Disney Data Dump September 25 2024

Okay, this week is weird, and I’m just going to admit it. We’re still living in upside-down land where Animal Kingdom and EPCOT are more popular than Hollywood Studios and Magic Kingdom. (I mean – they should be more popular, but I don’t want everyone knowing that …) And rope drop was shockingly [gulp] easy this week? Even Tiana and Slinky had relatively calm weeks. Plus the rain stayed away so everyone stayed dry! But we’re headed into late September and early October, and that means everything is likely to change quickly. Let’s see what the data says to us:

Observed Crowd Levels September 17 – 23

We’re continuing our ever-so-slight upward trend for overall crowd levels, which were at 3.7 on average last week, and this week made their way up to a 4. That means we’re still at below-average crowds overall, but things are significantly more crowded than they were at the end of August and beginning of September. Disney is also starting to significantly increase some park operating hours at the beginning of October, which points to this trend continuing.

The blue bars are really easy to pick out on this chart – EPCOT is relatively the most crowded park. Every day of the week. That doesn’t mean that its overall wait times are higher than Hollywood Studios (it has more “filler”), but it is officially above average. You can thank Food & Wine Festival drawing crowds, plus the low number of attractions to absorb crowds. And once again we’ve got Animal Kingdom coming in second place for crowds.

To emphasize how weird this is, last year around this time, Hollywood Studios was averaging a crowd level 6 every day. This year it’s at a 4. That’s a significant difference. Similarly, Magic Kingdom has gone from hovering around a crowd level 4 (accounting for party day spikiness) last year at this time to hovering around a crowd level 3 this year. But Animal Kingdom and EPCOT have both maintained their crowd levels from last year, so they’re overtaking the other parks in crowd level.

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 64% of the time. And, 89% 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. That’s a decrease from the perfect score last week, but still overall better than average. We’re still seeing a skew toward overpredictions – on average, you can expect real crowd levels to be one lower than predicted at every park, every day. The biggest miss of the week was an overprediction by 4 crowd levels, at Hollywood Studios on September 23rd. But the next two biggest misses were also at Hollywood Studios – overpredictions by 3 crowd levels on the 17th and 22nd.

Attraction Downtime September 17 – 23

If we average all of the capacity lost due to unexpected downtime over the past week, it comes out to 2.6% of attractions unexpectedly being down. That’s … super-low compared to average! Bonus points for you if you were at Walt Disney World this week and didn’t have to deal with a lot of downtime. EPCOT was the park with the most overall downtime issues, coming in at 3% overall downtime over the past week. Most weeks, that would be good enough for the fewest downtime issues, but this wasn’t a normal week.

The worst day for attraction downtime in the past week was on September 19th. On that day, 3.3% of all capacity at WDW was lost due to unexpected downtime. But the worst park-day of the week was on September 20th, at Magic Kingdom. On that park day, 7% of the capacity was lost at Magic Kingdom due to unexpected downtime. The park was only open for 10 hours on the 20th (because it was a party day), so 7% downtime is the equivalent of the whole park being down for 42 minutes.

Attraction Downtime Worst Offenders

What a turnaround we have this week! Because most of the time we’ll see the downtime “winner” with something like 20-30% downtime. But this week, Space Mountain takes the crown after “only” being unexpectedly down for 8% of the week. The worst day for Space Mountain was on September 21st when the ride was down for 23% of the day.

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: Tiana’s Bayou Adventure (26%), Magic Carpets (19%), Seven Dwarfs Mine Train (16%), Pirates of the Caribbean (12%)
• EPCOT: Spaceship Earth (19%), Journey Into Imagination (19%), Cosmic Rewind (16%), The Seas with Nemo (11%)
• Hollywood Studios: No rope drop downtime issues!
• Animal Kingdom: No rope drop downtime issues!

I haven’t gone back and done a comprehensive review, but I’m pretty sure that we’ve never ever had a week where Hollywood Studios had no rope drop downtime issues. Is it telling that the first thing I assumed was that the data feed was broken? Spoiler alert: it’s not. Really, other than the almost-expected late opening of Tiana’s most days, none of this is shocking or a big problem for any rope drop plans. A good week! Hooray!

Wait Times September 17 – 23

Attractions with the Highest Average Posted Wait at each park

• Hollywood Studios: Slinky Dog Dash, average posted wait of 62 minutes (63 minutes last week)
• Animal Kingdom: Flight of Passage, average posted wait time of 71 minutes (67 minutes last week)
• EPCOT: Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure, average posted wait time of 58 minutes (56 minutes last week)
• Magic Kingdom: TRON, average posted wait time of 78 minutes (62 minutes last week)

Not much of note here – a few not-too-significant shifts compared to the same behavior we saw last week, although TRON had a big increase in its average posted wait. For the record, Seven Dwarfs had an average of 48 minutes compared to 46 minutes last week. So it’s not a trend for the whole park. More likely it’s Disney trying to either get more accurate with its TRON waits … or scare people away from getting into TRON’s line. More on that later.

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 (29.5 minutes last week)
• Lowest: Magic Kingdom, average park-wide posted wait of 21 minutes (20 minutes last week)

Hollywood Studios has finally “recovered” up above the ridiculously-un-crowded threshold of < 30 minute waits on average. But just barely. And Magic Kingdom only saw a slight overall uptick too, even with TRON’s big increase. Expect these increases to pick up speed as we head into October.

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. This is a little-bit expected for early fall when overall crowd levels are low. 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 … TRON. At this one attraction, submitted actual wait times were only 51% of posted wait times in the past week. That means that if the attraction had a 90 minute posted wait, you probably would have actually only waited 46 minutes instead. Close to half of what was posted. This could be Disney trying to figure out what to post for TRON (and erring on the side of caution), or it could be deliberate crowd management – hoping you’ll bail out and go ride something else instead. 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 17th and 23rd, we had almost 1400 timed actual waits submitted through the Lines app. The one person who recorded the most actual waits during that time was jayhanna34, with 55 overall timed waits – 54 standby waits and 1 virtual queue wait. Thanks for all of that timing, jayhanna34! And way to go, avoiding paying for LLMP and LLSP 😉 It unfortunately does not compete with the the 97 timed waits in a single week from our current timing champion, preef.

Looking Ahead: September 24 – 30

I write this article on Tuesday evenings so that you all have the very freshest of data on Wednesdays. That means the 24th will already be in the past when you read this post. Sorry about that.

Starting September 29th, Magic Kingdom transitions from 3 parties a week to 4 parties a week through the end of October. That means even more people visiting the parks are going to be visiting on those rare non-party days. IF YOU VISIT MAGIC KINGDOM IN OCTOBER, PLEASE GO ON A PARTY DAY. You’ll experience crowd levels that are at least 4 crowd levels lower than non-party days. Do yourself a favor and enjoy the short lines during the day, then book dinner at a monorail resort and enjoy the fireworks from there. My family is doing exactly that on October 6th. (See ya real soon, Citricos!)

I hope you enjoyed your one-week break from stormy season – because Helene is coming in hot. The biggest storm impact looks like it’s tracking west of the parks, but the next few days will still be very rainy, and not just in the afternoons. Be prepared with ponchos, jackets or umbrellas. And store a dry pair of socks in your bag or a locker to give your feet a mid-day refresh!

Crowd levels are going to keep trending upward as we get into fall break season. Disney knows it and they’re expanding park hours to try to compensate. But be prepared for longer waits.

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