I’ve been really noticing the last month many inaccuracies in the data when looking into crowd levels. Bare with me here…
I’m a big believer in doing your own homework and not relying on others. Here is a great example of that. Using the Historical Crowds data, it’s always good to look at your planned trip week 1 year ago and 2 years ago.
Example: Looking into visiting WDW the week of Sunday February 7, 2021. (This is the week before President’s Day week) I’ll focus on the historical crowd levels just on Sunday. (first full day in park)
This is the TP Historical Crowd Level Data for Sunday February 10, 2019:
Across All Walt Disney World Theme Parks:
What we predicted: 4 out of 10
What we saw: 5 out of 10
Not bad right? But look closer, these were the levels at each individual park:
Magic Kingdom: what we predicted: 4, what we saw: 4
EPCOT: what we predicted: 4, what we saw: 5
Hollywood Studios: what we predicted: 4, what we saw: 9
Animal Kingdom: what we predicted: 4, what we saw: 10
So, is the 5, “What we saw” level across all parks an accurate average?
the average of 4,5,9, and 10 = 7, hmmmm…
Now let’s look at the same data for 2020, which would be Sunday February 9, 2020.
The Crowd prediction for 2/9/2020 was level 5 across all parks.
Note, only in the last week or two did TP up the level to a 7 across all parks.
These were the individual Park Levels:
Magic Kingdom: what we predicted: 4, what we saw: 9
EPCOT: what we predicted: 7, what we saw: 9
Hollywood Studios: what we predicted: 6, what we saw: 9
Animal Kingdom: what we predicted: 7, what we saw: 10
Now all this data is from only ONE specific day. But there are MANY days similar to what happened here during the past couple weeks. For example the weeks of Jan 26 and Feb 2 2020, even weekdays that were predicted 4’s (across all parks AND individual parks) turned out to be 6’s or higher. The funny part is, The actual crowd levels on these two weeks nearly exactly the same as 12 months prior in 2019.
Conclusion: Historical Crowd levels at individual parks don’t lie!
Problem 1 is TP may not get serious with their crowd predictions until it’s too late
Problem 2 is TP does not give you the real average of “across all parks” even after the fact
Are you still with me??