Crowd Blog

“Should I go to Magic Kingdom when it’s a Best Park and the Crowd Level is a ‘7′? Or should I go when it’s a Park to Avoid and the Crowd Level is a ‘2′?”

We’ve received this question many times, and we’ve always wanted to answer it better.  So we’re happy to debut a new feature: Per-Park Crowd Levels are now a part of the Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar!

These individual park crowd levels are based on wait times and are measured on a relative scale from 1 to 10. If the Magic Kingdom Crowd Level is a ‘1′ — it’s one of the lightest days of the year for the Magic Kingdom (and when it’s a 10, it’s one of busiest for the Magic Kingdom).

A given park level is only directly related to other park levels for the same park. If Magic Kingdom is a ‘4′ and Epcot is a ‘6′, it doesn’t necessarily mean that the Magic Kingdom is less crowded than Epcot (a ‘4′ day at the Magic Kingdom may have longer waits than a ‘6′ day at Epcot). However, if Epcot is a ‘4′ one day and a ‘6′ the next day, we’re predicting that Epcot will be less crowded on the first day, and more crowded on the second.

How does it affect my trip planning?

Say you’re on a 5-day trip, and want to schedule your touring around the single best day to hit the Fantasyland dark rides. Or the most relaxing day to enjoy Expedition Everest and Kilimanjaro Safaris. Or you want to hit Disney’s Hollywood Studios on the day you can most likely get a FASTPASS for Toy Story Mania after 10am! These Park Crowd Levels should help you do just that.

How do these numbers relate to the Best Park Recommendations?

As the calendar shows, we don’t simply choose the day with the lowest park crowd level to be the Best Park for a given day. Further, we don’t choose the absolute least crowded park for each day (if we did, the Animal Kingdom would be the Best Park every day of the year). Our Park Recommendations are based on a formula that includes Extra Magic Hours, special events & holidays, as well as guaranteeing that each park is a “Best Park” at least one day out of every seven days. To read more about how we calculate the Best Parks and Parks To Avoid, read the Park Recommendations breakdown.

Go check them out!

The Park Crowd Levels can be found here and are available exclusively for premium subscribers. Any questions, comments? Leave us a comment or email us!

On June 4th through June 7th, 2009 the annual “Gay Days” event will hit Walt Disney World. Since 1991, the Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgendered community as well as their supporters were encouraged to “Wear Red and Be Seen” at Orlando’s theme parks . The events are not officially Disney sponsored but they do represent enough of an increase in crowds that we add it to our crowd calendar. Each day, the event rotates through one of the four major parks starting with June 4th at Animal Kingdom; June 5th at Disney’s Hollywood Studios; June 6th at Magic Kingdom; and June 7th at Epcot.

Normally, we encourage our readers to avoid parks that are holding special events but on June 4th we have recommended Animal Kingdom. It is one of those cases where the Animal Kingdom represents the best choice among the four parks. Magic Kingdom and Epcot are out for June 4th because they are hosting Extra Magic Hours. Disney’s Hollywood Studios would be a good choice but there is a Fantasmic show scheduled that night. Add this all together along with our dozen or so other crowd statistics and Animal Kingdom still looks the best.

If you’ve always wanted to wear those rainbow colored Mickey ears, now is your chance! Take our advice and head to the Animal Kingdom. If touring the park with your family and a few thousand of your gay and lesbian red-shirted friends doesn’t sound appealing then go to plan B. Really, choosing amongst the other three parks is at your discretion. Unfortunately there are valid reasons to avoid all four parks that day. Pick your favorite park, take advantage of Extra Magic Hours, try a Water Park or go off-site.

If you do take our advice, tote the red shirts and be proud! Also, send us the wait times you experienced so we can see if we were right.

We get a lot of messages from people asking about the accuracy of the crowd calendar. The estimates we provide are based on a model that incorporates dozens of factors like park hours, parade schedules, weather, proximity of holidays, hotel occupancy and historical crowd levels. When the factors themselves change, it results in a change to our predictions. What this means is that the higher the risk for changes, the higher the chance that the predictions will change as well.

If you are planning your trip twelve months from now the calendar will give you a good sense of what to expect but it is likely that it will not be the exact crowd conditions when the time comes for you to set foot in the park. If we were that good, we’d be retired, writing the Unofficial Guide to Bahamian Beach Bars by now.

All this being said, here is the latest comparison of what our model predicted and what was actually observed in the Magic Kingdom since March 4, 2009. Before commenting on the times that the model is wrong remember that this represents the better part of my life’s work over the last 5 years. Here’ goes…

So, it seems that we’re right more than we’re wrong, which is good. There were some days in early March where we underestimated quite a bit. These are the days that even Disney had to adjust its park hours to accommodate the unexpected influx of guests. Still, there’s a lot of room for improvement here. Despite measuring every thing under the sun that has to do with crowds, there is enough variability in the size of crowds to cause us to be wrong now and then.

When we’re wrong, it’s not by much. This was a sample of 21 days. Our predictions were correct almost half the time and within one 80% of the time. We were off by two index levels only four times and never off by more than two. The good news is that we’re wrong equally as often on the high side as the low, so at least the model is centered.

So use the crowd calendar whenever you need to get a feel for what size crowd you will face but understand that it comes with a certain degree of uncertainty. Hopefully, our readers will continue to send us their wait times through email or twitter so that can continue to improve.

Far be it for us to pat ourselves on the back but…pat, pat. Our last few weeks of crowd monitoring have confirmed that our estimates of high crowds during the week after Easter and of lower crowds leading in to the last weeks of April. Maximum waits at the Magic Kingdom will continue to be in the 50 to 70 range over the next ten days then increasing to the 70-90 range leading into May.

As always, the crowd calendar is subject to change as we continue to collect information about crowds this spring.

The crowd calendar now includes the park hours and extra magic hour schedule posted for July. Park hours for July are cut back from what is normally expected. Just like March and April, Disney seems to prefer keeping posted hours short and then changing them last minute based on expected attendance. Regardless of Disney’s reasoning, this seems to be a recipe for large crowds, even larger than usual.

We added the Blog to the site so that we could speak to common problems or questions that we get on a regular basis, sometimes daily. He’s a sample of some questions and/or comments that we get a lot, maybe these explanations will help understand what goes through our little Disney-obsessed minds.

1. “I was able to book an ADR 60 days out for our vacation but you have the crowd estimated at a level 8. How can this be? Shouldn’t dining availability be an indicator of low crowds?”

Dining availability is only one of thousands of pieces of information that we collect on Disney World. In general, difficulty getting dining reservations can indicate higher crowds but not necessarily. The size of the restaurant, the location of the restaurant, the popularity of the dining plan can all affect the availability of reservations. Don’t assume that your experience booking dining reservations will forecast the size of the crowds.

2. “The Studios were packed on Tuesday but your calendar said it was a ‘6′ – what gives?

Remember, our crowd predictions represent the maximum wait time you are likely to observe at the Magic Kingdom headliners. They say nothing directly about crowds at the other parks. We are working on a new crowd calendar structure that will provide a more complete picture of what crowds will be for all parks.

3. “I booked my dining reservations based on the best days recommendations but now the recommendations have changed.”

We collect data on Disney World daily. When the data warrants a change to the recommendations, we do it. Our philosophy is that it is better to have accurate information than to keep things the same purely for consistency’s sake. Keep your dining reservations, its easier (and less important) to deal with a park that isn’t recommended than re-booking dining.

4. “Does your calendar take into account the economic downturn? That should make the crowds lighter right?”

We get this question every day. We have dozens of direct and indirect economic factors that have always been included in our crowd estimates. Its an important piece of the puzzle when predicting crowds. Incidentally, there is no evidence that the economic downturn is making crowds lighter. In fact, Disney’s promotions, cut-back hours and less staff are making the wait times longer in the parks. Check for a blog post about the latest crowd measurements coming soon. 

5. “I call Disney every day trying to book a room but they say they are completely booked. Why do you only have crowd estimates of ‘6′ for that week when it seems like every room is occupied?”

Surprisingly, on-site hotel occupancy is not a strong predictor of the wait times you will experience in the park. Similar to dining reservations, its not one thing that predicts crowds but rather all factors put together that give the best estimates. Certain factors balance out others and we spend a lot of time examining our model to make sure it does the best job it can with the information we have.

Unofficial Guide researchers have been pounding the theme park pavement all summer, checking crowd levels and wait times throughout Walt Disney World.

Our predictions are within 9 minutes of the actual waits, on average. Even better: we’re within 5 minutes more than half the time.

That being said, we’re fairly certain the 140- and 120-minute wait times posted on 27 May and 9 July are errors, since the posted wait times in the half-hour before and after those readings are far smaller (in the 90-minute range). We won’t bore you with the technical details of why we think this is true (unless you ask), but we’re confident they are. If we adjust for those two days by assuming the peak wait was 90 minutes, our predictions are about +/- 7 minutes from actual park wait times. That’s pretty good.

As we noted on the News page, our crowd level predictions for the second half of April underpredicted crowds by about 1.0 on our 10 point scale. We’re looking at three possible causes:

1) More visitors than usual for this time of year.

2) The effect that shortened Magic Kingdom hours for Grad Nights and Pirates and Princess Parties have on our crowd prediction algorithm.

3) Warmer than usual weather.

We’re looking at hotel occupancy rates to determine whether #1 had any effect. Occupancy was up around 4.6% for all of Orlando for the week of April 20 versus last year, but that alone doesn’t explain the gap. And the effects of weather is easy enough to determine.

The effect of Grad Nights and Pirates and Princess may be more interesting. Two of the things that we use to measure crowd levels are the number of hours the Magic Kingdom is open on a given day and in a given week. For April 2008, the Magic Kingdom was open a total of 371 hours, and closed early ten times (4 grad nights and 6 PnPPs). The Magic Kingdom was open significantly more in past years – 437 hours in April 2007 and 430 hours in April 2006. Granted, Easter was in April in 2007 and 2006, but the extra hours for Easter don’t account for the difference: there were only two Grad Nights in April 2006 and no Pirates and Princess Parties. So for now we’re thinking that the early closings for these hard ticket events caused the crowd prediction algorithm to underpredict the actual crowds. We’re still looking at this.

A couple of other notes:

1) We’re forecasting a 12% crowd increase for Free Dining in late August and September 2008, and the crowd calendar takes that in to account.

2) We’re still not sure of the economy’s effects on summer crowds. As far as we can tell, demand for WDW hotels remains strong. We’re continuing to look at this.

3) We’re going to start providing wait time forecasts for the other parks, using the Magic Kingdom as a guide. That is, we’re going to provide a chart that says a 5 at the Magic Kingdom is equal to X at Epcot, Y at the Studios and Z at the Animal Kingdom. We’re going to need some time to adjust the chart, so consider it “beta” advice for now. Also, we’re only going to use the Magic Kingdom to determine whether the crowd calendar is correct.

Thanks for your patience while we sort through all this.

More actual wait time data from the parks this week:

Space Mountain continues to have higher peak waits that either Splash Mountain or Big Thunder Mountain. In Epcot, standby wait times at Soarin’ on Wednesday evening were moderate at around 40 minutes.

The latest crowd calendar update for February 2009 includes an adjustment for the National Football League’s Super Bowl XLIII to be held in Tampa, Florida on 1 February, 2009. The last Super Bowl to be held in Tampa was in 2001, and Orlando was used as backup lodging for families who could not find hotels in Tampa. We expect similar crowds in 2009.