September and December are a couple months that CL’s increased the most. For comparison, here is the previous prediction vs the updated prediction:
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Yesterday I received an email updating the crowd levels for our 2023 trip. Most of the days had crowd level increases of at least 2-3 points. But today when I re-evaluated my TP, none of the wait time data changed. Is that normal?
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It usually only impacts by a few minutes which is why everyone should remain calm.
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I wasn’t expecting huge changes but literally not a single number changed.
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The old rule of thumb is that for every CL increase, the average wait increases 3 minutes. (More than that for headliners)
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Curious what a CL 1 means. Is it “wait times below X” or “the lowest wait times of the year”?
The updated calendar has essentially zero CL1 days, and very few CL2 days.
TP uses a handful of attractions with wait time ranges to determine the CL for a specific park.
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In theory the 1-10 are percentiles of wait times. In practice, since they use a long term average, there can be years when portions of the chart are rarely used. I’m not sure how long of a period their averages are looking back on.
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I think the unknown capacity limits, park reservation system, might be spreading the crowds out more evenly (which I think is the goal). I think another big driver of that is the lack of single park extra magic hours. People aren’t flocking to a specific park with EMH each day, which used to play a part in drawing the crowds away from other parks.
I also think Disney’s ability to plan for a specific number of people on any given day might be driving waits up on days when you’d have expected them to be much shorter in the past. It’s possible that they’re reducing ride capacity on those days when attendance will be lower… that helps them stretch a thin workforce further because it requires fewer ride operators, but it means that a less crowded park won’t necessarily equate to remarkably shorter lines, since the line moves slower.
Those trends would take awhile to show up and be recognized as something other than flukey weird crowd days.
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Great points.
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Wow @rgandillon that video was fantastic, thanks so much! Keep up the good work.
-fellow data nerd 
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I’ve loved watching these videos, too! I binged a bunch of them the other day. I’ll have to check this one out.
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Many thanks for the shoutout. I knew this crowd would like it 
Also, I was personally shook at how small some of those error bars are, given all of the variation throughout an entire year. Maybe things are more predictable than we all thought? 
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Also, since we’re here - I’m always looking for new post and video ideas. So tag me in any “Hm, I wonder …” thoughts and I’ll add them to my list!
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Wow Becky, you have covered so much in WDW I’m not sure if you missed anything!
There is something though @rgandillon I would love for you to spend some time analyzing in the future. I realize this may be unfamiliar to you and out of your comfort zone, but I would like to see a wait time analysis of Universal Studios & Islands of Adventure similar to what you did today with WDW. I know TouringPlans doesn’t get near the submitted wait time data as WDW, but I wonder if 12 months of data would be sufficient to make that work.
Also, we have noticed this year an increasing amount of Liners adding in more UOR days to their trips then ever before, partly because of frustrations with the complicated touring/G+ & high prices at WDW. I think TP in general would be wise to increase more time spent on Universal, especially with the opening of Epic Universe in a couple years. Maybe an opportunity for you to get acclimated to UOR and keep TP ahead of the game. And as your girls get older, they may be up for more thrill!
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Error bars are 95% confidence interval of what, exactly?
What’s the population used to calculate the standard deviation? Presumably it’s not individual wait times, or else the confidence interval would be much larger.