Disney Data Dump September 11 2024

Most weeks you get some sort of clever intro here. Instead, I’m going to be real with you and say your dear writer scheduled two vaccines for the day before this post goes up. That means I have a 101-degree fever, and anything I write here could and should be used against me in the future. Let’s keep it short and sweet and start digging into the data:

Observed Crowd Levels September 3 – 9

The Lovely Labor Day Lull has extended itself through another week! This week’s overall average crowd level was 2.7 – exactly the same as last week. Once again, the weekend was the most crowded (this is a reversal of the summer trend of Mondays being most crowded, and then crowd levels decreasing throughout the rest of the week and weekend). There has been a large amount of rain in the past week, so it’s somewhat surprising that overall average wait times haven’t gone up at indoor attractions, dragging up the overall crowd level.

There are a few more interesting trends to note at the park-by-park level. First, that crowded weekend was almost totally thanks to people vising Animal Kingdom and EPCOT. It’s a little bizarre that Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom regularly have the lowest crowd levels of any parks. Not what we would expect logically (or historically). It goes to show how important it is to have multiple attractions to spread out people.

We’re also seeing the first real blip of party day impact at Magic Kingdom with the first crowd level 4 at that park in a long, long time. That happened on September 9th. The 8th and 10th are both party days, and Tron converted to standby on the 9th. All of that means lots of people were tempted to visit on the 9th. Spoiler alert: that crowd level plummeted back down on the 10th.

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 71% of the time. And, 85% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we achieve a B for our predictions in the past week – this is back to some of the best performance we’ve seen since last spring. We’re still seeing a skew toward overpredictions – but for the first time since the beginning of the summer, two park days were ever-so-slightly underpredicted (only by one crowd level). So we’re making some progress on that front too. The biggest misses of the week were all overpredictions of 3 crowd levels, and there were 4 of those. No misses bigger than 3 crowd levels, though!

Attraction Downtime September 3 – 9

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past two weeks, it comes out to 4.3% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s on the lower end of what we’ve seen during the summer and early “fall” – and a lot of it was due to rain. And once again, Animal Kingdom is back on top as the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 5.3% overall downtime over the past week. We’re also seeing it at the top end of crowd levels, so it’s having an impact.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on September 9th. On that day, 7.5% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. And the worst park-day of the week was also on September 9th, at Hollywood Studios. On that park day, 11% of the capacity was lost at Studios due to unexpected downtime. Hollywood Studios was open for 12 hours on the 9th, so 11% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for almost 80 minutes of the day. Thankfully this didn’t really impact crowd levels, which were still a 2 on the 9th (predicted was a CL 5).

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

Watching out for pigs flying, because Tiana’s actually had a reliable week this week! It didn’t get the four-peat for attraction downtime. Instead, the worst offender of the past week was Slinky Dog Dash, which was unexpectedly down for 21% of the week – a really bad week for a big headliner. The worst day for Slinky was on September 9th when the ride was down for 55% of the day. But it was also down for 54% of the day on the 7th. On both days, Slinky went down in the early afternoon. On the 9th it never came back online.

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: Pirates of the Caribbean (30%), Big Thunder Mountain Railroad (25%), Magic Carpets (17%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (16%), Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (14%), Space Mountain (12%)
• EPCOT: Journey Into Imagination (13%)
• Hollywood Studios: Rock’n’Roller Coaster (24%), Rise of the Resistance (15%)
• Animal Kingdom: Kali River Rapids (14%), Expedition Everest (14%)

We’ve got a clear loser here, and that loser is absolutely Magic Kingdom. That’s a big list of downtime problems. With a lot of headliners. Boo. At least Tron spreads out your (regular) rope drop options. Thankfully no other parks had the same level of ick.

Wait Times September 3 – 9

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 56 minutes (60 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 56 minutes (59 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 50 minutes (47 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, average posted wait time of 46 minutes (47 minutes last week)

We did it, folks. We finally manifested every attraction at Walt Disney World having an average posted wait of under an hour for the week! The only attraction that saw an increase in wait times compared to the previous week was Remy. Thanks, Food & Wine people.

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 26 minutes (25.5 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 19.5 minutes (19 minutes last week)

This is still a remarkably good week, especially with a bunch of rain-related downtime. Any time that Hollywood Studios is under 30 minutes is your benchmark for “as empty as the parks get outside of a paid event”. Hope if you were there, you were able to enjoy it.

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. But it means that if the posted wait time at a popular attraction was 50 minutes, you could’ve expected to wait just over 33 minutes instead.

But the worst offender for the past week is Journey Into Imagination! At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 47% 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 less than 10 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 September 3rd and 9th, we had over 1600 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was 4forDisney, with 32 overall timed waits – 31 standby waits and 1 virtual queue wait. Thanks for all of that timing, 4forDisney! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: September 10 – 16

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 10th will already be in the past when you read this post. Welcome back to the future.

Magic Kingdom has ramped up its party schedule to three nights as week – this week on the 10th, 13th and 15th. That means Magic Kingdom during the day on the 14th (and 16th) will be crowded because both are sandwiched by party days with shorter hours. Zig when everyone zags, folks. Enjoy those empty party days. You’ll get more done.

There is just one more day this upcoming week where a boat may be your best choice for how to navigate the parks. After that, we’re cruising into the end of rainy season with a few days of sun and a few afternoon showers.

Otherwise, wait times may pick up a little in the upcoming week, but don’t expect any major shift until early October when fall break season begins for schools.