Category — a. When to Go to Walt Disney World

OVERVIEW: MARCH 2012 AT DISNEY WORLD

This page reviews March 2012 Walt Disney World crowds, prices, deals and discounts, weather, operating hours, adds a few other notes, and ends with week by week summaries.

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The 2012 Disney World Week Picker is out!

It’s designed to be an alternative way of picking your time to visit Disney World instead of using this site’s 2012 Weeks to Visit, Ranked in Order.

It lets you decide for yourself the importance to you of crowds, prices, and weather, and, based on your choices, offers you the best weeks of 2012 that meet your criteria!

The 2011 version has already helped visitors to Disney World pick their weeks with more than 130,000 hits–so give the 2012 Disney World Week Picker a try–it may be a huge help to you!

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 the 2012 Week Picker, see this
• For forecasting crowds at Walt Disney World, see this
  • For the 2011 Crowd Calendar, click here
  • For the 2012 Crowd Calendar, click here
• 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

I introduced updates to my ranking of the weeks of 2012 at Walt Disney World a few weeks ago, and promised I’d get back with a little more detail on what changed and why. Here it is.

CHANGES IN RANKING OF BEST AND WORST WEEKS AT DISNEY WORLD

47 weeks had their rankings change.

Changes came from analysis of final school calendars and resulting changes to the 2012 Disney World crowd calendar, and from analysis of final 2012 prices.

They also came from some new policies to make the rankings even more helpful.

While only 6 weeks had no change, of the rest, 36 weeks changed their rankings only +/- 3 weeks, and only two weeks had a ranking change of more than 10 weeks.

POLICY CHANGES AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS

Here’s the new policies built into the revised 2012 week ranking:

Have no recommended weeks that aren’t low crowd weeks.

This moved the week beginning 12/15 out of the list of recommended weeks entirely, and the 14 week change in ratings was the biggest of all changes.

For those who picked it based on its old rating, I haven’t changed my view of the week–low crowds and prices at the beginning, high at its end, and moderate levels on average.

It’s still a sound week to go, but with the change to no moderate crowd weeks on the recommended list, its ranking has to drop a lot.

Make sharper distinctions on summer crowds, which moved some late May and early June weeks well up in the rankings—these were the next biggest ranking changes.

Pay more attention within groups of like weeks to ranking lower-priced weeks ahead of higher priced ones. This moved the recommended fall weeks ahead of the recommended spring weeks, and caused minor shifts in a number of other weeks.

Pay more attention to the fact that Pop Warner week is typically excluded from deals and discounts.

Carl (“Dad”) at Dad’s Guide to WDW has been advocating that I do this for years.

I had some reasons for not doing so, resolved by moving from one suggested week in my home page and When to Go points of view to three suggested weeks.

This shift resolved my reasons for disagreeing with Carl, who really does know WDW. It also led to a new number one ranked week for 2012! Thanks, Dad!

The 2012 week rankings begin here–or you can just click the image.

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

WINTER AT DISNEY WORLD

Winter at Walt Disney World—loosely defined as November through February–is the most variable of seasons.

The weather is literally variable—cooler, and with typical daily highs ranging from the low 60s to the 80s. Tornadoes can be an issue during this period. See this for more.

Crowds are both at their lowest—in January and February after the Martin Luther King Day weekend and before the President’s Day week—and at their highest, over the week that includes New Years Eve.

Prices are the lowest of the year from early January through mid-February (the value season). They also hit their highest level of the year in winter, over the weeks that include Christmas and New Year’s Eve.
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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

CHRISTMAS IN JULY

Magical Blogorail Teal is writing this month about Christmas at Walt Disney World.

Welcome to those of you joining me from The World of Deej and those of you who have just hopped aboard. I am the 3rd stop on our Magical Blogorail.

Since 2008, this site has been listing the weeks of the year ranked in order for first-time Walt Disney World visitors who may never return.

(For example, see this for 2011 and this for 2012.)

Every year the top 3 weeks have been the Christmas season weeks beginning right after Thanksgiving.

WHY THESE CHRISTMAS SEASON WEEKS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD?

Each year I end up with about 14-18 recommended weeks.

I get to these by tossing the ride closure weeks, the horribly crowded holiday, spring break and summer weeks, the weeks that happen at the peak of the hurricane season, and some other higher-crowd weeks.

The weeks that remain are lower-crowd weeks that don’t have a weather or ride-closure reason not to go.

I generally sort these remaining weeks by crowds and prices, but the weeks that rise to the top are always the three Christmas season weeks right after Thanksgiving.

These aren’t the  lowest crowd weeks of the year (which occur in the peak hurricane and ride closure seasons) nor are they the lowest price weeks of the year (ditto).

What they are is lower crowd, lower price weeks that also have the full display of Disney World Christmas magic.

Special Christmas events and displays occur across the parks and the resort hotels beginning in early November.

They are fully in place by the Friday after Thanksgiving, and continue to New Years.

I won’t go into details here as I have done so elsewhere, plus my buds in Magical Blogorail Teal will cover them.

Any family vacation at in the Christmas season is magical.

A Christmas season family vacation at Walt Disney World would be even more magical, even if this special Disney Christmas stuff wasn’t happening (avoid the latter part of December though–the crowds and prices then are unimaginably high.)

But combine a family Christmas season vacation with all the wonder that Disney puts into celebrating Christmas, and you’ve got a family vacation you will never forget…

MORE ON A DISNEY CHRISTMAS IN JULY FROM MAGICAL BLOGORAIL TEAL

Thank you for joining me today. Your next stop on the Magical Blogorail is The DisneyFAITHful.

Here is the map of our Magical Blogorail loop should you happen to have to make a stop along the way and want to reboard:

• 1st Stop ~ Capturing Magical Memories
• 2nd Stop ~ The World of Deej
• 3rd Stop ~ yourfirstvisit.net
• 4th Stop ~ The DisneyFAITHful
• Final Stop ~ The Many Adventures of a Disney-Lovin’ Spectrum Mom

MORE ON WHEN TO GO TO WALT DISNEY WORLD