Disney Data Dump November 27 2024

Welcome to the Thanksgiving edition of the Disney Data Dump! As always, we’ll dive into the past week’s numbers, trends, and other various tidbits. But with Thanksgiving just around the corner, it feels like the perfect time to pause and say thank you. Whether you’ve been exploring Disney data with me from the start or you’re a new reader joining the ride, your curiosity, enthusiasm, and thoughtful comments fuel these updates. It’s a joy to connect with fellow Disney fans who share a love for digging deeper into the nerdy numbers. So, grab your favorite holiday snack (turkey leg, anyone?), settle in, and let’s get into the data!

Observed Crowd Levels November 19 – 25

Well, hello there, arrival of Thanksgiving week. What a beautiful array of colors! But here’s the thing, that week before Thanksgiving is basically never that uncrowded. A crowd level 1 day and three crowd level 2 days? That’s the stuff of early September, not late November. But then visitors arrived in force for Thanksgiving week. Typically, Monday has the highest crowds of the holiday week, so if 7 is where we peak overall, this is still going to be a relatively uncrowded Thanksgiving.

No big surprises at the park-by-park level either. Look at Magic Kingdom on those last three days – if you’re still not convinced that party days/non-party days make a big difference … those are BIG differences. A crowd level 8 compared to a crowd level 1 is 4-6 more hours of waiting for just the headliners at that park. We can also see that Hollywood Studios is the clear crowd-absorber when Magic Kingdom closes early.

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 25% of the time. Much lower than even the low performance of the past month. And, 54% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get an F for our predictions in the past two weeks. As has been the trend since this summer, crowds continue to be much lower than expected. In the past two weeks, if you had simply subtracted 2.5 crowd levels from any park prediction on any day, you would have been closer to reality. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 5 crowd levels, at Hollywood Studios on the 23rd and Magic Kingdom on the 24th. HS was supposed to be a 7 and ended up being a 2, and MK was supposed to be a 6 and ended up being a 1.

Attraction Downtime November 19 – 25

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 3.9% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s up from the past month, and is edging toward our historical average. Once again this week, EPCOT was the park with the most overall downtime, averaging 5.3% of its capacity lost to downtime throughout the week. With an already-small slate of attractions, downtime at EPCOT makes a big impact and contributes to some of those higher crowd levels.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on November 22nd. On that day, 8% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. There is a tie for the worst park-day of the week – on November 25th at Animal Kingdom and on November 22nd at EPCOT. On those days, 12% of attraction capacity was lost at each park due to unexpected downtime. Animal Kingdom was open for 11 hours on the 25th, so 12% downtime there is the equivalent of the whole park being down for 79 minutes. EPCOT was open for 12 hours on the 22nd, so 12% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for more than 86 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offender

This week, Expedition Everest was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. Everest was unexpectedly down for 20% of the week. It was followed closely by Tiana’s Bayou Adventure, which is seeing an overall uptick in downtime – a trend I want to keep an eye on. Easily the worst day for Everest was on November 25th, when the ride was down for 80% of the day. This was followed by 22nd, when it was down for over half of the day.

Rope Drop Downtime

Prepare yourselves. It’s a doozy. 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 (57%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (22%), Winnie the Pooh (18%), TTA PeopleMover (18%), Buzz Lightyear (15%), Under the Sea (13%)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure (17%), Living with the Land (17%), Gran Fiesta Tour (14%), The Seas with Nemo (13%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (34%), Slinky Dog Dash (22%), Muppet*Vision 3D (22%), Star Tours (14%)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (16%), Kali River Rapids (11%)

Ouch. I thought last week’s rope drop numbers were bad. Tiana is popping up again here with slow starts to the day, and that’s compounded by Seven Dwarfs also being unreliable.

Hollywood Studios is even worse, though, with Rise being down a third of the time and Slinky being down a fifth of the time. Either or both of those attractions being down at the beginning of the day causes cascading high wait times at all other attractions and really gets your Studios day off to a terrible start.

Wait Times November 19 – 25

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 75 minutes (81 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 66 minutes (65 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 53 minutes (60 minutes two weeks ago)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 61 minutes (62 minutes last week)

These are very weird averages since they all include at least 4 very uncrowded days and then 3 higher-crowd days as the Thanksgiving visitors started arriving in the parks. I expect all of these to go up next week.

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 32 minutes (32.5 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 21 minutes (21 minutes last week)

Again, these week-long numbers hide the fact that we really had a tale of two different “seasons” in the past week. In the first four days, Magic Kingdom’s average wait time was 15 minutes, and Hollywood Studios’ was 27 minutes. Then in the last three days, Magic Kingdom’s average was 28 minutes and Hollywood Studios’ was 39 minutes.

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 67% of what was posted. This is close to our historical average. Overall, it means that if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 60 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait about 40 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week was Gran Fiesta Tour. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 36% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 15 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited about 5 minutes instead. Almost a third 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 November 19th and 25th, we had over 1200 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was QueenofHearts, with 39 overall timed waits – 22 lightning lane waits, 10 standby waits, 2 single rider waits and 5 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, QueenofHearts! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: November 26 – December 2

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 26th will already be in the past when you read this post. You’ve made it to the future!

Magic Kingdom parties this week are going to drive a lot of crowd levels in the parks. There are parties on November 26th, 27th, and 29th, plus December 1st. Expect high crowds on Thanksgiving day. But if this is like other “normal” Thanksgiving weeks, visitors will start heading home before the weekend, so the 30th and 2nd may not be as crowded. Jollywood Nights is happening on the 30th, so Hollywood Studios should see a slight decrease in crowds that day too.

Weather continues to be rather predictable, if a little chilly. The next few days will be warm, but then the weekend starts with a cool front and highs in the 60s and lows dipping into the low 40s. Be prepared with jackets or sweatshirts – Florida is still humid, and that damp air will feel colder than you’d expect.

And if you made it to the end of this edition, you get rewarded with a fun Becky Thanksgiving story. Growing up, my family visited Walt Disney World once every three years. And we would typically go during the week of Thanksgiving. Back then, it wasn’t crowded (quite the opposite), and Christmas decorations would typically be going up throughout the week. My how times have changed.

One year, we had our Thanksgiving lunch at the China pavilion at EPCOT. We looked over at the table next to us, and there was Barry Bonds (then a big deal) and his family, also enjoying their unconventional Thanksgiving lunch. So now I’ll always say that back in 2001 I ate Thanksgiving lunch with Barry Bonds.

Were you in the parks this past week? Or do you have any Disney Thanksgiving stories to share? Let me know in the comments!