Full Hotels Don’t Necessarily Mean Full Parks

Routinely around this time of year I get comments from people trying to book one of my recommended December weeks that say something like “all the Disney World hotels are booked, so how can these be lower-crowd weeks?”

The short answer I always give is that this happens every year, and that Disney hotel occupancy is not a crowd calendar.

Quarter to quarter, Disney’s average occupancy is between 80 and 90%–it’s been around 90% for three quarters in a row.

The difference between 80% and 100% occupancy is about 5100 more rooms filled per night—or, at an average of 3 people per room, about 15,000 more people.

Fifteen thousand more people divided among 4 theme parks, two water parks, Universal, Sea World, Downtown Disney, days off, etc. just don’t much matter to a set of theme parks that have a base average of more than 140,000 visitors a day anyway.

(This is the same reason that the cheering competitions, runDisney events, etc., don’t much matter to park crowding. Fifteen thousand cheerleaders or runners and family members may seem like a lot to you…but translate into less than 10 percent more people on property.)

Here’s the longer answer.

WHY THE DISNEY HOTELS ARE NOT A CROWD CALENDAR

Crowds at Disney World don’t come from the Disney hotels, which are almost always close to full (my 80-90% occupancy point above). They come from hotels outside the parks.

On an average day in 2014, there were 141,000 people in one of the four Disney World theme parks. (Math applied to this.) You can convert those into required hotel rooms by making assumptions about

• People per room (e.g. 3) and
• Rooms occupied by those not in a Disney theme park that day: people in a hotel room for a Disney World vacation but taking a day off from the four Disney theme parks and instead going to a water park, Downtown Disney, Universal, taking a day at the pool, shopping, or skipping the parks on their arrival night)—I’ll use 25% as my assumption on this.

So divide the 141,000 people in the parks on an average day by three people per room and you get 47,000 required rooms; shift this by another 25% for the folk on a Disney-oriented vacation but not in a Disney park that day and you get 63,000 required rooms.

Disney World itself right now has “only” about 25,500 rooms available, and probably can’t hit much above 95% occupancy for any sustained period (at 95% occupancy rooms are booked 19 out of every 20 nights) except in the rarest of circumstances, because there aren’t enough one night stays to fill in the tiny gaps that exist between 95% and 100% occupancy.

At 90% occupancy (Disney has been running near this level for almost a year now) it can serve 23,000 of the 63,000 needed rooms—just a little more than a third.

Occupancy at the Disney hotels doesn’t flex up and down much with crowds. Rather, Disney runs its price seasons and its deals to hit a fairly high level of average occupancy year round. Hotels fill up in the highest-crowd times, but they also fill up during times when savvy Disney World visitors (the most likely to occupy a Disney space—especially DVC owners) know are great times to visit—like early December!!

In other words, the crowds don’t come from Disney World hotels. They don’t flex enough. Rather, they come from off-property folk. So full Disney World hotels don’t necessarily mean high crowds. (They can mean that—it’s just that they don’t necessarily do so.)

Want a real crowd calendar?  See this.

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