Crowd Blog - TouringPlans.com Blog

Spring crowd levels at the Disney parks vary from year to year. This variation is largely driven by school schedules. Crowd levels are inversely related to the percent of children in school: when most schools are on a break, high wait times are found in the parks. We track the school schedules for the 100 largest school districts, and these schedules goes into our Crowd Calendar predictions.

Different school districts use different rules when scheduling their spring breaks. Some school districts have a fixed week each year, and others adjust spring break based on Easter. In addition, some school districts have the Friday before and/or the Monday after Easter off. In 2013, Easter is early (March 31), so the spring break season is going to be early. In fact, only 30% of schools will be in session the week before Easter Sunday. This suggests to us that the parks are going to be more crowded that week than in prior years.

School Schedule 2011-2013

The above chart shows the estimated percentage of students in school. The dates for Easter are notated. We use a smoothing algorithm to adjust for weekends. Looking at the chart, it’s interesting to notice the effect a late Easter has on mid-March spring breaks. This year, with an earlier Easter the spring break season is early and condensed. Looking forward to 2014, Easter is April 20, so we expect the school schedule patterns will look like 2011.

February can be a great month to visit Walt Disney World, but it can be a reasonably busy month, depending on the week. Here’s a quick view of Walt Disney World’s February 2013 Crowd Calendar:

And here are a few specific days that I would like to bring to your attention:

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The Disney World park hours were recently updated for the month of January 2013, with operating hours extended for the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. There are now a handful of days where the Magic Kingdom is open later with a second Main Street Electrical Parade added.

Hollywood Studios also had quite a few days changed, and will now stay open until 9 or 10pm occasionally. Those days will also see an additional showing of Fantasmic!. Animal Kingdom had many closing times adjusted as well.

The chart below shows all current park hours with changes in red.

You may notice changes to our Crowd Calendar involving some of the changed dates. We recently began using our own internal projected park hours to give you the most accurate crowd ratings available. Using these projected hours has made our long-term crowd ratings more stable, but we are not perfect (well, some of us). Should any major changes occur to our Crowd Calendar, I will update this post with explanations. If you have questions, please feel free to post them in the comments below.

One period that may change is the first few days of the new year. While we expected larger crowds still hanging around from the holidays, the very late hours for the Magic Kingdom and the 3 Fantasmic shows on the 1st and 2nd indicate even higher crowds are expected. If you are going to be there during that time, make sure you get to the park before it opens and use a Touring Plan.

One last important point regarding evening Extra Magic Hours (EMH): Starting on January 4, with an Epcot EMH, Extra Magic Hours will only last for 2 hours in the evening rather than the previous 3. That means that Epcot will remain open to Disney resort guests from 9pm until 11pm on that particular evening.

If you are curious about how Disney updates their park hours, check out this blog post. Thanks for using Touring Plans!

The Disney World park hours were recently updated for the month of December, with operating hours extended for the Magic Kingdom, Epcot, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. There are now a handful of days where the Magic Kingdom is open until 12am and even 1am with a second Main Street Electrical Parade added.

Hollywood Studios also had quite a few days changed, and will now stay open until 9 or 10pm occasionally. Those days will also see an additional showing of Fantasmic!. Animal Kingdom had many closing times adjusted as well.

The chart below shows all current park hours with changes in red.

Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the first few Annual Passholder previews of the new Fantasyland have passed, and the effect on crowds at the Magic Kingdom has been underwhelming–significantly less than our crowd level predictions had suggested.

That’s good news for theme park visitors but bad news for us stats guys. We don’t like estimates that miss the mark, but we stand by our choice to be conservative with our estimates. Predicting crowd levels during new events that have no history can be very difficult. Without historical data to comb through, estimation starts to enter into the realm of guess-timation.

As we do every day, we will still be watching crowds at the Magic Kingdom very closely to see if the crowds remain manageable during the Passholder previews. In the meantime, watch for reductions in our estimates for Magic Kingdom crowds on November 13 and 14.

Here at TouringPlans.com we spend a lot of time honing our predictions to make our Crowd Calendar the most accurate available. One of the many methods we employ is projecting park hours for all of Disney’s Florida theme parks. You may be wondering why we bother since Disney World publishes its park hours for all to see. Well, Disney does not always make things easy (as outlined here).

The published hours are available for the next six months (currently through May), but they are simply preliminary hours. Disney doesn’t create an operational schedule for its employees that far in advance. Using things like hotel occupancy rates and dining reservations, Disney reviews all hours for a given month approximately two weeks prior to the start of that month (for instance, December’s adjusted hours should be released on or around November 12) and makes changes to its park hours.

How often are park hours changed two weeks before the start of a month? This post will give you idea of what to expect when February hours are adjusted. And the chart below shows what the final park hours were for Walt Disney World in February 2012.

The numbers in red are February 2012 dates that changed when park hours were adjusted in mid-January last year.

There are a few things you should notice about this chart:

• As mentioned above, these are the final park hours from last year (I want to make that very clear); final hours for this February (2013) have not yet been released.
• The third week (or so) in February (16-23 in 2013) is President’s Day week and tends to be quite a bit busier than the surrounding days. The park hours are expected to reflect this.
• The opening times for all parks change very rarely (with the obvious exception being during the busy President’s Day week).
• Epcot times change very, very rarely (which is why they are not listed).
• Wishes is performed once per night, and changes are very rare, so we have not listed Wishes because of this.
• The days that have Extra Magic Hours almost never change.
• Closing times for the Magic Kingdom, Disney’s Hollywood Studios, and Disney’s Animal Kingdom, as well as the number of performances of the Main Street Electrical Parade and Fantasmic!, are the most variable.
• Fantasmic! and the Main Street Electrical Parade were both undergoing refurbishment in February 2012, which is why there are big periods of inactivity. Barring something unforeseen, that will not be the case in 2013.

So the real question is: what you should expect for this year? Since we started actively tracking park hour changes, we have noticed that the previous year is quite a good predictor of the upcoming changes. We do make some adjustments for our internal calculations, but the chart above should give you a good idea for planning purposes.

One thing to remember is to compare days of the week rather than numerical dates. For instance, if you are traveling from Saturday, February 9, through Saturday, February 16, 2013 you would look at the second Saturday through the third Saturday from last year (February 11-18, 2012). Please also keep in mind that this chart is one of many references for you to use in planning your trip and is not necessarily the exact operating times.

I hope you find this information useful. As you may have guessed by now, this is going to be a regular feature. I am still in the process of “catching up” to the currently available Walt Disney World calendar (currently through May). Once I have caught it, I will post these as the new preliminary hours are released.

Thanks!

November is a fun month at Walt Disney World, even if we are a little late with this post.  Here’s a quick view of Walt Disney World’s November 2012 Crowd Calendar.

And here are a few specific days that I would like to bring to your attention:

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One of our readers sent us this email recently, asking for clarification on a significant jump on the crowd calendar. November park hours were recently updated, and they included extended hours at the Magic Kingdom to accommodate Annual Passholder Previews of the New Fantasyland. Whenever special events affect the park hours it creates a bit of a conundrum for the stats guys. Extended park hours historically indicate an expectation of large crowds, but special events such as passholder previews don’t usually significantly affect wait times at the other attractions. Usually, the increased attention is localized at the attraction being previewed.

What to do, what to do…

We had a similar situation on February 29, 2012, when the Magic Kingdom stayed open 24 hours for “One More Disney Day.” A regular day in late February would historically be an average crowd, but this day was packed, especially once evening hit. Wait times at the headliners stayed in the range of 70-90 minutes all night long. We had guessed that despite the special event, wait times would be normal. We were wrong.

This time we want to be conservative. We do expect the the wait times to be reasonable at most attractions outside Fantasyland, but the appeal of the official preview may be a big enough draw to cause a significant influx of people to the Magic Kingdom. So, we chose to keep the high rating. Like during the Food & Wine Festival at Epcot or Star Wars Weekends at Hollywood Studios, the wait times at the attractions don’t always tell the whole story of crowds at a park.

Regardless, we strongly recommend using a touring plan and taking advantage of the 8:00am opening whenever possible on these days. Think of it as your crowd insurance. If our estimates were too high, you won’t need to stick to it. But if it turns out to be a zoo, you will be prepared to survive one more Disney day.

October is a fun month at Walt Disney World.  Here’s a quick view of Walt Disney World’s October 2012 Crowd Calendar which, if you look today, you can see for free, without charge, sans-subscription (well, you get it)!

And here are a few specific days that I would like to bring to your attention:

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September should be one of 2012′s least busy months at Walt Disney World.  Here’s a quick view of Walt Disney World’s September 2012 Crowd Calendar.

And here are a few specific days that I would like to bring to your attention:

Read the rest of this entry »