AK crowd yesterday January 11th

The crowd level at AK yesterday was apparently an 8 instead of the predicted 2. The other parks were only slightly more crowded than predicted. Anyone know why AK was so out of whack? I wasn’t there, but heard about it. One person would say it was super crowded and then another would say it wasn’t and describe a “40 minute” posted standby wait being a walk on (I believe this was not at closing). Just curious if someone bizarre happened, or if perhaps the reported 8 crowd level wasn’t actually correct? @len

I was there that day and from my perspective it was a zoo, literally and metaphorically. I’m grateful Everest has a single-rider line!

I actually wrote to Touring Plans to complain about how badly they underestimated that day – 2/10 versus 8/10 is a bad miss.

It looks correct, and yes, it was a bad miss. In fact, it’s the most we’ve been off at the AK since at least November of 2015. I apologize for that. We started re-running the models earlier this week to update the predictions.

Thanks @len for the confirmation. It seems that AK has been especially crowded the last few days. Any insight as to why? Is Pandora drawing consistently large crowds to the park since it’s still new?

We would be very interested in any crowd level updates for 2/28 - 3/4, especially AK. Predicted crowd levels are somewhat low for Wed through Fri, but restaurants are booking up and we couldn’t get an FoP FP at 60 days out. I know you try to limit your published updates to crowd levels to several times per year, but are the crowd levels incorporated into the customized TP’s updated more frequently? (Worried about crowds for our short trip.) Thanks!

It is not unusual for restaurants to be booked and for FoP FPs to be difficult to get at the 60 day mark. That is normal, even for low crowd times.

Yes, I think Pandora is still drawing larger crowds than expected.

According to our users, Flight of Passage is the best ride in any Disney or Universal theme park in the U.S. That probably explains why we’re seeing this level of attendance in the park, long after other new attractions in other parks would have settled down. Our models initially assumed a typical fade-from-new-to-average, and that’s what we’re updating.

I didn’t think FoP really drove any new demand at AK last year, but that may be different this year.

Len

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