October – Mid-Month Crowd Calendar Updates
This Crowd Calendar update is a bit of fine-tuning to the Walt Disney World and Universal Orlando.
Walt Disney World
Most of the changes in this update are to EPCOT. For the October update, we were seeing a strong pattern where weekdays had very low crowds and weekends had very high crowds. It appears that the secret is out and more people switched their EPCOT days to weekdays. Most of the 1s that EPCOT had, are now 2s and 3s. Weekdays still have lower crowds than the weekend at EPCOT.
Animal Kingdom is the only park with a plethora of 1s.
50th Anniversary
October 1, 2021, will be Disney World’s 50th anniversary. We expect that there will be a bump in crowds for this historic day. Disney will be celebrating their 50th anniversary for 12-18 months, so don’t feel left out if you avoid the first weekend of October 2021.
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Regarding your last sentence, that begs the question…When will mask requirements go away inside the Parks? We’re planning a trip late-JUL/AUG 2021 timeframe, and it would be great if we’re past mask requirements during this hottest time of the year.
Of course, that depends largely on external happenings, such as the widespread distribution/availability of a vaccine by that time…
Thanks….
I would give it a 50/50 chance that masks will still be required in summer 2021. I could see the CDC relaxing the mask recommendation to just indoors before it goes away completely. As you said, it depends largely on external happenings.
Thanks for the updates! I had a question about comparing August/September crowd levels to the ones currently predicted for December and beyond. We were in WDW over Labor Day weekend, when all the parks were at maximum capacity (or at least out of park passes) and those were listed as level 2 crowds.
Looking ahead to December, there are next to no parks lower than a 2, and some are 10s.
Did the 1-10 scale get tweaked between then and now?
For example, Magic Kingdom on December 27th is a 9 crowd level. Does that mean you expect wait times to be close to or at the wait times they were over Labor Day, when the parks were at capacity, or much much worse?
My family found the at-capacity parks far too risky feeling and unpleasant in September, and if all of the parks will be worse than that in December and February, we’ll be cancelling our trips.
Thanks!
The 1-10 scale is the same. At the time, Labor Day weekend had the highest wait times we had seen since the re-opening. After Labor Day we just kept seeing higher and higher wait times. It is clear Disney is distributing more Park Passes. Disney said that they have not increased the 25% capacity cap. For this to be true, we believe that up to Labor Day they were keeping capacity below 15%.
I was in the parks in July and September. After the September trip, I would recommend postponing future trips until operations changes. I expect Disney will increase ride capacity before masks go away.