Were there reports of lots of ride closures at AK? 10 on a random Thursday in Feb is crazy!
Good grief! What happened at AK? This makes me nervous
I asked on the liners chat and some said they felt capacity was down, one side loading on safari for example, and then asked on the blog and @len replied:
I counted people on the ride on Wednesday in AK. They were running at close to 100%.
I think the posted wait times yesterday were very, very wrong at Animal Kingdom. For example, in a 2-minute span the posted wait for Everest went from 115 to 30. It’s impossible for that to be accurate. I mean, even if Disney had the entire track filled with trains, people just don’t walk that fast through the lines.
Likewise, Primeval Whirl from 65 to 20 in 7 minutes and 60 to 20 and 55 to 20 later; Adventurers Outpost from 50 to 10; Dinosaur 65 to 20; Safaris from 95 to 35 in 30 minutes.
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Right now it just looks like the wait times were not updated correctly throughout the day. And it’s another thing we need to go back and check.
We have procedures in place to detect and ignore the once-in-a-while occasion when this happens. My guess is that there was too much going on yesterday for our procedures to detect. We need another way to identify this. And we need to go back and see how often it happened in the past.
I’ve asked the stats team to look at it.
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Quite a challenge for your team when Disney isn’t consistent with how they set wait times. Makes one wonder if this early Feb has been busier than normal, or if the posted wait times are skewed and messing with your model…
Disney does NOT make this easy…
We know that some of the wait times are wrong. The question now is how many?
We’ve got some ideas to get a better idea. They’re somewhat expensive. I’m thankful for folks like y’all who pay for subscriptions, because it lets us do the kinds of things that no one else can.
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Your commitment and transparency are much appreciated. It, along with this community, is why I’ll keep my subscription active even after my trip next week…
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@len have y’all ever thought about crowd funding special research projects like the one you allude to? Would be interesting to see the interest in that.
I volunteer as tribute to ride rides and test wait times all day long 
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Okay, before we get into the latest figures can I just fangirl a little that @len got involved in my thread. I was listening to the Disney Dish podcast this morning and telling my wife - that’s the guy who replied to me!!! Thanks Len, we’re so appreciative of everything you do.
Okay, so to Friday’s figures:
Fri Feb 8: MK 6(5) EP 4(4) HS 7(4) AK 9(7)
Again, AK still bizarrely high but not a huge jump from the prediction - but at the moment pending more feedback from the TP it seems we should be taking AK actuals as pretty unreliable. Reports on the Lines app from the park say it ‘felt’ like a 6/7.
Just a note to everyone going in March in case you missed my other post. The AK hours extensions means there are LOTS of new FoP passes available:
Update from a couple of hours ago. Letters in the corners are Morning, Afternoon or Evening slots available for a group of 4 (green) or 2 (purple).
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It’s an interesting idea. We have enough money to do short-term things like this. In a perfect world, we’d have 2 full-time people who could do it. We’re not there yet.
We’ve got people ready for Monday to ride AK rides all day, for a few weeks, to compare actuals and posteds. I’m interested to see what’s going on there.
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Brilliant, thanks to you and the team, you’re superstars! Looking forward to seeing what you find. We’re there for three whole weeks from the end of the month so will be posting as much data to the app as we can too.
Would you take casual volunteers?
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Honestly if you raised the subscription prices it would still be worth it. I’m amazed at all you and your team do!
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Something that may have contributed to higher than expected crowds in AK and HS the past several days is the cheer competition taking place here. I have been here all week and it seems the cheerleaders prefer going to AK and HS more than the other two parks. I have seen a lot of large groups there but barely any elsewhere.
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A question for @len or other members of TPs - have you considered adding confidence intervals to your estimates? I’d be curious to see some of the rawer distribution numbers if you were willing to publish them. (Disclaimer: data science is literally in my job title, but I have no intent on starting a competing company 
)
Thanks,
Shayne (was at WDW the last ~10 days, and other than Epcot, nearly everything felt crowded, none so more than AK)
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I’d be willing to.pay a higher fee to get access to more data. I’m a data nerd… 
So we have another CL10 this Saturday at AK, but also an unexpected 9 at HS.
Sat Feb 9: MK 6(7) EP 7(8) HS 9(5) AK 10(8)
TP have people on the ground all this week looking at what’s going on with those high figures, and hopefully we’ll hear more about it soon. The only thing of note when I asked about it on Liner chat was LOTS of big groups of cheerleaders for the competitions this week who apparently have preferred going to AK this time around. Watch this space.
Adding Sunday’s figures shows similar strangeness at both HS and AK:
Sun Feb 10: MK 4(4) EP 5(4) HS 9(4) AK 9(4)
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Monday was bad for HS and AK too. AK turned out as a 10 yesterday!