I’m not questioning the accuracy, just trying to understand (as a stats and analytics person myself!). On our upcoming trip - just hit 30 days out - we are looking at crowds of 6 and below overall, 3s and 4s of the parks we are hitting each day. Why then are all of the hotels showing no availability? We tried a last ditch effort to switch resorts and there’s are no moderates or higher with any availability. How is that vis a vis the crowd calendar? Thanks for any insights!
The DIS hotels are doing their best to be booked solid - I think they usually run 90% occupancy year round IIRC. To do that they are looking to move rooms to various groups who may not actually be visiting the parks. They might be selling rooms to Pee Wee football teams or cheer-leading groups who spend most of their time competing and not touring. Those groups may only tour one day of 5 in their visit for example. Same deal with various corporate events where hotel guests will be stuck away in a conference room somewhere working rather than riding Splash Mountain. As a result you may see minimal hotel availability but the park crowds are not expected to be that high.
The hotel are basically full year round, which is why that is no indicator of crowd level. Most park guests come from offsite.
I think there was a TP blog explaining this recently, I’ll look for it. ETA I can’t find it. It’s hard on a phone :-/
Did you use a promotional offer when you booked? And/or trying to use a promo offer when trying to switch? Those promos have limited rooms available to them. So it may look “booked” when it simply is not offered for that promo. Take the promo off and suddenly you’ll see the rooms become available.
No, sadly. Rack Rate. Even with the Visa and booked it 9 months ago, we still didn’t get any good rates for our dates (after Jersey Week, before Tgiving).
As others have mentioned, the WDW resorts operate at or near capacity year-round. The main driver for park crowd levels is the number of off-site guests.
Hmmm. well, then sounds like you’re lucky you got a resort on-site at all. You can always keep checking in case last-minute cancellations happen.
Very happy to have our rooms (some family at Riverside and some at FQ)! I just wanted to be prepared if the parks will be much more crowded than I anticipated!
In my experience the calendar has been pretty accurate. That being said, they have published blogs recently saying that they know they’ve been low lately, because Disney has changed their marketing strategy over the past few years that has been doing a very good job of keeping the parks fairly well attended at all times of the year. So, overtime, TPs calendar will become more accurate. Just make sure you have your TPs electronic and use the Lines app while you’re there. That way you can tweak/re-optimize them as needed on the fly. That’s what we did the last two times we were there, one of which being Memorial Day weekend (VERY crowded) and our wait times were still incredibly reasonable using our TPs via the Lines app.
Another thing to consider is the construction going on at CBR and CSR, and refurbing all rooms at Pop. Lots of rooms currently out of circulation.
Also, keep trying. Check twice a day. Sometimes a room becomes available and then is snatched up.
Another thing that I found is that sometime a resort might not be available for a long period of time, but there is a room of the same category available every night.