Disney Data Dump September 18 2024

Say, do you remember? Dancing in September? Never was a cloudy day. Okay, that’s definitely a lie if we’re talking about September in Orlando. But this is an important week! This Saturday is September day. And I hope that means people flood to EPCOT and give Cosmic Rewind the love it deserves. Hey, if they converted the ride to standby for that day only, I’d be there in a heartbeat. But other than September 21st, what do we have to look forward to this week? And what happened in the past week? Let’s find out:

Observed Crowd Levels September 10 – 16

The past three weeks have seen overall average crowd levels of 2.7, 2.7, and 3.4 before that. But I think we can finally call the Lovely Labor Day Lull closed as parks have turned the corner into moderate territory starting in the second half of September. This past week, the average crowd level bumped all of the way up to a 3.7. Obviously that doesn’t mean the parks are suddenly incredibly crowded, but we’re entering the time of year where families don’t mind taking their kids out of school for trips down to Florida. Expect more moderate crowds until we hit October where things will step up again.

When we get to the park level, we see a few interesting – but not surprising – trends that are continuing. First, EPCOT and Animal Kingdom continue to be generally more crowded than Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios. We still had one exceedingly-rare crowd level 1 day at Hollywood Studios. But EPCOT was crowd level 5 or above five days this week.

And we’re seeing the return of real party season behavior at Magic Kingdom. It’s not a difference of a crowd level or two – but a difference of 4 crowd levels, like between the 15th and the 16th. Throughout the course of a day, that adds up to hours of time saved in line. Repeat after me: I will go to Magic Kingdom on a party day.

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 93% of the time. And, 100% of the time Touring Plans predictions were within 2 crowd levels, and that means we achieve an A+ for our predictions in the past week – frame this one and put it on the fridge! That’s the first perfect score in the past year. We’re still seeing a skew toward overpredictions – there were 3x more overpredictions than underpredictions even if just by one crowd level. The biggest misses of the week were just overpredictions by 2 crowd levels, at EPCOT and Hollywood Studios on September 11th.

Attraction Downtime September 10 – 16

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 4.3% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s exactly equal to what we saw this week, and pretty average for this late-summer/early-fall season. And this week, Hollywood Studios is the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 7.3% overall downtime over the past week. That’s way higher than any of the other three parks. More on that in a bit …

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on September 10th. On that day, 6.8% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. But the worst park-day of the week was on September 15th, at Hollywood Studios. On that park day, 16% of the capacity was lost at Studios due to unexpected downtime. Hollywood Studios was open for 12.5 hours on the 15th, so 16% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for exactly two hours. This also ended up being the most crowded day of the week at the Studios – partially because of all of that downtime impacting waits at other attractions.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

This is a bummer of a week. Because for the second week in a row, the worst offender of the past week was Slinky Dog Dash, which was unexpectedly down for 34% of the week – and to think, I called last week’s 21% downtime a “really rough week for the headliner”. Oops. The worst day for Slinky was on September 10th when the ride was down for 100% of the day. That’s right, completely unavailable. But it was also down for 99% of the day on the 15th. If you were one of the lucky few that rode Slinky that day, you should probably buy a lottery ticket.

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: Buzz Lightyear (14%), Winnie the Pooh (13%), Space Mountain (13%)
• EPCOT: The Seas with Nemo (22%), Frozen Ever After (17%), Gran Fiesta Tour (14%), Spaceship Earth (13%)
• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash (33%), Rock’n’Roller Coaster (26%), Rise of the Resistance (20%), Star Tours (11%)
• Animal Kingdom: Expedition Everest (22%)

Thankfully Magic Kingdom bounced back this week. It was a little bit of a rough start for Tomorrowland on a couple of days, but those folks starting in Fantasyland had an easy week. Hollywood Studios had a harder time, with Slinky and Rock’n’Roller Coaster and Rise all having at least 20% of rope drop downtime. It always pays to have a Plan B … and C … and D at Hollywood Studios during early entry.

Wait Times September 10 – 16

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 63 minutes (56 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 67 minutes (56 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 56 minutes (50 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 62 minutes (46 minutes at Seven Dwarfs Mine Train last week)

As another data point to show that the Lovely Labor Day Lull is over, several of the average posted waits for headliners popped back up over an hour. Now – let’s be clear, people – these are still relatively low average posted waits. They will continue trending upward as we get into October. And TRON is a net-new attraction. For the record, Seven Dwarfs had an average of 46 minutes again, just like last week.

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 29.5 minutes (26 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 20 minutes (19.5 minutes last week)

Hollywood Studios is still under a 30-minute average for the whole park! I suspect that’s the last time we’ll see that number until August 2025. And even with TRON getting added to the standby mix at Magic Kingdom, its overall park average was almost exactly the same as last week.

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 Gran Fiesta Tour. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were 49% 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 just over 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 September 10th and 16th, we had over 1500 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was EftelJuddi, with 39 overall timed waits – 38 standby waits and 1 lightning lane wait. Thanks for all of that timing, EftelJuddi! It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: September 17 – 23

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 17th will already be in the past when you read this post. Time travel is real.

Magic Kingdom still has parties three nights a week – this week on the 17th, 20th and 22nd. That means Magic Kingdom during the day on the 21st and 23rd will be crowded because both are sandwiched by party days with shorter hours. But remember, you can get more done during those shorter park hours on party days because lines are so much shorter! Don’t follow the crowd.

Are we finally out of afternoon thunderstorm season? Maybe. For now. This week looks bright and sunny and warm. Enjoy the break from weather-related downtime!

Other than the Magic Kingdom spike-y up and downs, expect this upcoming week to stay mostly in line with what we’re seeing from mid-September so far. Overall crowd levels in the 4-6 range, with Animal Kingdom and EPCOT being on the higher end.