Category — Disney World Crowds

Disney World Crowds in 2013: Christmas/New Years Crowds 2012/2013

by Dave

DISNEY WORLD CROWDS FROM LATER DECEMBER 2012 TO EARLY JANUARY 2013

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

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

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

In 2012/2013, many more kids are out Christmas week than New Year’s week, but there’s enough on break New Year’s week to still crowd the parks…

SCHOOL BREAKS AND DISNEY WORLD CROWDS

[Read more →]

July 17, 2012 10 Comments

The Week Beginning 12/29 Looks Worse, and the Week Beginning 12/15 Looks Better, Than I Thought They Would

by Dave

WALT DISNEY WORLD CROWDS THE WEEKS OF 12/15 AND 12/29/2102

I now have data from ~180 of the around ~200 school districts whose vacation calendars I track (more calendars than you’d think don’t come out until June or later), which is enough to say that

Crowds will be lower at the end of the week beginning 12/15/2012 than I thought they would, and
Crowds will be worse from January 2 2013 to January 6 2013 than I thought they would.

Specifically, many fewer districts than I had projected are taking off from 12/18 through 1/1, and are instead taking 12/22 though 1/6 off. As a result, in 2012 crowds will be lower December 18, 19 and 20 than I’d been projecting, and they’ll be higher January 2 through January 6th 2013. [Read more →]

June 27, 2012 6 Comments

Crowds and Walt Disney World

by Dave

DISNEY WORLD CROWDS, LIES, STATISTICS, AND JUDO

Every now and then I get a comment or an email saying something like (this is an exact quote, but for reasons that will become apparent I’m not going to link to it):

“Our last visit was Sept. 2011 . . . The crowds were not low in the parks. MK closed most nights at 5 pm for MNNSHP. Only EPCOT was open late and DTD. They were mobbed . . . impossible to find a place to eat if you didn’t make your reservations 180 days out. MK very crowded during the day. The shortest wait we saw for Toy Story Mania or Soarin’ was 90 min. and fast passes gone by 11:00 am. . This same week has a crowd level of #1!”

Or to put it another way…I said it was not going to be crowded, but it was!

Now there’s a number of errors of fact or interpretation in this comment (MK closes at 7, not at 5, for Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party; the restaurants are always packed during free dining; FASTPASSES are almost always gone for Toy Story, and often for Soarin, by late morning at every time of the year).

But there’s two bigger points.

One is that if you don’t know what high crowds are, it’s hard to know you are experiencing a low crowd.

And the second is that even in the lowest-crowd weeks of the year, sometimes the days you choose for specific parks matter a lot.

LOW DISNEY WORLD CROWDS COMPARED TO WHAT?

Low crowd periods, as used in this site and its crowd calendars, are low compared to other times of the year with higher–often spectacularly higher–crowds.

That does not necessarily mean that the parks will feel uncrowded compared to your expectations, as that depends on your expectations, because low does not equal empty.

Even on the quietest of days, if you arrive at 11a and stay through the afternoon parade, you may run into mobs of people, long lines, and fully-distributed FASTPASSES.

But all of these will be much better than they would be during a more crowded period.

The least crowded day I ever had at the Magic Kingdom was a cold and rainy January day during a long stretch of cold and rainy days. It was already one of the lowest attendance periods of the year; everybody knew the forecast; everybody was tired of the cold and the rain; tons of people stayed home; and I had 20 rides in by 1p.

The busiest day at the Magic Kingdom I’ve ever personally seen was a late Wednesday afternoon the week after Easter 6 or 7 years ago. Because I was tent-camping at Fort Wilderness, I drove; and for unrelated reasons had arrived a couple of days earlier than I had planned.

I took 45 minutes to get a burger at Pecos Bill’s, and even the Carousel of Progress was mobbed…

So “Low Crowds” does not necessarily mean lower than you think they will be, or a low as you wish they were; it means lower than the other choices you have.

VARIATIONS IN DISNEY WORLD CROWDS BY DAY OF THE WEEK AND OTHER “LOCAL” FACTORS

You can also, by art or by error, design your trip so that you hit the parks on their most crowded days.

Because both shorter and longer trips typically include weekends, weekends (and Mondays) are typically the times that see the most people in the Disney World parks. Operating hours are often extended over weekends (except at Epcot), but not in proportion to demand, so crowds can be high even during low times of the year.

Days when a park has Extra Magic Hours will be more crowded later that day than they would be without these special hours. This is because these hours disproportionately attract Disney resort hotel guests, many of whom don’t have hoppers and thus have that as their park all day.

During weeks with highly varied show schedules and/or operating hours, the Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Studios can show real variation in crowding across the week. This may be what happened to the commenter I quoted at the top of the page.

During many non-holiday weeks from September through President’s Day, there will be weeks when the Magic Kingdom closes some nights at 7, 8 or 9p, and others at 11p Some of these nights will have no evening parades or fireworks, and others will.

This is particularly an issue many weeks September through much of December, when because of Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party and Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party the Magic Kingdom can be closed at 7p, with no fireworks or evening parade available to the general public, multiple times a week.

As a result, people are both “repelled” by the 7p closings and lack of evening shows, and “attracted” to the days when the park is both open late and showing fireworks and parades…and those days can be mobbed.

The better way to handle these periods is to see the Magic Kingdom on days when it closes at 7p, and see the evening events on a different day, without having spent the earlier part of that day at MK.

THE JUDO OF DISNEY WORLD CROWDS

This last point is an example of how to think about crowds at Disney World.

Think about why you are drawn to Walt Disney World in general during a particular week, or to a specific park on a particular day, and whether your reasons are the same as those of the typical family with children.

If the reasons you have are also those of the typical family with children, then you will likely run into disproportionate crowds.

So as much as you can, do the opposite of the typical family–that’s the judo.

Go when almost all kids are in school.
Avoid parks on days when they have Extra Magic Hours.
Avoid the daylight part–or at minimum, the afternoon part–of days when parks have less-common evening entertainment available to everyone with regular tickets
Go during lousy weather

The point you have to be specially careful about is “go when almost all other kids are in school.” I’ve learned a couple of things over the years of running this site:

School breaks across the country are more varied than most parents think–especially spring break
There’s a number of parents who think “We’ll go to Disney World during Thanksgiving/ Christmas/ Easter, because everybody else will be home with their families, and it’ll be great.” Oh no it won’t…
You need a plan that includes showing up before the parks open, riding the most popular rides first, and using FASTPASSES. See this post on the TouringPlans.com blog for how much this matters.

Disney World Crowds in 2013

by Dave

December January February March April May June July

2013 CROWDS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

In the image you’ll find Walt Disney World 2013 weekly crowd forecasts (revised on January 13, 2013).

Dates in it are the beginning of the week, and the forecast covers the following 9 days.

(For 2014 crowds, 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 2013 DISNEY WORLD CROWD CALENDAR

Dates are the beginning of the week.

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.

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, in homage to Spinal Tap, I assigned 11 to “highest.” That let me skip two numbers, the ones that separate the moderate crowd levels from those higher and lower.

What’s Different About the New Walt Disney World 2012 Crowd Calendar?

by Dave

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–

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.

Disney World Crowds in 2012: Summer 2012 Crowds

by Dave

DISNEY WORLD SUMMER CROWDS: THE PRINCIPLES

Walt Disney World summer crowds are governed by two factors:

Public school summer break calendars, which have start and end dates more varied than you’d think
The beginning of the peak of the hurricane season, in mid-August

Pretty much all kids are off all of July. As a result, July is the busiest summer month, and during it, the week that includes the 4th of July the busiest week.

Varied dates for when summer breaks begin means June starts well, but builds to high crowd levels later in the month.

August has the opposite pattern, beginning with high crowds, but, through the combination of a trickle turning to a flood of back-to-school dates, and savvy travelers avoiding the peak of the hurricane season, it ends quite un-crowded.

Families that can only visit in the summer (for example, school teachers) should go in early June if they can, or, if their schools are not out then, as late in August as their schedules permit.

2012 PUBLIC SCHOOL SUMMER BREAKS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON WALT DISNEY WORLD CROWDS

The beginnings of summer breaks vary more than most people think.

The chart to the right illuminates this.

It’s based on data from a weighted sample including more than 125 of the largest relevant US public school districts.

(Click it to enlarge it; when it opens, click it again to enlarge it more.)

In 2012, only about 10% of kids are out before June; 30% are out as of June 2, 2012, 60% as of June 9; the proportion builds slowly over the rest of the month, with essentially all kids off by June 28, 2012.

Few families plan their vacation for their first day out of school, so there’s a lag in the effect of these dates on summer crowds that I can’t precisely quantify.

But the upshot is that early June is not bad.

I rate crowds the week beginning June 2 as 5/moderate-minus, June 9 as 7/moderate-plus, and June 16 begins a string of 9 straight summer weeks rated 9/high or 10/higher.

Because of the variation noted above in when people do go vs. can go, the weeks of June 9 and 16 may be a little better than I’m rating them, but my data sets won’t let me draw that conclusion.

THE PEAK OF THE HURRICANE SEASON AND DISNEY WORLD SUMMER CROWDS

The hurricane season officially runs from June 1 through November.

It peaks, however, from mid-August to early October.

(Click the chart; see also Weather and When to Go to Walt Disney World.)

As a result, August crowds at Walt Disney World are affected not only by the end dates of summer breaks, but also by savvy travelers avoiding this potential weather.

Hurricanes rarely impact a Disney World vacation…but savvy travelers with choices in when they can go commonly avoid this period. (Disney knows this of course, and both drops prices and commonly offers free dining during this period to change the value and risk equation.)

As a result, I rank crowds for the first two weeks of August (arrival dates 8/4 and 8/11/2012) 9/high. The week beginning 8/18 gets a crowd rating of 6/moderate. The week beginning 8/25 gets a crowd rating of 3/low.

July 20, 2011 No Comments

Category — Disney World Crowds

Disney World Crowds in 2013: Christmas/New Years Crowds 2012/2013