Category — Disney World Crowds

In this post, I’m covering the Christmas-New Year’s season 2011-2012.

(I’ve also posted on spring break crowds at Disney World here and summer 2012 crowds at Walt Disney World here.)

DISNEY WORLD CROWDS FROM MID-DECEMBER 2011 TO EARLY JANUARY 2012: THE PRINCIPLES

Disney World usually sees its highest crowds and prices of the year in the second half of December, in the week that includes Christmas, and the next week that includes New Year’s Eve.

This is for a pretty basic reason: most kids are out of school these weeks.

However, not every school district has the same break schedule.

• Not every kid gets two consecutive weeks (or more) off
• And the days of the week that these holidays fall on matter

As a result of all this, I’m seeing the week beginning the 17th of December 2011 as an OK week, with crowds beginning to build in the middle of that week and lasting through the morning of 1/2/2012.

SCHOOL BREAKS AND DISNEY WORLD CROWDS

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2012 CROWDS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

In the image below you’ll find Walt Disney World 2012 crowd forecasts. (Click it to enlarge it; when open, click it again.)

(For the 2013 Crowd Calendar, click here)

Crowd levels are ranked by week from 1-11 in the following way:

1: Lowest of the year

2: Lower

3: Low

5: Moderate-minus

6: Moderate

7: Moderate-plus

9: High

10: Higher

11: Highest

HOW TO INTERPRET THE 2012 DISNEY WORLD CROWD CALENDAR

The “low crowd” weeks–those rated 1-3–represent the only crowd levels a family visiting for the first time, and unsure if it will ever return, should consider.

However, lower crowds, especially lowest crowds, do not always mean a better week. The lowest weeks are low for a reason–typically because they are in the hurricane or the ride closure seasons. See this for recommended 2012 weeks for first time visitors, and for the 2012 Week Picker, see this.

The “moderate crowd” weeks–those rated 5-7–have crowd levels I would not recommend to first time visitors. However, I’d go during such weeks myself with no hesitation, and think these levels are OK for returning visitors who don’t need to see everything and already know how to work Walt Disney World.

The “high crowd” weeks–those rated 9-11–should be avoided by everyone. They aren’t, which is why they are so high.

You may have noted that there’s no level 4 or 8. There’s a reason for that.

MY DISNEY WORLD CROWD CALENDAR GOES UP TO 11

My analytics only let me distinguish 9 groups–the lowest through the highest crowd levels noted above.

Since the influence of the Unofficial Guide and TouringPlans.com has led almost all Disney World crowd calendars to top out at 10, this presented a problem of needing to skip a number. The skipped number is hard to place among 9.

However, I’ve always thought that the really nastiest weeks of the year deserved an 11 for emphasis. So I assigned 11 to “highest.” That let me skip two numbers, the ones that separate the moderate crowd levels from those higher and lower.

A NOTE ON DISNEY WORLD CROWD FORECAST ACCURACY

This site’s forecasting approach has stood the test of time.  But nobody’s perfect, and it can’t hurt you to look at other Disney World crowd calendars—such as TouringPlans.com –far and away the best daily crowd calendar on the web.

(TouringPlans.com charges a trivially small fee. Buy Testa and Sehlinger’s book and get a discount on TouringPlans.com.)

I particularly suggest checking other forecasts for 2012 Spring Break–late February, March and early April–visits, as crowds in this period are the hardest to forecast.

HOW THE 2012 CROWD CALENDAR WAS BUILT

The data-sets, analytic engines, and inference processes that went into this are largely the same as in past years, but, as I’ll explain in a later post, the data-sets are more extensive, the analytic weighting of data-sets is different, and I’ve used inference in a different way to label the weeks.

The presentation is also quite different.

I’m still working on the graphics, but I wanted to make it easier to read the crowd levels of individual weeks.

See the right side for the same 2012 crowd levels data laid out in a format similar to that of prior years.

MORE ON WHEN TO GO TO WALT DISNEY WORLD

• For when to go to Walt Disney World, see this
• For the next best dates, see this
• For the best and worst times to visit, see this
  • For 2012 weeks to visit, ranked in order, see this
  • For the 2012 Week Picker, see this
  • For 2013 weeks to visit, ranked in order, see this
• For forecasting crowds at Walt Disney World, see this
  • For the 2012 Crowd Calendar, click here
  • For the 2013 Crowd Calendar, click here
• For seasonal pricing at Walt Disney World, see this
  • For 2012 price seasons, see this
  • For 2013 price seasons, click here
• For weather at Walt Disney World, see this

DISNEY CROWD CALENDAR UPDATE

I’ve updated my Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar to reflect recently-released December 2011 Disney World operating hours.

You can find the updated crowd calendar here.

A reminder–I always recommend checking another crowd calendar–preferably that at TouringPlans.com–before committing to a specific time to go to Walt Disney World.

I’ll be publishing my 2012 Disney World crowd calendar later this month.

In the meantime, for a consensus view on lower-crowd 2012 weeks, click here.

THE LOWEST CROWD WEEKS AT DISNEY WORLD

I’ve been working lately on my formal Disney World crowd calendar for 2012.

(The 2011 Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar is here; my 2012 Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World, Ranked in Order is here.)

For reasons I’ll post about later, the data sources I use as the basis for my Disney Crowd Calendar are becoming a little less reliable—especially for the relative ranking of moderate and high crowd weeks. So I’ve been re-thinking my approach.

See the image for the sophisticated analytic tools I use to support this work.

While doing such noodling I noticed a disboards thread on the lowest crowds at Walt Disney World over the year.

I was surprised at the variance among and vehemence with which various times were proposed.

So I went to my bookshelf and here’s what I found:

• Guidebook 1: Lowest crowds right after Labor Day
• Guidebook 2: Lowest crowds the first two weeks of December
• Guidebook 3: Lowest crowds in the middle of January

My own approach (which is good at “low” but not really reliable for “lowest”) at the first level, before modifications that I apply to it, suggests January-early February, and October.

Well, all these can’t be right. The only people who really know work for Disney World, and TouringPlans.com is the next most reliable source that I know about.

That said, I thought it would be interesting to canvass a number of sources and find how much they agreed or disagreed.

My starting point was the 2011 editions of four well-known guidebooks, the calendars on three strong websites, my own first level 2012 calendar, and a proprietary crowd calendar that the team at LeaveittoGenie.com was kind enough to share with me.

THE WISDOM OF CROWDS ON WALT DISNEY WORLD CROWDS

Only three of these nine had a specific point of view on 2012 at all, and only one (mine) was complete.

So what I did was infer their principles and apply them to 2012, adjusting for the changing dates of key holidays. In some cases I also had to infer (usually straightforward—see the analytic resources available in the image higher on the page) the distinction between low and lowest.

(In my “other” job, I’m a consultant specializing in business strategy, so this future oriented inference—I almost said BS—is what I do every day.)

THE LOWEST CROWD WEEKS OF 2012 AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

See the image for the result.

(Click it to open it; once open, click it again to enlarge it.)

Based on my inferences, 21 different weeks would be indicated by at least one source as lowest, with an average of about 3.5 votes each (out of nine possible).

Seven weeks were noted as lowest crowd in half or more of the sources (in the image, they are highlighted in green):

• January after the Marathon Weekend until early February, excluding Martin Luther King Day week, and
• The week after Labor Day until the opening of the Epcot Food and Wine Festival

THE LOW CROWD WEEKS OF 2012 AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

Based on the same approach, I also built a view of the “low crowd” weeks of the year at Walt Disney World.

Click the image to open it up.

• Thirty two weeks got noted as low
• Twenty two got votes as low from more than half of the calendars

A couple more in later April were impossible for me to infer because of the major change in Easter dates compared to 2011.

Likely some of these April weeks will get promoted into the “more than half” category once the sources develop their official 2012 calendars—remember that for almost all I am inferring some or all of their 2102 crowd calendars from their approach to 2011.

Click the image to see all these weeks–the ones with more than half the crowd calendars supporting them are highlighted in green.

(By the way, it’s because I am basing this on such inferences that I’m not identifying the sources—any errors here—and there’s bound to be some—are mine, not theirs.)

So there you have it—a best efforts shot at a broad-based view of the lowest and low-crowd weeks of 2012 at Walt Disney World.

Disney has posted some highly unusual operating hours 5/20 through 5/22.  These coincide with the first Star Wars weekend, and also with the opening of the re-imagined Star Tours.

Disney’s Hollywood Studios–where the weekend happens and the ride is located–will be open from 8a-midnight the 20th, 21st, and 22nd.

This is three or four hours longer than the first Star Wars Weekend last year, and makes sense–the new ride is not only an attractor itself, but has been conceptualized to encourage multiple rides by having dozens of different possible experiences.

Mark Goldhaber of MousePlanet.com is reporting here that “some within Walt Disney World management are predicting that May 20 will be the busiest day in the history of Disney’s Hollywood Studios.”

But a couple of things suggest Disney may be expecting much more than multiple Star Tours riders.

First, Fantasmic is rarely shown Fridays and Saturdays, but both the 2oth and 21st not only is it on, but is on for two shows.

In the last six months, Fantasmic has been shown 14% of non-holiday Fridays and 18% of non-holiday Saturdays, and on both the Friday and Saturday of a non-holiday weekend exactly once; on last year’s first Star Wars weekend, it had one show, on Friday.

Second, the Animal Kingdom not only has unusual Saturday morning extra magic hours the 21st, but also has an 8a opening Sunday the 22nd–almost unheard of outside the busiest holiday weeks. As a result, for Disney resort hotel guests, the Animal Kingdom will open at 8a both weekend days.

Finally, the Magic Kingdom opens at 8a the 21st.  Saturday 8a openings are becoming coming at the Magic Kingdom–they’ve been happening many Saturdays since early March–so I don’t let this influence my thinking too much.

If what was going on was just the extra hours at the Studios, and the Magic Kingdom early Saturday, I wouldn’t be thinking big crowds outside of the Studios and especially the Star Tours area.

But adding in the unusual Fantasmics–not added for the Star Wars crew–and the unusual hours at the Animal Kingdom, leads me to suspect that Disney is projecting large crowds resort wide May 20 through May 22.

DISNEY CROWD CALENDAR UPDATE

I’ve updated my Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar to reflect recently-released  November 2011 Disney World operating hours.

You can find the updated crowd calendar here.

A reminder–I always recommend checking another crowd calendar–preferably that at TouringPlans.com–before committing to a specific time to go to Walt Disney World.