Crowd anomalies

I noticed today that the “how we did” section for the crowd calendar that normally shows the time discrepancies for various rides simply says how far off the predictions were, which I have never seen before, so I am guessing it was a pretty bad forecast-to-actual-crowd situation. I was wondering how much of that might be due to convention center activities. Specifically, yesterday was the final day of the California FFA State convention and also happened to be a HUGE crowd day in the parks. Could the unpredicted crowd be convention goers taking advantage of the last day and hitting up the parks? Also I noticed that Saturday was the Disney Channel Fan Fest with a bunch of celebrities at the park, could yesterday’s crowd be residual from those who planned their vacation to fall on the weekend and extended it into Monday? Or my bigger theory is that these crowd calendars are being used enmasse by SO many people that projected “low crowd” days are actually becoming large crowd days and vice versa (there have been several days that were predicted high crowd levels that were extremely low, April 22 was predicted to be an 8 and was historically recorded as a 2). Could the use of these calendars actually be reducing the accuracy of the predictions??? Just curious to see what others might think.

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Really good questions…I still don’t think most visitors use any crowd calendars, Tp or other sites. I read recently that a few days ago at MK the walk ways were very congested but the ride wait times were in accordance with the predicted TP crowd level. We visited DLR the first week of October 2018 with predicted moderate CLs. Thursday, 10/4 at DL was very doable, but Friday, at CA by the afternoon was insufferable with all the people that were arriving early for the Halloween party. It was a mad house trying to move around especially after evening parade. I had never encountered such a claustrophobic situation! It didn’t help that my hubby was on a knee scooter. He may have run over some toes. If seems the most predictable thing about CLs are their unpredictability!

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We went Monday 4/29 because TP predicted a 4/10. It ended up being an 8. We were disappointed. TP has been off a lot in March and April. It took some time, but I wrote down their prediction and actual for every day in April and March. They make it difficult to compare. They were right on only one day each month. Some days off by 8, many days off by 4. In their defense, a cast member told me many family members were signed in Monday because Disney was freezing their benefit of signing guests in from May through January because of Galaxy’s Edge. TP wouldn’t have any historical data for that.

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I’m curious how you were able to make the comparisons, short of having screen shots of all the past moths of projections…Is there a record of old CC’s somewhere that I don’t see? Thanks.
Rachel

That’s just it-they make it hard. I pulled up the “observed” off the “historical crowds” calendar, then clicked on each date to see the “predicted”.

That is very clever! I had never even looked at the detailed report of the historical data, and to be quite honest I didn’t know it was even there…it is interesting to see this information. I wonder if TP ever looks retrospectively at other factors that may have impacted the accuracy of their predictions. For example, on April 27th DCA was predicted to be a 2 and ended up being recorded as a 9. However, in hindsight it is easy to see that DCA was NEVER going to be a 2 on that day because it was the Disney Channel Fan Fest with TONS of disney celebrities on site in DCA. Also along the same time frame (April 26-29) the convention center was hosting the CA state FFA convention, which was sure to bring in lots of FFA members (adult and teenagers alike) from throughout the state. And at one point FFA was holding registration and private parties on site at the parks. Clearly that could have a significant impact on crowds during that time frame (crowds were predicted to be fairly low and ended up being pretty high).

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