning on going there first in the next week or so.

Wait Times March 18 – 24

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 92 minutes
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 84 minutes
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 91 minutes
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 92 minutes

Well, howdy. These look quite a bit different than when we last were tracking in early December! Maybe not the numbers so much, but certainly the attractions. Flight of Passage is almost always the overall winner, but it’s got two new challengers in TRON and Cosmic Rewind. In fact, over the past several weeks, Cosmic Rewind has the overall highest average posted wait in all of WDW. But for just the past week it edges in ever-so-slightly behind Flight of Passage.

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: Animal Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 45 minutes
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 28 minutes

So … fun fact! If you have a park with very few attractions with timed queues, and you close two attractions in that park that had consistently low waits (look at you, It’s Tough to Be a Bug and TriceraTop Spin), math says that the average posted wait at that park will go way up! And that is exactly what has happened. If we had been tracking since February, Animal Kingdom would’ve been competitive with Hollywood Studios for overall highest average. But now with It’s Tough to Be a Bug gone too, there’s no contest. There is very little “filler” left at Animal Kingdom as far as timed queues go. But the good news is there is still plenty to do without a wait at AK – just go look at animals or see shows or listen to music or become a Wilderness Explorer!

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 72% of what was posted. This is significantly above our historical average. That means that posted wait times were more accurate last week than normal. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait a little over 43 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 48% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 30 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited just over 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.

This Week’s Wait Time Rock Star

Between March 18th and 24th, we had a little over 1300 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was 42 Wallaby Way, with … wait for it … 42 overall timed waits – 25 Lightning Lane waits, 14 standby waits and 3 single rider waits. Thanks for all of that timing, 42 Wallaby Way! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: March 25 – 31

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 25th will already be in the past when you read this post. Welcome to the future, please keep moving forward!

As we look ahead, nothing much should change significantly in the immediate future. We’re not to Easter yet, and so we’re still in the nice spread-out Spring Break season. We’ve already made it through the week where the biggest local school districts were out. Still, Disney seems to think something is up with this week specifically. Hours are ever-so-slightly later than the week before or week after it (aka, Magic Kingdom closing at 11 pm instead of 10 pm, Hollywood Studios closing at 9:30 pm instead of 9 pm, wowee … AND Animal Kingdom closing at 7 pm instead of 6 pm, yippee). So maybe there will be more people. But not enough to wildly change hours. And definitely not enough to get us into the crowd level 9 or 10 range that we’ve seen in past Spring Break seasons.

Temperatures are going to be just about ideal if you’re in the Orlando area this week. Some storms may roll through over the weekend, but it’s not like hurricane season. Enjoy your warm weather instead of being silly like me and running away to the snow-capped mountains for Spring Break instead.

Were you in the parks this past week? Do you have any Disney Spring Break stories to share? Let me know in the comments!