why is the end of week of 2/23/17 showing resorts levels at 5 when if you try to book a room most of the hotels are not available?? how often are these figures updated??
we are going that week…just curios
Remember that many park visitors are not staying on-site. WDW markets very aggressively to make sure that the resorts are at capacity even when the park attendance is at lower levels, so resort “fullness” is not a good proxy for park crowd levels.
Are you trying to book a room using a promo/package deal of some sort? If so, you may be running into them being all taken. That doesn’t mean the resort is full, just no more rooms available at that rate.
I,m just doing general bookings without promos and they are still pretty booked…i’m wondering what touring plans uses for their predictions whether it’s a best guess or they verify how booked the rooms are.because if i’m checking and they are pretty full how can touring plans still say they are at a 5 level…thats my point…
just to follow up I’m not talking about crowd levels in the parks i’m just specifically talking about resort preditions…because you can’t be absoultly sure about the parks or you could guess the winning lottery numbers but is touring plans guessing at resort crowds or do they have inside info?
I’m not sure if they take hotel bookings into consideration. I know much of their predictions is based on historical data. Maybe @len could shed more light on this.
I’ll ask @fred to weigh in on what’s going on with that particular week.
A few points:
-
Disney doesn’t share its hotel occupancy numbers with us. We get some of that anyway, because we have contacts who are sympathetic to what we’re trying to do. But it’s not comprehensive. (And it probably doesn’t matter - see below.)
-
The research team at VisitOrlando.com also puts out hotel occupancy data.
-
As far as we can tell, hotel occupancy is not a great predictor of how long you’re going to wait in line.
I’ll explain that last thing a bit more.
Every time we collect a wait time (say, “20 minutes at Space Mountain”), we attach to that wait time, a couple hundred other pieces of data. The date and time are two obvious things that go along with the wait time:
- The wait time at Space Mountain is 20 minutes at 9:14 a.m. on Monday, January 9, 2017
We also keep track of things like whether it’s an EMH morning or afternoon, the EMH and special event schedule across every park, and what the EMH/event schedule was at each park over the last few days and the next few days.
We also know about school schedules, holidays, the weather today, yesterday, and tomorrow, and so on. We even track the state of the U.S., Canadian, British, and Brazilian economies over the last few months.
Like I said, literally hundreds of other pieces of data - anything that you might reasonably think of as affecting wait times, we’ve probably tried.
We’ve tried looking at hotel occupancy in our models. It never comes up as one of the top 20 or so predictors of a good general model for wait times.
Conventions, for one thing, tend to increase resort occupancy without affecting wait times much. For example, Primerica has two 5,000-person WDW conferences coming up from 1/16-1/19 and 1/23-1/26. But except for two days where they’re renting out DHS in the evening, those folks are going to be stuck in meetings all day. For the most part, they’re not going to be standing in line at Space Mountain at noon.
We could be wrong about 2/23 - there might be something we’ve overlooked or not updated. But having looked at the crowd cal prediction process in detail for the last few months, I’m confident it’s the best method anyone has come up with.
6 Likes
^^^ This ^^^
Told ya he could shed light! 
wow…very helpful…thanx
Where do you go to see the resort levels for the week?
Is there possibly some confusion happening here because of the word “resort”? On the crowd calendar it has a number for “Resort Wide Crowd Levels”. In this context, “Resort” means Walt Disney World as a whole, so they are talking about the average crowd levels across all 4 parks. Not about crowd levels at the hotels themselves.
Thank you. You answered my question!
1 Like
no the parks average is right below where the parks are listed…the resort average is right below the resorts section at the very top of the crowd calendar page.Besides len from touring plans answered the question thoroughly…
I have the same question but for November 12-18, 2017. Jus trying to make sure I’m not missing something…a lot of rooms are unavailable but historically this is not a busy week. Any insights? Thank you!