I’ve been trying to keep tabs on crowd levels for the dates this year that correspond to the dates my wife and I will be going next year. Dec. 1 next year falls on Tuesday, which is the same as Dec. 3 this year.
I was also curious to know how SWGE and ROTR affects CLs this year. And, as I predicted, ROTR played overall little impact on CLs.
Here, I compare 2018 CLs to 2019 when mapped to the same day of week:
2018 HS (Starting first Tuesday of December):
T - 5
W - 4
T - 4
F - 6
S - 7
S - 3
M - 6
T - 5
W - 4
Avg - 4.9
2019:
T - 5
W - 1
T - 4
F - 5
S - 2
S - 3
M - 4
T - 2
W - 1
Avg - 3
A couple things to note…for the most part, 2019 saw lower CLs. The 1 on Wed. was likely due to the opening of ROTR the next day and the media event, so I think that the 1 is likely an anomaly.
I stopped on the subsequent Wednesday because I covered the dates I was concerned about for our trip…it will be interesting to see if the trend holds.
What surprised me was that we didn’t actually see a “chaos” moment with ROTR apart from the drama of the ride itself. I had expected CLs to go up for the week of the opening itself…but then, I had also expected people to be tied up in line for ROTR, which should have reduced overall waits in other rides. But with the use of BGS, that statistically didn’t matter, since those in the BGs could line up for everything else. Despite all this, CLs went down (not up) or stayed the same.