Disney Data Dump – October 30 2024

Happy Halloween and Merry almost-Christmas. This is the time of year where Orlando should be trending toward its most bustling. We’ve got fall breaks, we’ve got long weekends, we’ve got Jersey week, and then the lead-up to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Years. Instead … the bottom dropped out of wait times this week. If I didn’t know any better, I would look at the numbers from this week and assume another hurricane rolled through, cancelling a bunch of vacations. But no, people are just willingly not travelling right now. Have price increases and upcharges finally outpaced demand? Time will tell!

Observed Crowd Levels October 22 – 28

Spoiler alert: these are not normal crowd levels for late October. The average crowd level across the past week was 3. If we rewind to 2022, the average crowd level for the same dates was 5.1. And just last year, it was 4.5. So we’re seeing a continuing trend of decreasing crowd levels, but that trend definitely sped up this year.

No one went to EPCOT on the 22nd, but other than that outlier, we’re seeing mostly the same behaviors we have all fall so far (and most of summer). EPCOT has the highest crowds, on average. Magic Kingdom still has some of its party-date spiky-ness. But not nearly as much as we would expect. For example, the 28th was not a party day, and it was still a crowd level 1. The 26th was surrounded by 3 party days, but it still only “spiked” to a crowd level 3. This is all indicative of shockingly empty parks for this time of year.

Bonus graph!

If we look at a park-by-park level across each of the last three years, we see that no park is exempt from lower crowds. But the biggest drop-off from 2022 to 2023 was at Animal Kingdom, and the biggest drop-off from 2023 to 2024 is definitely Hollywood Studios, followed by Magic Kingdom.

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 only 21% of the time. Much lower than normal. And, just 50% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, so that means we get an F for our predictions in the past week. I’m very confident in calling this a trend of much-lower-than-expected crowds now. This isn’t hurricane-induced behavior. And it’s been happening since the beginning of summer. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 5 crowd levels, at EPCOT on the 22nd, when a crowd level of 6 was predicted, but the actual crowd level was a 1. I do also want to call out that we had one major underprediction, when the crowd level at Magic Kingdom on the 22nd was predicted to be a 2, but ended up a 5. This was a non-party day in the middle of heavy party season, so there’s no way it should’ve been a 2 anyway.

Attraction Downtime October 22 – 28

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 2.9% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s a big drop from recent weeks, and much below our historical average. Let’s review – if you were in the parks this past week you not only got well-below-average crowds, but you also got well-below-average downtime. You lucky people, you. Magic Kingdom was once again the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 3.7% overall downtime over the past week. This continues a trend of Magic Kingdom struggling more than any other park – but slightly less than previous weeks.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on October 7th. On that day, 4% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. The worst park-day of the week was also October 27th, at EPCOT. On the 27th, 7% of attraction capacity was lost at EPCOT due to unexpected downtime. The park was open for 12 hours on the 27th, so 7% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for 50 minutes. Still a lot, but nothing compared to some of our other worst-of days.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

I strongly dislike being the bearer of bad news. And after declaring Tiana’s Bayou Adventure as an attraction that had recovered from its downtime issues …. but I was at least temporarily wrong. Because Tiana’s was the WDW attraction with the worst overall downtime. This week, Tiana’s Bayou Adventure was unexpectedly down for 15% of the week. That’s not a terrible score compared to many of the past “winners” of this category. But still the worst of the week. The worst day for Tiana’s was on October 26th, when the ride was down for 23% of the day. But there were plenty of scattered late starts, afternoon breakdowns, and late-evening issues throughout the week.

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: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (20%), Big Thunder Mountain (20%), Winnie the Pooh (20%), Mad Tea Party (17%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (15%), Peter Pan’s Flight (15%), Space Mountain (11%)
• EPCOT: Cosmic Rewind (13%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rise of the Resistance (33%)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (18%)

Compared to last week, most of the parks have cleaned up their act. Of course, it’s never great when Rise of the Resistance misses a third of its opening hour. And Magic Kingdom continues to have really poor rope drop performance. Almost everything other than Pirates is showing up on the list this week. But these are not the results we want from a bunch of headliners.

Wait Times October 22 – 28

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 57 minutes (72 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 53 minutes (69 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 51 minutes (67 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 64 minutes (68 minutes last week)

Oddly enough, after one normal-ish week, average posted wait times have dropped back down. And not just a drop – these numbers are almost identical to two weeks ago, when Milton shut down the parks and cancelled a bunch of vacations. I expected that crowd levels and wait times wouldn’t go up, but I’ll admit that I didn’t expect a drop like this in the last week of October. It’s very weird.

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 30 minutes (36 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Animal Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 20 minutes (23 minutes at Magic Kingdom last week)

Same story, different view. Posted wait times decreased by 17% at Hollywood Studios week-over-week. And Animal Kingdom was so uncrowded, it even beat out Magic Kingdom in the peak of party season. Magic Kingdom was right behind, with an average posted wait of 21 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 69% of what was posted. This continues a downward trend back toward our historical average. Overall, it means that if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 50 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait less than 35 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Gran Fiesta Tour. 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 15 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited less than 7 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 22nd and 28th, we had just over 1000 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was Clang24, with 42 overall timed waits – 38 standby waits and 4 virtual queue waits. Thanks for all of that timing, Clang24! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: October 29 – November 4

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 29th will already be in the past when you read this post. Keep moving forward!

We’re entering the season of a mad dash to Halloween and then immediately to Christmas. Go to Christmas. Do not pass go. Do not worry about Thanksgiving. Do not collect $200. The 29th and 31st both have Halloween parties, but the 30th doesn’t, and then we have a breather from Magic Kingdom spikes until parties start back up on November 8th.

November 4th through the 8th is Jersey week – the special time of year that typically significantly impacts crowds, but that people who don’t live on the east coast or don’t study Disney crowds have absolutely no idea about. I fully expect for crowds and wait times to jump back up that week, and potentially even outpace predictions. Then again, everything since April this year has been so far below predictions that maybe even Jersey week won’t jolt it back. But quite a few resorts are showing no availability for the week, and for the first time in a LONG time there are restaurants that are fully booked that aren’t Space 220.

 

Were you in the parks this past week? Or are you headed to Orlando soon? Let me know in the comments!