CLWatch - Keeping an eye on the new estimated Crowd Levels

We’re going Nov 9-16… :flushed::flushed::flushed:

I found late April last year (after Easter) to be very nice crowd wise, and May for the most part still seems like a good time based on historical numbers…

Wednesday was still higher than predicted but no actual CLs higher than 5 so a marked drop from earlier in the week.
Wed Feb 6: MK 4(3) EP 5(4) HS 4(2) AK 4(1)
Today, Thursday is one of the lowest predictions of the year at 3212 - we’ll see just how it works out.

2 Likes

Thanks for tracking this in one thread. It’s one of the ones I keep coming back for to see updates!

2 Likes

Thur Feb 7: MK 5(3) EP 3(2) HS 4(1) AK 10(2)
What in the world happened at Animal Kingdom yesterday, CL10?!!!

Clearly crowds this time of year are higher than expected (I know I just got back). Might have something to do with the fact that all the major guidebooks and websites listed mid-jan to President’s day week as the least busiest time to go so there is the crowding effect. Disney’s tiered pricing and perhaps overseas marketing effort may also have something to do with it.

So expect the crowd levels to be higher 2/9-2/13 is what I am thinking. Yes?

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.

1 Like

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.

5 Likes

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.

10 Likes

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…

2 Likes

@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 :joy:

6 Likes

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:
image
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).

3 Likes

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.

7 Likes

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.