Judging from our visit to US and IOA on Monday, Feb 1, the parks seemed to be more crowded than predicted. I assume this was leftover crowds from the previous weekend’s Celebration of Harry Potter festival/expo. We met a LOT of people who had spent the weekend at the fest and were hoping to take advantage of a low-crowd day. Diagon Alley was navigable; Hogsmeade especially was extremely crowded and uncomfortable.
Hope you still enjoyed it. Even at quiet times Hogsmead still feels crowded to me due to its layout.
We absolutely had a wonderful time. We were there for 3 days so we skipped out on Hogsmeade and headed elsewhere in the park to explore. Our favorite time at Hogsmeade was from 5:30-near closing on our last night. It was wonderful.
But getting back to my main point - I think it was just more crowded than I had expected based on the crowd calendar.
Remember crowd calander is based on average wait times for rides between peak hours of 10-5 and are not based on number of people in parks wandering drinking butterbeer and taking photos .Tp publish daily reports on actual v predicted and for Monday Usf was predicted 3 and actually 3 IOA was predicted 3 and actually a 2.