Category — zz. Even Geekier than Usual

DISNEY WORLD SPRING BREAK CROWDS FROM FEBRUARY THROUGH APRIL 2014

DISNEY WORLD SPRING BREAK CROWDS: THE PRINCIPLES

Walt Disney World Spring Break crowds are governed by two and a quarter factors:

• Public school Spring Break calendars, which are still largely framed around Easter
• The demand of snow-belters for a break from winter weather, which peaks in March, and
• The quarter factor, the date of President’s day.  Later President’s Days (which can range from February 15 to February 21) tend to make the first part of March better

An early Easter combines the first two factors, making for more than the usual horrible crowds in March but a great April; a late Easter spreads the first two factors out, yielding some good early March and early April weeks.

Easter 2014, on April 20, is very late in the possible range. President’s Day 2014, on February 17th, is in the middle of its possible range.

As a result, 2014 Spring Break crowds at Walt Disney World will be

• Fine the last week of February and the first week of March,
• Very rough the weeks beginning March 8, 15, and 22
• Better the week beginning March 29
• Fine the week beginning April 5,
• Horrible the week of April 12 
• Bad, but not horrible, the week beginning April 19
• ..and back to fine the week beginning April 26

2014 PUBLIC SCHOOL SPRING BREAKS AND THEIR EFFECTS ON WALT DISNEY WORLD CROWDS [Read more →]

DISNEY WORLD CROWDS FROM LATER DECEMBER 2013 TO EARLY JANUARY 2014

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 2013/2014, more kids are out Christmas week than New Year’s week, but there’s still plenty enough on break New Year’s week to wildly crowd the parks…

SCHOOL BREAKS AND DISNEY WORLD CROWDS [Read more →]

This site’s Disney World crowd calendars always show crowds dropping off in later August.

For example, in 2013, crowd rankings go from 9/high at the beginning of August down to 1/lowest in early September.

This page both explain how that comes about and also reviews how the site’s crowd calendars are built.

END OF SUMMER 2013 CROWDS AT WALT DISNEY WORLD

The highest-crowd periods at Walt Disney World all have one thing in common: they are convenient times for parents to take their kids to Orlando.  That is, they are times that kids are out of school and that parents traditionally can take off of work.

What’s not so clear until you do the numbers is that actual school vacation dates are much more varied than you’d think.  And there’s no good source you can go to that explains what all these varied dates are.

So every year about this time one of my nieces goes to almost 200 school district websites and captures all the key vacation dates for the upcoming academic year. (This time of year because you’d be surprised many districts don’t put their calendars up for the upcoming year until June; this year, about 180 had their calendars out by the time we agreed to stop collecting data.)

These include the 100 largest school districts in the U.S., plus eighty more of the next largest school districts in the more highly-populated states east of the Mississippi–that is, the states from which in particular Walt Disney World draws its visitors.

I then create a database that shows based on district enrollment every kid who is off on every date, sum these by state, and weight them based on the state’s proportion of total US visits to this website (because Disney won’t tell me actual visitation by state!) See the image above for a screenshot example.

Finally, I calculate percentage of total weighted kids on break by date and use that to inform the crowd calendars. (There’s about 12.6 million actual kids in the database.)

Above are the results of this for when kids go back to school in 2013.

So you can see that kids don’t start going back to school in real numbers until the week of 8/10; almost half are back in school the week of 8/17; almost 70% are back by the week of 8/24, and almost 90% are back in school by the week of 9/2.

Thus, in the 2013 crowd calendar, the week of 8/10 is rated 9/high crowds, the week of 8/17 6/moderate crowds, the week of 8/24 2/lower crowds, and the week of 9/2 1/lowest crowds!

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NEW LOGO; UPDATED 2014 STUFF; NEW PRICES; FREE DINING RUMORS

The top-secret “Lipstick on a Pig” team has been busy the past week or so developing the new logo at the top of the page.  Hope you like it!  The good bits came from a crack designer I’ve been working with and the weak parts from me.

Also over the weekend the final data set for 2014 school calendars at 180 US public school districts came in from my crack research staff—the older Test Niecelet (on the left). I’ve converted these into databases, and will be analyzing and reporting on the forecasted crowd results over the next week or so.  Based on this analysis, I’ll make any needed adjustments to the 2014 Disney World Crowd calendar.

Meanwhile, it’s widely expected that 2014 prices will come out mid-week from the crack Disney World revenue management team.  Based on these I’ll revise and finalize the 2014 Disney World price seasons, and will use both the revised price seasons and revised crowd calendars to finalize the 2014 Disney World week rankings.

Finally a number of crack observers have been predicting that Disney World will release free dining for October through December this week.  I still quite doubt it, but it is of course possible.  Major macro-economic indicators (especially bond markets, developing country currency markets, and the Lone Ranger) do suggest slight headwinds against overseas visits to the US and a slight increase in Disney’s need to more strongly drive later 2013 earnings…

And let me know what you think about the logo!!!!

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Disney released its Q2 2013 results (covering December 30, 2102 through March 30, 2013) yesterday, and discussed them with analysts.

(The earnings report and 10q are herehere.)

I haven’t made my way through the 10Q yet, but based on the earnings release and call, a couple of observations:

• The key component of MyMagic+, Fastpass+, may not even open this year
• MyMagic+ will indeed have special perks for guests staying at a Disney-owned and -operated resort
• I’m even more convinced we won’t see any 2013 free dining for US residents other than the September offer that will come out tomorrow

THE TIMING OF MYMAGIC+

An analyst specifically asked CEO Bob Iger when MyMagic+ would open.  Prior statements had implied it would open this spring—which has been unlikely for a while now. This time, Iger said that “the goal is to roll it out at some point this year.”  When later asked if it would have an impact on earnings “by” fiscal 14 (that is, October 2013) Iger said it would have in impact on earnings “in” fiscal 13.

I forecast more than a month ago that the earliest we’d see a general roll out of My Magic+ and Fastpass+ would be October 1.  I’m sticking by that as the earliest date, but can now easily see this date slipping to November 1 or January 5.

EXTRA MYMAGIC+ PERKS FOR WALT DISNEY WORLD RESORT HOTEL GUESTS

It’s been long assumed by thoughtful observers that MyMagic+ will provide extra perks to those staying in a Disney-owned and operated resort, for obvious business reasons.

But yesterday’s call was (so far as I can remember) the first confirmation of that.

Iger (or CFO Jay Rasulo, I forget which) said in response to an analyst’s question that MyMagic+ will continue the tradition of providing perks to on-site guests not available to off-site guests and “encourage people to stay more on property than off property.”

There’s no credible scoop on how this might unfold.  Because of the high value to Disney of people pre-planning their park visits (and hence limiting those darned spur-of-the moment choices to see Harry Potter) the offer may be more complicated than people have been predicting.

For example, the simplest approach is to offer more Fastpass+s per day (OK, what’s the right plural of Fastpass+?) to on-site guests than to off-site guests.  But this doesn’t keep them in Disney World on their off days.  Adding extra Fastpass+ to the later days of a visit based on how many earlier days are scheduled (or more simply but less effective, on how many ticket days are bought…) would both drive ticket sales and keep people on property.

Just a thought…

MORE FREE DINING IN 2013?  MY FORECAST IS STILL “NO WAY”

Disney’s domestic parks and resorts really shot out the lights this quarter.

While a big part of the improvement (about $70 million of a $161 million operating income improvement compared to a year ago) came, as I’d noted it would in my comments on the Q1 call, from differences in the timing of Christmas and Easter school breaks vs. Disney’s fiscal quarter timing, another big part came simply from increased attendance and increased spending per attendee.

There’s no way to tease out how much of this came from Disney California Adventure and a full quarter of the Disney Fantasy cruise ship, vs. Walt Disney World itself.

But Disney did note that resort hotel bookings in the current (April-June) quarter were running 7% ahead of last year, at rates comparable to last year.*  These rooms are overwhelmingly at Disney World, so they are a cue to ongoing strong performance.

This performance, and these booking levels, means that Disney simply doesn’t need to discount to bring people in the way it had to in 2007-2012.  So it won’t.

I expect we will see continuing room-rate discounts for the slower periods, but, other than the September free dining deal that will come out tomorrow, I’m even more convinced we won’t see any more Free Dining in 2013.  Free dining is just too expensive to Disney to offer—and too complicated to administer—compared to the value it creates for the company.

MORE ON THIS CALL

Jason Garcia does a nice job with the Disney World-related facts of this call here.

*When asked why rates weren’t higher and if Disney was discounting too much, Rasulo noted that Art of Animation was added to the inventory in 2012, and, as a value resort, it necessarily drives overall average realized prices down.

Not quite true. Because so much of Art of Animation is pricey Family Suites, average rack rates at the resort are well over $200.  A much bigger driver of Q3 2012 vs. 2013 rate oddities is the different timing of the Easter price season—entirely in Q3 in 2012, and only half in Q3 in 2013.

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FASTPASS+ AND THE APOCALYPSE

There’s been a ton of reaction to Tom Stagg’s Disney Parks Blog post on “MyMagic+” and “FastPass+” and to prior and subsequent press.

There’s not much new in any of this, other than the beginning of rollout—February; the length of rollout—all year; and the order of rollout– starting with Walt Disney World resort hotel guests, probably BoardWalk Inn guests at first, with the program expanded slowly to others.

But oh my, there’s been a lot of noise!

In general, any noise about this is good—I’ll come back to that in a bit—but the general tone out there is that the new program will be either a cataclysm, or the best thing since the forward pass.

LET’S ALL STAY CALM…THERE’S NOT MUCH TO SEE HERE

Well maybe it will be one or the other, but I doubt it; it’ll end up somewhere between, as do most human endeavors.

Moreover, there’s some key facts that just aren’t out yet, and some emergent behavior to observe that we’re all just gonna have to wait for.

The key missing facts are

1. How many daily FastPasses will be available to all guests, and
2. How these will be divided between those reserved for those who book them ahead and those that are available to anyone on the day of visit, just like today.

The answer to these questions will make a huge difference to the overall guest satisfaction with the program, especially for those who don’t, or don’t want to, reserve their rides ahead of time. (See this for more.)

Stay calm on this point, since as the link notes, Disney World could be on the way toward daily FastPass capacity triple what it offers today…plenty for advance reservation users and “unplanned” users too!

The behavioral question is will the “schedule from home” system lead more people to get up early if the only time they can reserve Space Mountain is at 9.15a? And if so, does that mean the time-honored strategy of getting to the parks at rope drop to beat the crowds will no longer work so well?

Stay calm on this too…mostly because we won’t know for a while, and in the meantime it’s best to bet on human nature, and thus tens of thousands still sleeping in…

Much of the cataclysmic thinking about FASTPASS+ comes from either those with privacy concerns (who, if this remains an issue for them, will need to opt out) or experienced Disney World visitors who have an approach that works for them, and are worried that the new system will get in the way of something they understand and are happy with.

I have a lot of sympathy with this latter group–as I’m in it too!—but that’s not what I’ve got my eye on.

Since I started thinking about this site, I’ve had one example family sharply in my mind’s eye:

They’ve been in line for Peter Pan’s ride for hours in the Magic Kingdom on an early July afternoon. They didn’t know that July was a bad time to go, they didn’t know that not sleeping in but rather hitting the park at opening was the best way to see Peter Pan without much of a wait, and they didn’t know that FastPasses are free with their ticket, and so don’t use them.

I want this family to have a great time, and FastPass+, if it lives up to its promise, can help them see great stuff without waiting so long…even on a July afternoon.

And that’s the reason I like the noise. The more noise, the more likely this family will find out how best to do Walt Disney World—however the new best way to do it emerges to be!

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