Disney Data Dump October 23 2024

Welcome back to another week of Disney data delights! (That’s such a better word than dump, what was I thinking?) As we move further into October, the parks are shifting gears for the full swing of Halloween season while sneakily preparing for Christmas too — crowds are moderate, and operational hiccups are on the rise. What are we seeing from the data in one of our first hurricane free-weeks this fall? Let’s dive into the numbers to see what’s up—and what’s down—at the most magical place on earth.

Observed Crowd Levels October 15 – 21

Last week I predicted that we’d be seeing overall crowd levels in the 5-7 range this week, and if we mentally subtract one number then I wasn’t so far off, ha! These mid-October numbers are significantly lower than what we typically see this time of year. There’s no reason to expect that these increase from now through the end of the month, but based on recent park hour extensions and low remaining resort capacity, early November should see an uptick.

Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios are now tracking pretty closely together, with EPCOT staying more crowded. That’s not surprising since we’re in the heart of festival season and Test Track is still down. There just aren’t that many places for people to go in lines, so they’re staying elevated.

But where this graph gets really fun is at Magic Kingdom. Check out the 10/15-10/17 dates – crowd level 1 to 8 to 1. What is the difference between crowd level 1 and crowd level 8 in your touring day? If I pick out 10 popular attractions at Magic Kingdom and get the average wait time at each throughout the day, the crowd level 1 day would’ve required 317 minutes of waiting. A little over 5 hours for 10 attractions, and most of that waiting is at Seven Dwarfs and Tron. But on the crowd level 8 day, the same 10 attractions would’ve required 691 minutes of waiting. Over 11.5 hours! Five out of the ten attractions averaged more than an hour wait.

So on the non-party day, the park was open for 5 more hours than the party day. But for just 10 attractions, you spend over 6 more hours in line. That’s a huge difference.

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 39% of the time. A significant increase from our hurricane-impacted weeks, but still very low compared to normal. And, 64% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we get a D for our predictions in the past week. Unlike our hurricane weeks, though, something can and should be learned from this. We’re outside of the trip-cancellation window for hurricanes. This is more likely a trend of lower-than-expected crowds for this portion of the fall. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 6 crowd levels, at Magic Kingdom on the 21st, when a crowd level of 7 was predicted, but the actual crowd level was a 1. This was a party day, so I’m not sure how it was ever predicted as a 7. Party days are empty. You’ll maybe see a crowd level 2 on a party day if you get unlucky, but they’re almost always a 1.

Attraction Downtime October 15 – 21

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 6.3% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s not only an upward trend from the past several weeks, but it’s also significantly above our historical average. Boo. Magic Kingdom was far and away the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 9.4% overall downtime over the past week. This continues a trend of Magic Kingdom struggling a lot.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on October 21st. On that day, 9% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was also October 20th, at Magic Kingdom. On the 20th, 16% of the capacity was lost at Magic Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. The park was open for 10 hours on the 20th, so 16% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for more than 1.5 hours. That makes a huge difference on a short party day!

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

Time for a repeat offender – once again, Pirates of the Caribbean was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. This week, Pirates was unexpectedly down for 40% of the week. That’s much worse than last week when it won this category. The worst day for Pirates was very clearly on October 20th, when the ride was down for 100% of the day. It actually went down a little after 3 pm on the 19th, stayed down all day on the 20th, and didn’t come back online until almost 4 pm on the 21st. Ouch.

Rope Drop Downtime

Buckle up – it’s a crazy one. Here are problematic offenders from the past week, with the percentage of downtime during the first hour of the day in parentheses:

• Magic Kingdom: Pirates of the Caribbean (47%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (27%), Big Thunder Mountain (20%), Jungle Cruise (17%), Space Mountain (14%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (13%), Winnie the Pooh (13%), Astro Orbiter (11%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo (28%), Cosmic Rewind (24%), Living with the Land (15%), Journey Into Imagination (15%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (27%), Slinky Dog Dash (24%)
• Animal Kingdom: Dinosaur (12%)

Ouch. That’s an ouch. Maybe except for Animal Kingdom, where like 2% of people are trying to rope drop Dinosaur anyway. Two big headliners had significant issues at Hollywood Studios, after having several reliable months! EPCOT had problems all over the place, and Magic Kingdom was just an epic mess.

Wait Times October 15 – 21

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 72 minutes (65 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 69 minutes (53 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 67 minutes (54 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 68 minutes (56 minutes last week)

Big increases! The past few weeks have been so weird with lots of deflated wait times because of cancelled vacations and ugly weather. These still aren’t as high as I would expect for peak fall travel, but they’re closer.

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 36 minutes (29 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 23 minutes (19 minutes last week)

Hollywood Studios is on its way back up! Finally over that 30 minute mark again. But the bigger story here is Magic Kingdom – there were only two non-party days in the past week, and the wait times on those two days were so high that they increased the overall average by 4 minutes. 20%. That’s crazy. Those were crowded days.

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 70% of what was posted. This is slightly lower than last week, but still much higher than 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 just 42 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Tron. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 37% of posted wait times in the past week. 37%! That means that if the attraction had a 90 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 34 minutes instead. Close to 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 October 15th and 21st, we had almost 1000 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was rdammann (repeat winner from last week!), with 36 overall timed waits – 29 standby waits, 5 single rider waits and 2 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, rdammann! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: October 22 – 28

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 22nd will already be in the past when you read this post. We’re all time travelers here.

There is no reason to expect crowds to see any big increases or decreases in the coming week – so look for moderate crowds throughout the parks. Both the 22nd and 23rd don’t have Halloween parties, so that should help spread out the crowds a little. Hopefully no crowd level 8s at Magic Kingdom. The 26th, though, may be an issue. Because there are parties on the 24th, 25th, and 27th. Eek.

We’ve got a continuation of pretty perfect weather this week too. No real reason to prepare for rain or extreme heat. Enjoy the beautiful Florida fall!

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