I recently published my Walt Disney World Crowd Calendar for 2012 and, based on it and other factors, revised the list of 2012 weeks to visit Disney World ranked in order.
I’ve also published details on 2012 crowds during key periods–
- Crowds during the Christmas-New Year’s season 2011-2012
- Crowds during 2012 Spring Break
- Summer 2012 crowds, and
- The lowest crowd weeks of 2012 at Disney World
In this post, I’ll be explaining how my Disney World 2012 Crowd Calendar is different from those I’ve been publishing for the last 3+ years (e.g. this one for 2011) but also how it’s the same!
SAME PURPOSE: HELPING FAMILIES FIND THE LEAST CROWDED TIMES AT WALT DISNEY WORLD
The new crowd calendar has the same old purpose–to help first time family visitors, unsure if they will ever return, to find the more and less crowded weeks at Walt Disney World.
It’s not mean to give precise day by day crowd forecasts–the best source for those is TouringPlans.com.
It also uses the same data sources I’ve always used–greater and lower operating hours, the exact dates of kid’s school breaks, and my own inferences based on experience, knowledge, and research.
I’ve incorporated even more school breaks than I had in the past, where my focus had been solely on sharpening up the Spring Break crowd forecasts. My school calendars now cover all the major family vacation periods.
What’s different is how I bring all this to a label. In the past, my crowd “number” came from a normalized index of excess operating hours, which I then adjusted based on school break info and inferences.
However, this approach no longer works so well.
The biggest problem with it has been that Disney has lately been frequently changing its operating hours–usually adding to them–which caused my crowd calendar to both look funny—crowded later dates don’t look as bad as they will be because hours have not yet been added–and to change month to month in ways that actually aren’t important.
So what I’ve done in the new 2012 Disney Crowd Calendar is, using the same analytics as before, to re-label every week from 1 (lowest crowds) to 11 (highest crowds).
This makes it both more accurate and more stable. So weeks that I know will be crowded, and that will thus have operating hours added, are just indicated as high crowd weeks now…
MY DISNEY WORLD CROWD CALENDAR GOES TO 11
The choice of 1-10 as the ranking would have been easier–it would have followed the traditional TouringPlans.com model.
But what TouringPlans.com currently groups together as “10” weeks seems to me to mask among these really bad weeks some really nightmarish ones.
I’d recommended to them (see this comment and the one that precedes it) that the distinguish these nightmare weeks, but they haven’t taken me up on this advice 🙂 . So I took it myself, both as a source of additional crowd precision and as a tribute to Spinal Tap!
The final changes are that the layout of the Crowd Calendar is now horizontal rather than vertical, which gave me room to add the dates of every week, and I’ve now color-coded the bars.
Check it out–it’s here.
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 2011 weeks to visit, ranked in order, see this
- For the 2011 Week Picker, see this
- For 2012 weeks to visit, ranked in order, see this
- For forecasting crowds at Walt Disney World, see this
- For seasonal pricing at Walt Disney World, see this
- For 2011 price seasons, see this
- For 2012 price seasons, see this
- For weather at Walt Disney World, see this
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