Disney Data Dump Oct 9 2024

Well, the Disney Data Dump is just turning into a “stay safe during hurricanes, please” blog. I can’t help it. I’m a mom. If you’re in Orlando or anywhere in Milton’s path, please make the smart decisions. I know I look at the “fun things” like low wait times and other weird or random impacts of hurricanes on WDW operations, but there are a lot of scary numbers associated with these storms. Let’s get into the Disney data from this week to hopefully provide a bit of levity in a tense week.

Observed Crowd Levels October 1 – 7

It’s been a rough few weeks for the southeast. Just as we started to see crowds recovering from trips cancelled by Helene and moving toward fall break mode … it’s very obvious when Milton became a big deal and started causing more cancellations. Let’s be clear – cancelling your trip this week was the right call if you had to do it. This isn’t a storm to be taken lightly. But it’s certainly messing with our data. Large amounts of rain on the 6th also contributed to that lower crowd level.

Party day behavior at Magic Kingdom is in full force, even with a hurricane barreling toward Florida. Magic Kingdom’s crowd level on the 7th was exaggerated not only by it being a rare non-party day, but also because of upcoming expected park closures. Anyone who is at WDW and wants a chance to experience this park with full operating hours either had to go Monday, roll the dice with the park staying open on Wednesday (unlikely), or wait until Saturday. Almost everyone chose going on Monday.

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 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 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 43% of the time. That’s the exact same as last week. And, 79% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we get a C+ for our predictions in the past week. There is still a pretty large skew toward overpredictions. But with the front half of the week still low thanks to Helene cancellations, and the last two days low thanks to Milton closures … there’s not much we can do about that. The biggest misses of the week were overpredictions by 4 crowd levels, at Hollywood Studios on the 1st and Animal Kingdom on the 2nd. Both park-days were predicted at crowd level 5, but came in at crowd level 1.

Attraction Downtime October 1 – 7

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4.4% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s up significantly from the past several weeks, and is close to our historical average. Magic Kingdom was the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 5.3% overall downtime over the past week. But it barely edged out Hollywood Studios, which had 5% downtime. Animal Kingdom and EPCOT were much more reliable overall.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on October 3rd. On that day, 6.5% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. And the worst park-day of the week was also on October 3rd, at Animal Kingdom (which is weird, because other than this one day, there was almost no downtime at the park). On the 3rd, 11% of the capacity was lost at Animal Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. The park was open for 10 hours on the 3rd, so 11% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for over an hour.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

We’re back to a reliably unreliable classic this week – Space Mountain was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. This week, Space was unexpectedly down for 25% of the week. That’s a really bad week. The worst day for Space Mountain was on October 4th, when the ride was down for 93% of the day. That was a party day, and the attraction was closed almost the entire day, and during the party. On October 5th, Space’s issues continued and it was down until after 3:30 pm.

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 (29%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (15%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (11%), TTA PeopleMover (11%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo (33%), Frozen Ever After (30%), Living with the Land (14%), Cosmic Rewind (11%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (25%), Rise of the Resistance (16%)
• Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (18%), Expedition Everest (11%)

This week, rope drop was a little tricky at most parks. At Magic Kingdom, there just aren’t many headliners to absorb crowds during early entry, so problems at Space Mountain and Seven Dwarfs are especially impactful. If you didn’t have access to the International Gateway at EPCOT, and you tried to rope drop Frozen, you could have been disappointed. Thankfully, Hollywood Studios and Animal Kingdom had good rope drop reliability at least a couple of headliners.

Wait Times October 1 – 7

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 58 minutes (56 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 48 minutes (50 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 54 minutes (54 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 65 minutes (65 minutes last week)

These are average headliner posted waits that we just shouldn’t be seeing in October. And it’s solely due to cancelled trips thanks to back-to-back hurricanes. Don’t take it as evidence that the rest of the month will be this empty. We’ve also once again got Tron coming in with the overall top average wait … but don’t take that posted wait at face value. It continues to have one of the highest “inflation” rates of any attraction.

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 28 minutes (28 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Animal Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 18 minutes (19 minutes last week)

Just like last week, very crowded non-party days at Magic Kingdom were enough to tip its wait times up to second-lowest instead of lowest. That’s good news for Animal Kingdom visitors and Magic Kingdom party-day visitors. And very bad news if you choose to go to Magic Kingdom on a non-party day.

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 actually a little higher than our historical average. Which means that for the past week, posted wait times were ever-so-slightly more accurate than normal. This is a little-bit expected for early fall when overall crowd levels are low. It means that if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 50 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait less than 34 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is … Spaceship Earth. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 46% 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 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.

This Week’s Wait Time Rock Star

Between October 1st and 7th, we had almost 1100 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was gringo_loco, with 56 overall timed waits – 16 lightning lane waits, 37 standby waits and 3 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, gringo_loco! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: October 8 – 15

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 8th will already be in the past when you read this post. Time travel is possible.

This look ahead is somehow both more and less complicated than normal. Soon after this publishes, the WDW parks will shut down early in the afternoon of the 9th. And they’ll likely stay closed on the 10th too. Obviously we won’t know the extent of damages or full length of closures until Milton passes on through and Disney can figure out what they need to do in order to get back up and running. I’m not going to be updating this section, but we’ll be keeping this page up-to-date with information as it comes through.

If you’re already on property this week and are not evacuating, stay safe – listen to cast members and follow their rules and advice.

Once the parks open back up, expect crowds to stay lighter than we would otherwise expect for mid-October. Many vacations that would have extended through the weekend or into next week have already been cancelled. And flights will likely be impacted beyond just Wednesday and Thursday.

 

And as a special bonus if you made it this far, two more pictures from our family trip this weekend!

Were you in the parks this past week, or are you headed there soon? Let me know in the comments below!