I’ve planned my TP (custom) for a CL 8 day at MK later this month. I optimized, shuffled a bit to suit our needs, and evaluated.
Then I copied my plan and kept it all the same except I changed the date to TODAY, another CL 8 day at MK, just so I could observe what happened on LINES and see how the app worked.
But! Predicted wait times are much longer for today than for my actual travel date later this month. Both are CL 8 at MK park. Why would this be? Example, 29 minute wait for SDMT at 9:58 later this month; 43 minute wait for SDMT at 10:02 today.
My fear is that my lovely TP for late June, with tolerable wait times as predicted 3 weeks in advance, is going to morph into intolerable wait times when the actual day arrives.
Thoughts?
Thanks!
Although overall CLs are only updated infrequently (I suspect to avoid mass complaints on par with what the weather guy gets), TP updates expected wait times regularly. I might not agree with this approach (I prefer more information, even if I don’t like it), but what it means is that your evaluated TP reflects the most current information TP has to guide expected wait times. Given recent history, it is possible to probably that your waits will be a little longer at the end of June that you expect, but likely not by much.
Two things to bear in mind here:
First of all, on the actual day the TP modeling software takes into account real-time data to make more accurate predictions for the rest of the day. So, if today happens to be more or less busy than predicted or a major attraction has gone off-line, then there can be noticeable differences between the original prediction and the current reality.
Second, not all CL8 days are created equal. It is the predicted wait times for a selection of attractions that determines the CL, not the other way around. Two different days can have totally different wait time profiles, but they will both be CL8 because they meet certain overall criteria. When you run TPs for those days, you can end up with different results.
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If its a different day of the week or more schools are out then ride weighting changes. Eg not al schools out just now so wait time for rides like Space will be less but for Barnstormer will be longer due to younger ages of kids. We got caught out with this one Easter. We swapped a Sun for Wed. Tried to use same tp and all the fantasy land ride wait were nuts due to the lots of families with younger kids but bigger rides were walk on.where they were supposed to have longer waits. Remember crowd level is only an indicator of wait times across key rides between 10-5. Also another month worth of data helps with accuracy. Other factors are what parks had emh last night and this morning and is that the same for your CL day. Sorry to be a downer but I don’t think 7dwarfs will be 30 mins at 10 am. I would track actual posted waits on the app and on mde to give you a realistic idea. At MK this Easter on a 8 predicted day we were falling behind by 10 am and about 30 mns behind by 11 am. But I build in extra breaks and extra time at lunch to allow for this. We did have to skip a few things that weren’t important to us to make fpp times.
Very helpful, mossmaci - thanks!
I didn’t re-optimize, because we have a first-timer on our hands (age 4) and we need to do Dumbo first. Every time I optimize, I get SDMT first. So, I shuffle a couple of things around and then evaluate and “optimize” manually as best as I can. 
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Thanks brklinck, I appreciate the details!
This is my 5th WDW trip using TP (it’s so much more sophisticated now, though), and there are still so many more details to learn.
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Aha, good advice mumcalsop - I will try to be flexible also. We might need to skip a ride or two (sob). lol