Disney World Wait Times Available for Data Science and Machine Learning
Today we’re announcing the public availability of datasets for Disney World ride wait times for data science and machine learning projects. These data run from 2012 to present and cover these attractions:
| Magic Kingdom | Epcot | Disney’s Hollywood Studios | Disney’s Animal Kingdom |
| Pirates of the Caribbean | Soarin’ | Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster | DINOSAUR |
| Splash Mountain | Spaceship Earth | Toy Story Mania | Expedition Everest |
| Kilimanjaro Safaris |
All data files are comma-separated values (CSV) and in ASCII. A data dictionary is also provided. A separate file of metadata features is also available. These features should be appended to the wait times, as they include information such as Disney World’s Extra Magic Hours schedule, park hours, parade and fireworks times, local sunset time, and more. We’ll update the files monthly.
Both the TouringPlans website and the Unofficial Guide book series have their roots in academia: the touring plan software was my master’s thesis, and Bob Sehlinger taught Operations Research prior to creating the Guide series. Today we work with colleges and universities around the country on Disney theme park research in the sciences and humanities. We hope these data will help further the next generation of theme park study.
The best book I read to get started with machine learning was Python Machine Learning by Sebastian Raschka, and it’s available for cheap on Amazon. That book uses a few scikit-learn libraries, which are really useful to test different ideas in machine learning. We’re also interested in using TensorFlow for these kinds of projects. Let me know if you get something working there.
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Hey Len,
Thanks so much for this data its great!
I’ve made TensorFlow models for predicting each ride given a date and time, and am making an RL agent to learn to optimize days at DisneyWorld using those tools.
Once I’m done with those I’m going to make a stable diffusion tool for removing people/distractions from pictures.
Email me if you want any of this or to collaborate on some projects!
Do the links to the datasets still work? When I try to access them it directs me to the regular touringplans page for next month.
It takes me to the same page. I’m brushing up on my data analysis skills and would love to play around with this set in between trips. Any chance it’s still available?
Hi there, I was wondering if you could give some background regarding how the wait time data was obtained? Very interesting datasets to examine, especially for theme park lovers! Thanks!
Hi Aly- We get data three ways: (1) from our users, who enter the information into our app; (2) from our staff, who are in the parks daily and have to ride the rides as part of their job; (3) from Disney’s My Disney Experience app.
Hey Len,
Just wanted to see if these data sets are still available. I went to https://touringplans.com/walt-disney-world/crowd-calendar#DataSets but when I click on the links for the individual attractions the file is empty except for the headers. The metadata and data dictionary files appear to be working as intended but not the attraction wait time files. Thanks for posting these!
Is this data also available for the Disneyland parks?
Hey Len,
I made a data warehouse of Disney queue times from the data you provided for a class project in my database management class.
I also visualized the results in Tableau.
Would love to share my findings with you!
Thank you for making this data available!
Thanks!
Hi Christopher — I’m working on a similar project for a graduate course, however we are all neophytes at Tableau and data science. Do you mind sharing with me the data sets that you used?
Best,
Jason
I am looking for the dataset also; if somebody has access and could share, that would be great!
Are there data sets for other attractions available? I’d like to look through data for rides that maybe aren’t as popular, like Living with the Land or Astro Orbiter.
Thanks for providing this data set! I used it for my capstone project project for a HarvardX Data Science certificate looking at Expedition Everest wait times (descriptive stats,, regression, and application of Machine Learning algorithms).
In the interest of sharing, here’s my GItHub repository which has my R code, data subset, and final report. https://github.com/schenx/Disney
Feel free to read and review. Would love to hear about any improvement ideas and well as what you would do differently.
Super cool – love that metadata file!
If I can get my kids to plug their brains back in at least temporarily over the summer, will have to come up with some sort of project to try out. Thanks!
thank you len
Thank you Len! I’m developing an analytics course currently and have been looking for a fun dataset.
Happy to help, Adam.
We have attraction ratings data you may be interested in. Alexis Franzese at Elon has a class called “The Psychology of Happiness at Disney”, and the students there have done a number of interesting research projects. One of them (“Do boys and girls equally enjoy meeting the Disney princesses?”) changed what we tell parents to do in the parks.
Oh interesting. I’m just down the road at NC State (also in Psychology). I think I will reach out to her. Thanks again for sharing!
PS – I’d love to have that data to merge with the wait times data. Should I ask Alexis or is that something I should reach out to you all for? Again, thanks for the generous offer!
Thanks for sharing – this looks like it will be fun to play with!
Hi!
First off, thanks for all the data that you made available.
However just a quick FYI. There appears to be an error in a few of your Metadata columns. Specifically they are MKHOURS, EPHOURS, HSHOURS and AKHOURS. Instead of there being some type of calculation of the difference between the previous two columns, (i.e. AKOPEN and AKCLOSE), they are marked as 12:00:00AM and appear as a Zero sum.
This appears to be a minor oversight because all other time differences, (i.e. AKOPENYEST and AKCLOSEYEST) do have a calculated value in the next column (i.e. AKHOURSYEST).
Mike
Sorry about that, Mike. Steve’s going to look at it and will post an update. Thanks for catching this!
Mike-
Thanks. MKHOURS, EPHOURS, HSHOURS and AKHOURS are fixed. It was just a formatting issue in my export. The values are now numeric.
As an aspiring data scientist in training, thanks so much for providing this! I’m excited to see what I can find from the data.
What fun!!! I just downloaded one of your datasets into SAS and plan to take it for a spin later this eve!
I’m guessing you don’t want to release the “actuals” that your app users have submitted?
We’re happy to provide actual wait times. I’ll ask Steve to include them in an upcoming update.
Actuals have been added to the attraction datasets.
Is the attraction dataset under the metadata excel file? Or do we have to subscribe to Touringplans.com to access everything? I really want this data for a data science project.
Attraction datasets are seprated CSV files. The link to the available attractions are listed below the link to the Excel file.
https://www.touringplans.com/walt-disney-world/crowd-calendar#DataSets
Hi Steve,
Whenever I download the CSVs, the actual wait times are not attached for me, only the posted time. Any advice you can give me would be great.
Hi Jacob. We have changed our process for obtaining wait time datasets. Let me know which attractions you’d like to have actuals for and I can provide datasets.
This is amazing! I’ve been dreaming of finding a fun data set to get myself out of mommy brain and back into data processing, thank-you!
Have fun! Let us know what you discover, please.