Disney Crowd Calendar

Disney Crowd Calendar

FAQ on How to Use Our Tool to Spend Less Time in Line

What is a Crowd Calendar?

Our Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar is a researched measure of how many people are visiting Walt Disney World on a particular day. For Disney World as whole and for each individual theme park (Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Animal Kingdom, Hollywood Studios), we give a rank for every day of the year, from those that are the least crowded (Level 1) to those that are the most crowded (Level 10).

You can use this information to make informed decisions about what time of year to plan your Disney vacation and to help decide which day to visit each theme park during your trip.

How do We Determine Crowd Levels?

We use a lot of data.

We have a pool of historical data that includes over 8 million wait times, accumulated over more than 10 years of Disney World operations. Additionally, we track holiday dates and the vacation schedules of more than 140 key school districts, paying particular attention to floating dates such as President’s Day and Easter which impact winter and spring break crowds. We also use economic data from the US and other countries, which point us to travel spending trends. Historical and predicted weather data go into our models, as do observations about Disney's operations such as new attraction openings and maintenance schedules.

Further, Lines (Our TouringPlans app) users and our own employees record attraction wait times every day.

Posted wait time is the wait time that Disney posts on a sign outside of an attraction and in their app. Actual wait time is the amount of time a guest actually waited to get on an attraction. We predict both posted and actual wait times. Disney typically inflates the posted wait time so people are happy when they actually wait a short time.

We then crunch all the numbers and patterns into highly educated estimates of crowd levels and wait times. Whew!

How Accurate are Our Predictions?

We offer the most accurate Disney Crowd predictions available, if we do say so ourselves.

We are completely transparent about our prediction success rate. The top of the Crowd Calendar always gives a summary of how well our prediction matches the actual observed crowds on the previous day. We also publish a monthly article on our blog at touringplans.com/blog with a summary of how our predictions fared during the previous month. And we periodically tweak our analysis to keep our numbers on track.

Overall, we’re incredibly accurate, and if we’ve had a bad day, we let you know, and let you know what went wrong.

What is a 'Crowd'?

Sounds like a silly question but it may not be as simple as you think. You might say, "a crowd is a crowd, of course" but do we all define it the same way? When we say that we want to measure how crowded a theme park resort is we might be referring to any one of the following possibilities.

• How hard is it to walk around the parks?
• How far in advance do I have to book my hotel to make sure I get a room?
• How long do I have to wait to experience the most popular attractions?
• What is the total attendance across the resort?
• When I tour around the parks how does it feel? Do I feel like people are in my personal space or is there room to breathe?
• There are lots of other ways too: “How hard is it to find a parking space?” “Can I get the restaurant reservation I want?” or “Will the bus from my hotel to the theme park be so full that I’ll have to stand?” These are all perfectly valid ways to define a 'crowd' and it really doesn't matter which one you choose. All that matters is that the definition is clear and that we all know which one we are using.

What Do the Crowd Calendar Numbers Mean?

The crowd level is based on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being the least crowded and 10 being most crowded. The scale represents the average wait time between 11 AM and 5 PM at key attractions.

How Do I Use the Crowd Calendar?

Click on the individual days or use the "Jump to Day" form to see the crowd levels, park recommendations, park hours and parade and firework schedules for a single day on one simple page.

Compare the crowds from your previous trip to your next one in the Historical Crowds section.

How important is choosing the right time of year to visit?

We’ll be honest, all things being equal you’re likely to have a more relaxing visit to Walt Disney World if you visit on a day we’ve ranked as a Crowd Level 2 than you will on a Crowd Level 9 day. So, if you can choose a lower crowd time to visit, that may mean that you can be a little more lax with your trip planning and still get to see everything that’s important to you.

But we understand that school and work schedules may prevent you from visiting during the lower crowd times. (Lots of other people are in the same boat, that’s why certain times of the year are more crowded.) Even if you’re visiting on a Level 9 to Level 10 day, we have a big box of planning tools to help you save time in line and enjoy your vacation to the fullest.

Foremost are our Touring Plans and Lines app, which direct you to the best order to experience attractions with the least possible time spent waiting in line.

Our Hotel Tools can assist you in choose the best place to stay during your trip. We even offer a service that will make a request for a particular view or a particular room.

Our Best Ticket Price Tool can help you identify the best priced theme park tickets, leaving you with more money for entertainment, transportation, or souvenirs.

Our Menu Pages can point you to the places to dine for your family. And our Disney Reservation Finder Tool can help you get reservations at the restaurants you need.

And our FastPass+ Information can help you find the FastPasses you need each day.

How Important Is Choosing the Right Day to Visit Each Park?

The quick answer is...using the Crowd Calendar to determine which parks to visit in which order is not as important as you might think. The long answer is that there are a lot of more important factors that determine how long you will wait in line. The time of year, the time of day and the attractions you choose to experience will have a much greater impact on how much time you spend in line. And reducing your time in line is our goal and yours.

So what does this tell us? According to our data, the attractions you visit and the time of day at which you visit them will have the greatest influence on how long you wait. On the other hand, the day of week and the weather will play only a small role. Statistically speaking, the time that you arrive at the park is 5 times more important than the day of the week. Still, there can sometimes be an advantage to selecting one park over another on a particular day. For more on that, check out our Walt Disney World Park Recommendations page.

The biggest tip to help with your day is to get to the parks before they open, which will allow you to get to the busiest attractions before they build large waits.

If you are staying at a Disney hotel, you can use the morning or evening Extra Magic Hours (EMH), which is an advantage in the morning. That's where we suggest starting when choosing your days; if you can use the morning EMH and think you'll be able to make it to the park at least 15 minutes before they start then choose the parks with morning EMH. If not, avoid those parks and try to get to the park at least 30 minutes before the regular opening time.

How does a particular holiday, special event, or convention affect crowds?

We have hundreds of direct and indirect factors that construct our crowd models, so the general answer to this question is, "Yes."

Some of the factors have greater influence than others, and each attraction is different. For example, attractions like Splash Mountain and Kali River Rapids have wait times that are heavily influenced by weather, and wait times at rides like Space Mountain and Rock 'n Roller Coaster are noticeably impacted by whether schools are in session. We have specific comments about certain holidays and events on our Walt Disney World Crowd Levels page.

Do You Predict Crowds More Than A Year in Advance?

We are only comfortable projecting the crowds up to one year ahead of time (and even that comes with a fair amount of uncertainty), so that's as far out as we make available. If you want a guess for tentative planning (which is all that can reasonably be done so far in advance), you can look at similar days during the current year.

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Walt Disney World is busiest Christmas Day through the first few days of January. Next busiest is the spring-break period from mid-March through the week of Easter, then Thanksgiving week. Following those are the first few weeks of June, when summer vacation starts, and the week of Presidents Day.

The least busy time is from Labor Day in September through the beginning of October. Next slowest are the weeks in mid-January after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday weekend up to Presidents Day in February (except when the Walt Disney World Marathon runs after MLK Day). The weeks after Thanksgiving and before Christmas are less crowded than average, as is mid-April-mid-May, after spring break and before Memorial Day.

Late February, March, and early April are dicey. Crowds ebb and flow according to spring-break schedules and the timing of Presidents Day weekend. Besides being asphalt-melting hot, July brings throngs of South American tourists on their winter holiday.

We define theme park crowds by looking at average posted wait time for the park's most important attractions, between the hours of 11 AM and 5 PM. We selected this definition for many reasons:

• It is data-driven, using data that we can collect
• It has fixed park hours to make fair comparisons between parks
• It can be objectively evaluated for accuracy

That last one is important. Two guests who tour Magic Kingdom on the same day may not agree on how the crowd felt. It will depend greatly on their personal perspective: what time of year they usually visit, how experienced they are, whether they used a touring plan, and more. However, everyone should be able to agree on what the average posted wait time was between 11 AM and 5 PM.

See our Magic Kingdom Crowd Levels page to get a sense of wait times at popular attractions for different crowd levels.

Other Tips

1. Using a Touring Plan is 5 times more important than which park to visit

The best way to avoid waiting in line is to use a Disney World Touring Plan. You will tour more efficiently with a touring plan at a park at level '8' then you will without a touring plan at a park at level '4'.

2. Lower crowds mean it's less important to choose a specific park to visit

If the crowd calendar level is a '4' or lower, picking which park to visit will matter less. Use the crowd calendar to choose a week with lower crowds, then visit whichever park you wish.

3. Use Extra Magic Hours Wisely

If you're staying at a Disney hotel with Extra Magic Hours, then take advantage of that perk. Morning Extra Magic Hour is the most effective for seeing rides without long waits in line. Just make sure you can arrive before Morning Extra Magic Hour begins.