Disney Data Dump May 28 2025

Memorial Day weekend has come and gone, and if you were expecting it to mark the beginning of summer crowds, well … surprise! Crowd levels stayed low all weekend long—really low. Like, historically low. With Disney’s summer deals not kicking in until the 27th and some blockouts already in place, it looks like the holiday weekend may have accidentally been the calm before the Cool Kid Summer storm. Let’s take a look at what happened between May 20th and 26th.

Observed Crowd Levels May 20 – 26

That, my friends, is Memorial Day weekend and the start of summer. All green bars. With below-average crowds (which may be the new average crowds, amirite?). An important note, though, is that this graph doesn’t include Disney’s start of summer. Or at least not the start of summer deals (“Cool Kid Summer”), which kick off May 27th. It’s possible that by not including deals for the holiday weekend (and some annual passes being blocked out), Disney created their own empty parks over the weekend.

I legitimately can’t remember the last time I saw Magic Kingdom crowd levels this consistently low. FIVE crowd level 1 days in a week?! The only time that might happen is during party season. But even then, those not-one days are usually much higher. Maybe during Labor Day week. But certainly not during Memorial Day weekend. This is the stuff of officially next-level-bonkers emptiness.

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 21% of the time. After several pretty-good weeks for predictions over the past month, this is a huge drop. And just 42% 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. All misses were over-predictions, meaning that crowds came in lower than expected throughout the past week. On average, the crowd level at any park any day of the week was about 2.5 crowd levels below prediction. That means crowds were significantly, noticeably, below what was predicted. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 6 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on May 24th and 26th. On those days, the park was predicted to be a crowd level 8, but only ended up being a crowd level 2.

Attraction Downtime May 20 – 26

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s similar to the last two weeks, and a big uptick from the few months before that. Part of that is due to weather-related downtime. In the past week, Magic Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 5% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on May 25th. On that day, 7% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was also on May 25th at Animal Kingdom. On that day, 14% of attraction capacity was lost at the AK due to unexpected downtime. Animal Kingdom was open for 11 hours on the 10th, so 14% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park shutting down for over an hour and a half.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

In the past week, Slinky Dog Dash was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. This is now officially kinda-a-big-deal, because Slinky also had the most downtime for the previous two weeks. Three weeks in a row with such a big headliner having the most downtime at WDW is statistically bad news. The ride was unexpectedly down for 17% of the week. The worst day at Slinky was on May 26th, when the attraction was down for 60% of the day. But it was also down for a quarter of the day on the 24th and a third of the day on the 25th. Not the performance anyone would want to see for a long weekend.

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 (32%), Winnie the Pooh (17%), Peter Pan’s Flight (17%)
• EPCOT: Spaceship Earth (15%), Gran Fiesta Tour (14%)
• Hollywood Studios: Millennium Falcon (14%)
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

Tiana’s is almost a guarantee to show up on this list at this point. Don’t count it being open when the park opens. Peter Pan’s Flight showing up is much more rare, and a big bummer, because it’s typically the safe bet during early entry for being up and saving a lot of time compared to later in the day.

Small golf claps for EPCOT and Hollywood Studios for no headliners with major problems at rope drop this week.

Gold star for the week goes to Animal Kingdom! I think that makes a solid month with no rope drop downtime issues?!

Wait Times May 20 – 26

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at Each Park

• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 75 minutes (was 78 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 62 minutes (was 63 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 61 minutes (was 65 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 57 minutes (was 59 minutes two weeks ago)

Once again, Cosmic Rewind is leading the pack. And it’s still by a LOT. What I find interesting here is that Slinky Dog Dash was down for well over a full day over the past week, and its wait time still dipped the lowest out of the park-leading headliners. Meanwhile, Cosmic Rewind keeps having really high average waits. And that’s not just inflation – it has one of the lowest rates of inflation of any attraction at WDW. Actual waits are coming in pretty close to what is posted. It’s just that popular.

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 36 minutes (was 36 minutes two weeks ago)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 19.5 minutes (was 22 minutes two weeks ago)

Animal Kingdom is the only park that didn’t have a drop in park-wide posted wait for the past week. Every other park was significantly down. We haven’t seen Magic Kingdom below 20 minutes as a park since last party season. And back then, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure and Tron didn’t have standby queues, so they weren’t impacting the park average. That sub-20-minute mark includes standby waits at Tiana’s and Tron, which are some of the longest in the park. If we exclude them, the average posted wait time at Magic Kingdom was just 17 minutes. I don’t think I’ve EVER typed a number that low for Magic Kingdom. Bonkers.

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 68% of what was posted. This makes it over a full month that we’ve been back in the “Genie+ era” of wait time inflation. Under LLMP, inflation hadn’t been as bad. But I think we’re back to “normal” now. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait just under 41 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 14.5 minutes instead. Less than half of what was posted. Remember to always check the Lines app for predicted actual waits instead of making decisions based on what is posted.

This Week’s Wait Time Rock Star

Between May 20th and 26th, we had over 1,300 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was mizzourah, with 56 overall timed waits – 34 standby waits and 22 Lightning Lane waits. Thanks for all of that timing, mizzourah! (I really feel like I need to sing the fight song for your now). It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: May 27 – June 2

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 27th will already be in the past by the time you’ve read this, so welcome back to the future!

We’re entering summer with historically low crowds for 2025, especially at Magic Kingdom. But Disney is also trying to remedy that situation with historically good deals over the next couple of months. There will be some families who won’t be tempted to visit the surface of the sun, no matter the deal. But there will be plenty of others who can’t pass up deals like this. My personal expectation is that we see a bump up in wait times compared to the past couple of months over the summer, and then things cool back off significantly in the fall when the deals expire.

Other than Cool Kid Summer kicking off, nothing else remarkable looks to be happening over the next week at Walt Disney World. What crowds look like in the parks will largely depend on how people react to those deals. The next week or two should give us a much clearer picture of what the rest of the summer will look like.

Weather is starting to shift into summer mode too. Highs in the lower 90s and upper 80s will feel worse than you expect (it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, and all that). And rain showers will pop up throughout most days. Be prepared for heat and rain!

Were you in the parks these past couple of weeks? Or are you headed to Orlando for the long weekend? Let me know in the comments below!