Disney Data Dump October 25 2023

We’ve got a lot to look forward to, Disney Data fans! Park hopping restrictions are going away (which should have an interesting impact on crowd levels at Animal Kingdom especially), After Hours are coming back (statistically one of the best ways to tour Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom), and Disney is even tempting me to try out the Treasure with its Haunted Mansion bar – not that that impacts wait times at Disney World. It’s just something I’m looking forward to. Someday.

In the meantime, we can all be thankful for lower-than-expected crowds this fall. Not only are wait times more pleasant in the parks this October, but it should mean continued access to great deals for everyone wanting to travel to Orlando!

Observed Crowd Levels October 17 – 23

What a difference a week makes! Last week was all yellows and oranges and reds, and this week we pop back into the greens. Saturday here was the worst day of the week, but then Sunday bounced back to beautiful. All-in-all, a pretty great week as we shift into late October.

Friends. These Magic Kingdom crowds are totally bonkers. That’s an average 7 crowd level difference between party days and non-party days. Last year the difference averaged 5 crowd levels. I’m honestly shocked that party days are still in the 1-2 range. They should be more like 3s or 4s, but I guess no one is getting my memo about avoiding those non-party days. AVOID THE NON-PARTY DAYS. Okay? Okay.

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 a 54% of the time. This is much lower than last week, and pretty low overall. 86% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we earn a B for our predictions the past week. Interestingly, we’re also back to being very skewed in the predictions. Almost every single miss, even by one crowd level, was an overestimate. The only two underestimates were Magic Kingdom non-party days. Both of those underestimated crowds by 4 levels. NON-PARTY DAYS ARE REALLY CROWDED. I’ll stop with the caps now.

Attraction Downtime October 17 – 23

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. A little up from last week, and we need to nip that trend in the bud. The park with the biggest issues was Magic Kingdom, with 4.4% of its capacity lost due to unexpected downtime. All of the parks were pretty close to the 4% average this week.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on October 17th. On that day, 4.8% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was at EPCOT on October 17th. On that park day, 7% of the capacity was lost at EPCOT due to unexpected downtime. EPCOT was open for 12 hours on the 17th, so 7% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for over 50 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

The worst offender of the past week was Space Mountain, which was unexpectedly down for 24% of the past week. Not a good look for a classic headliner and big part of the capacity at Magic Kingdom. The worst day for Space Mountain was October 19th, when the ride was down for 38% of the day, but there were several other days that also had over 30% downtime.

Rope Drop Downtime

Here are this week’s problematic offenders:

• Magic Kingdom: Magic Carpets (unavailable for 37% of its first hour of the day), Space Mountain (unavailable for 18% of its first hour of the day), Under the Sea (unavailable for 14% of its first hour of the day)
• EPCOT: Frozen Ever After (unavailable for 27% of its first hour of the day), Journey Into Imagination (unavailable for 25% of its first hour of the day)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (unavailable for 31% of its first hour of the day)
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

There’s some good and bad here. Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios (whoa) got through the week relatively unscathed, but Frozen Ever After being down for over a quarter of rope drops, and Magic Kingdom having Space Mountain problems are both not great. Even still, not a terrible rope drop week.

Wait Times October 17 – 23

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 86 minutes (103 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 77 minutes (88 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 73 minutes (83 minutes at Frozen Ever After last week)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 64 minutes (76 minutes last week)

Now that’s much better. Still not the rock-bottom average waits that we saw in September, but a drop of almost 20 minutes at Slinky Dog Dash and at least 10 minutes at each of the other headliners is significant.

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 39 minutes (46 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 25 minutes (28.5 minutes last week)

More wait time drops! 7 minutes for a park-average is a very noticeable difference across a park day at Hollywood Studios, and I’ll never complain about an average below 30 minutes at Magic Kingdom. Thanks, Halloween parties!

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 very in line with 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 Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 43% of posted wait times in the past week. Holy moly! That means that if Buzz had a 30 minute posted wait, you probably would’ve waited just under 13 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 … Ian UK, who submitted 41 actual wait times through the Lines App over the last 7 days! This includes … 41 Standby waits. That’s it! I’m going to go ahead and call that beast-mode. All standby timing for the win. Thank you for all of that timing, Ian UK! But this doesn’t come close to the all-time record of 78 recorded wait times in a single week, still held by psymonds.

Looking Ahead: October 24 – 30

The trends here are all pointing to more of the same: lower-than-expected crowds for this time of year. Incredibly crowded non-party days at the Magic Kingdom, and really un-crowded party days. Moderate crowds at every other park throughout the week, with EPCOT being most crowded on Fridays and Saturdays.

Otherwise, the weather looks enjoyable over the next week, and there is nothing else that should mess with a really nice week in the parks!