Disney Data Dump – May 7 2025

Y’all! The parks actually got crowded this week!

Just kidding. Crowd levels dropped again last week, continuing the downward trend we’ve been watching pretty much all year. Overall, it was another calm stretch in the parks, with only a few brief bumps to keep things interesting. Patterns are starting to emerge too, especially around weekends, and they’re worth keeping an eye on as we head into summer break. Here’s everything we observed this week!

Observed Crowd Levels April 29 – May 5

Even more green than last week! Previously we were hitting “average” (level 5) crowds at least a couple of times a week, but the parks only managed to hit that level once in the past week. This continues a light trend that is emerging – busier Saturdays compared to other days of the week. Nothing to totally upend your plans over, but at least something to be aware of.

EPCOT takes over from Animal Kingdom as the park that is (relatively) most crowded this week. It was the park with the highest crowd level 4 out of 7 days of the past week, and it tied with Animal Kingdom on the other 3 days. Magic Kingdom, on the other hand, had the lowest crowd level 6 out of 7 days, and tied on the other day. We also see that Saturday behavior here on the 3rd – every park hit its highest crowd level of the week on that day. So guests aren’t just rushing to a single park. They’re attending all of them. This points to local passholders taking advantage of the weekend to visit the parks.

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 50% of the time. That’s the highest number we’ve seen at least for this calendar year. And 82% 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. All misses this week were over-predictions, meaning that crowds came in lower than expected throughout the week. But at this point lower than expected is the new expected, yeah? On average, the crowd level at any park any day of the week was more than 1.5 crowd levels below prediction. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 4 crowd levels, which happened at Hollywood Studios on April 30th. On that day, the park was predicted to be a crowd level 6, but only ended up being a crowd level 2.

Attraction Downtime April 29 – May 5

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 2.7% of attractions unexpectedly being down. Part of that low number is thanks to good weather keeping outdoor attractions online – that’ll change over the coming week. This week, Hollywood Studios was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 3.3% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on May 3rd. On that day, 4% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was on May 2nd, at Hollywood Studios. On that day, 8% of attraction capacity was lost at the Studios due to unexpected downtime. The park was open for 13 hours on the 2nd, so 8% downtime is the equivalent of the entire park shutting down for over an hour.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Frozen Ever After was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. This might be the first-ever “win” in this category for Frozen? Hopefully a fluke. The ride was unexpectedly down for 18% of the week. Almost all of the downtime came from one major downtime event that took out the attraction for 87% of May 3rd, and a significant chunk of May 4th. The ride broke down before 9:30 am on the 3rd and stayed down until after noon on the 4th. Yikes.

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: Space Mountain (37%), Winnie the Pooh (34%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (14%), TTA PeopleMover (12%), Under the Sea (11%), Peter Pan’s Flight (10%)
• EPCOT: Frozen Ever After (16%), Journey Into Imagination (14%), Gran Fiesta Tour (13%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (12%)
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

Ummmmmmmm, Magic Kingdom. Let’s have a chat. My favorite MK rope drop strategy right now is Space Mountain during early entry, then straight to Tron. And my second-favorite MK rope drop strategy is Peter Pan’s flight to Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. But Space Mountain AND Peter Pan’s Flight both had issues this week, among a bunch of other attractions. Boo.

Gold star for the week goes to Animal Kingdom!

Wait Times April 29 – May 5

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at Each Park

• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind, average posted wait of 77 minutes (was 69 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 75 minutes (was 73 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 75 minutes (was 73 minutes last week)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 61 minutes (was 68 minutes last week)

Cosmic Rewind had a couple of days of longer-than-normal wait times thanks to Frozen being down, so it rockets up to the top of our wait time list with an 8 minute average jump compared to last week. TRON and Flight of Passage both saw modest increases in their wait times, and Slinky saw a big drop!

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 39 minutes (was 41 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 23 minutes (was 23.5 minutes last week)

Finally every park is under the 40 minute posted wait time average. In fact, Magic Kingdom and EPCOT have both been hovering below 30 minutes for a while. Even Hollywood Studios, which only drops below 30 in wild-and-crazy-empty times, is at 33 minutes for this past week.

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 65% of what was posted. We haven’t seen a number that low since the Genie+ era – it’s even 2% lower than it was last week. With LLMP, it’s typically been closer to 72% or 73%. So that’s two weeks in a row we’re back to Genie+ era inflation. We’ll see if the trend continues. Overall, if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait about 39 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Journey Into Imagination. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 38% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 20 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 8 minutes instead. Almost a third 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 April 29th and May 5th, we had over 1,000 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was jayhanna34, with 41 overall timed waits – and it was all in difficult mode, with only standby waits! Thanks for all of that timing, jayhanna34! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: May 6 – May 19

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 6th will already be in the past when you read this post. Hope you had a great May the Fourth and Revenge of the Fifth!

If you’re a clever reader, you’ll notice that this looking ahead covers more than one week. That’s because I’ll be flying home from a quick Orlando trip next Tuesday, and therefore won’t have time to pull the data and write this up next week. So we’re going to look ahead across the next two weeks, and then we’ll be back with your next Data Dump on the 21st!

Based on school calendars, the next two weeks shouldn’t be anything special. We’re not quite at the Memorial Day weekend yet even with a two week preview. There’s no reason that crowd levels should go above average … unless that reason is weather. After a shocking lack of rain over the past few months, the next week or so looks pretty wet. Prepare yourself by packing a rain jacket or poncho, and an umbrella. And keep those feet dry!

Were you in the parks this past week? Or are you headed to Orlando soon? Let me know in the comments below!