Just got back from a trip to DL and DCA, and I was shocked at the inaccuracy of the crowd calendar. I freely admit that I don’t expect perfection, but man, this was way off.
We went to DL on Halloween, rated at 2, and the place was absolutely packed. If you’d asked me to give you a number I’d say at least an easy 8. Shoulder to shoulder all over the park.
All of the days we had in the parks were 2 or 3, with one 6. The 6 might have been the least busy day we saw.
Did I use the crowd calendar incorrectly, or was this year an oddity?
I know this thread is about DL but the difference in the crowds/ crowd calendar is always clearest to me when I think of Saturdays in EP during festivals. Sometimes you cannot move, but the attraction lines might equal a lower crowd level.
How frustrating. I don’t think you did it wrong. What’s really interesting is the ‘What we saw’ is very close to what was predicted. I do sometimes consult multiple calendars because I don’t know if they all look at the same criteria. I do wonder, for Halloween, if things lightened up significantly later in the day if locals went home for trick or treat or people went to the party at DCA.
ETA: I would be interested in a calendar that was based on overall attendance. I really am more focused on what it feels like being there than how long waits are. When I look at the numbers, I’m not just thinking about standing in line.
The date I always will remember is 1 Oct 2021. The date of the 50th anniversary of the opening of Walt Disney World. It was supposed to be big! A huge celebration. Park Passes for MK and Epcot were both gone. New food, new merch, a bunch of new stuff. The Crowd Calendar predicted 10s for those 2 parks. Lines for the new food were long. Lines inside The Emporium were out the door. Lines at the snack carts were leaking into The Hub! It was wall-to-wall people.
What were people not doing? They weren’t going on rides. Wait times looked like the property forgot to open! The official results were 1/1/1/1
So it was crazy busy that day, just not on the one thing that The CC uses for metrics. So the numbers looked like it was crazy quiet.
I do want to give major credit to the Touring Plans folks for doing all the work on the not just the calendar but also the rest of all the resources on the site. My post could easily been seen as accusatory, and that was truly not my intention. Y’all are why I come here first and foremost over any other site!
I will totally admit to a “correlation equals causation” outlook for the wait times and crowd size. It has always worked in the past, but I completely failed here. The difference in what I expected (my assumptions) vs. the mass of humanity was just so immense, that I had to have missed something important. I have no doubt about the wait times tracked by TP at all, so what did I miss? I forgot that people go to the parks for more reasons than the visitor like me does.
So, to answer my original question, no, the crowd calendar was absolutely not way off. My assumptions and internal figuring were.
For my next trip though, I’m going back to my usual mid-January dates. The post-holiday lull is more my zone.
Since Disney doesn’t release those numbers, it’s harder to predict. I have seen some that say they are for overall attendance. I don’t know how accurate they are. Something with only 1 or 2 point difference really shouldn’t be noticed significantly. Events and holidays (especially ones where the parks dress up) will feel more crowded. Having Halloween on a Friday also may have impacted crowds.
I think just Halloween on a weekend night (Friday). I bet mid-week Halloweens are less packed.
I almost died at the crowds at Epcot on our June 2022 trip with my DD18. Our wait times were very manageable, but the mass of humanity was too much for me. I was tired. I was tired of dodging people. And my feet were wet. We left at 7PM
It looks like the crowd calendar aspect was addressed in this thread. Just wanted to add that locals love Halloween time at Disneyland (read: September - October). It is one of the busiest times of the year (that is fairly new in the park’s history - it has really burgeoned in popularity overt the last 10 years) . As you discovered, that doesn’t necessarily translate to wait times, so it can still be a decent time to visit. But I would advise anyone who is claustrophobic or averse to being in a crowded space to avoid that time of year.
I think there’s a lot of truth to this for several things. The other day that I can think of that is a perfect example is Superbowl Sunday. It used to be dead because most people were home watching the game, then Disney fans caught onto that and it became a thing to go on Superbowl Sunday in your team’s gear (ESPECIALLY if your team wasn’t in the big game).
We’ve been a couple of times on Superbowl Sunday and the first time it wasn’t bad and the next time a few years later it had definitely become a thing. We’ve only done Halloween the once (2014) and it was DEAD but our Halloween Party was also a bit rained out. FWs still happened by some miracle, but no dance parties or parade (it was a cavalcade back then even, but it was too slick for them to run still). I’d bet if we go back another Halloween even if it had rained it wouldn’t be that empty park feeling we had in 2014.
Oh, also, every single time I have gone to DL in the last 3-4 years (so post pandemic) if it’s not a peak weekend attendance or Monday holiday or major holiday, the staffing that helps ease a lot of the feeling of the crowd all around you (like through security, the entry, staffing registers for food and merch and having general crowd flow CMs) is way, way, way reduced and that makes it feel so much more crowded than the wait times reflect. Disney’s definitely figured out how to optimize their staffing for the less attended days (and then made those days the discounted ones to attract a little more attendance).
