Disney Data Dump November 1 2023

Happy Christmas! We’ve been celebrating Halloween for something like 72 months, so naturally it’s time to immediately transition another holiday that’s 8 weeks away. Other than at Magic Kingdom, which gets one more post-Halloween day of Halloween. I don’t know who decides these things. The good news is, no matter the holiday, crowds are still lower than we’d expect for this time of year, which means that this fall should be a great time to visit Walt Disney World!

Speaking of which … by the time the next Disney Data Dump drops on November 8th, I’ll already be in the parks! You catch me at EPCOT on the 8th (or Animal Kingdom in the evening), Hollywood Studios on the 9th and Magic Kingdom the 10th. Stop and say hello! Now let’s get to the data.

Observed Crowd Levels October 24 – 30

Last week I commented on the three lovely green bars and how different that was from a normal October. Here we are again, and with five green bars this week! Only Friday and Saturday brought average or above-average crowds to the parks. Otherwise, things are looking like they’re going to remain less crowded than normal for the foreseeable future.

Here’s where we can see some of the driving force behind the overall numbers. Unlike the past couple of weeks, Magic Kingdom isn’t hitting those crowd level 8s or 9s on non-party days. October 28th was a Saturday – and it was surrounded by 3 party days. Logic says it would have been packed, but the crowds didn’t materialize. EPCOT is still pulling its weight and consistently being more crowded on the weekends, while Hollywood Studios is (gasp) the steady park out of the bunch, hovering right around that medium crowd level.

Performance of Crowd Level Predictions

Each week, I’m giving you a very transparent look into how our crowd level predictions performed. Each day at each park is one data point, so this week 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 we predicted. Being off by 3 or more crowd levels is where we’d like to be more accurate because 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 just 50% of the time. This is even lower than last week. But 89% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we earn a B+ for our predictions the past week. Still, things are very very skewed. Almost every single miss, even by one crowd level, was an overestimate. There were only two underestimated the entire week. One was a miss of one crowd level at EPCOT on a weekend, and the other was a non-party day at the Magic Kingdom that was predicted to be a crowd level 3 and ended up being a 6. The parks are much less crowded than even our revised estimates had been predicting.

Attraction Downtime October 24 – 30

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. The exact same as last week! The park with the biggest issues (by far) was EPCOT, with 6% of its capacity lost due to unexpected downtime. Hollywood Studios was the next-closest with just over 4% downtime.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on October 28th. On that day, 6% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was at EPCOT on October 28th. On that park day, 11% of the capacity was lost at EPCOT due to unexpected downtime. EPCOT was open for 12 hours on the 28th, so 11% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for almost 80 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past week was Frozen Ever After, which was unexpectedly down for 27% of the past week. This makes a huge impact on the capacity at EPCOT, especially for kids in the World Showcase. The worst day for Frozen was October 28th, when the ride was down for the entire day, but it was also down for more than half of the day on the 29th and about a quarter of the day on the 30th.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are this week’s problematic offenders:

• Magic Kingdom: Magic Carpets of Aladdin (unavailable for 18% of its first hour of the day), Astro Orbiter (unavailable for 17% of its first hour of the day), Under the Sea (unavailable for 16% of its first hour of the day), Haunted Mansion (unavailable for 15% of its first hour of the day)
• EPCOT: Living with the Land (unavailable for 26% of its first hour of the day), Frozen Ever After (unavailable for 19% of its first hour of the day), Spaceship Earth (unavailable for 17% of its first hour of the day)
• Hollywood Studios: Runaway Railway (unavailable for 15% of its first hour of the day)
• Animal Kingdom: DINOSAUR (unavailable for 27% of its first hour of the day), Expedition Everest (unavailable for 20% of its first hour of the day), It’s Tough To Be A Bug (unavailable for 14% of its first hour of the day)

Well, first congratulations must go to Hollywood Studios rope-droppers for a pretty excellent week. None of the big rope drop candidates had any significant or repeated downtime at the start of the day. Hooray!

But, every other park is on the naughty list (it’s after Halloween, we can officially use the naughty list as bribery now). Magic Kingdom thankfully was just a smattering of non-headliners that saw early downtime, and EPCOT’s only big issue is Frozen. But Animal Kingdom is another bizarre one. It usually has no rope drop issues, and really struggled this week. Thankfully, 95% of people who rope drop Animal Kingdom go to Pandora.

Wait Times October 24 – 30

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 83 minutes (86 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 65 minutes (77 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 64 minutes (73 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 55 minutes (64 minutes last week)

Other than at Slinky Dog Dash, these are all pretty significant wait time drops at the big headliners! Flight of Passage is almost back down to an hour, and thanks to those low party days and not-terrible non-party days, Seven Dwarfs Mine Train sneak in under an hour.

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 (39 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 21 minutes (25 minutes last week)

In two weeks, the average posted wait time at Magic Kingdom has decreased by more than 26%. And in that same time, the average posted wait at Hollywood Studios is down by 24%. Late October is looking a whole lot better than mid-October with all of its fall breaks.

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 63% of what was posted. This is exactly equal to our historical average. If the posted wait time was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait less than 38 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Journey Into Imagination with Figment. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 44% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if Journey Into Imagination had a 20 minute posted wait, you probably would’ve waited under 9 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.

Actual Wait Time Rock Star

The Actual Wait Time Rock Star for the past week was … preef, who submitted 60 actual wait times through the Lines App over the last 7 days! This includes 8 Lightning Lane waits, 48 Standby waits and 4 Virtual Queue waits. Thank you for all of that timing, preef! But this doesn’t beat the all-time record of 78 recorded wait times in a single week, still held by psymonds.

In the upcoming week, timed waits from the first hour of park opening would be incredibly helpful!

Looking Ahead: October 31 – November 6

Welcome to the weird off-week between parties at the Magic Kingdom! The last Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party is on November 1st (weird, but okay), and the first Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party isn’t until November 9th. That means no party-behavior swings.

The coming week should see below-average crowds, other than a slight bump during the weekend when locals and families with long weekends come out to enjoy the cooler temps and parks transitioning to Christmas instead of Halloween!

Magic Kingdom has some of its latest hours in the recent past on Friday and Saturday this weekend, which may mean that Disney is anticipating more visitors than usual. Or they just feel bad for closing the park so early for months and months. One of those things.