Decreased Park hours - any significance?

Walt Disney World
1

Now that Disney has confirmed park hours for the dates of our trip in November, almost every day has either later opening or earlier closing than Touring Plans had actually predicted. Some are fairly significant amounts of time like a 2 hour earlier closing at AK than predicted (8pm instead of 10) as well as a 2 hour earlier closing at MK than predicted (10pm instead of 12am).

Would you think there is there any significance to this? I think Disney typically adjusts hours based on expected crowds to some degree, right?

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Disney will adjust dates for November around 15 October. Just because that’s what the site currently says, doesn’t mean that it’s the finalized times.

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3

Yes, but this goes both ways. When they adjust the total number of hours down, crowds tend to also drop because people are more likely to avoid going when there are fewer hours to work with. It is hard to fully say which causes the other more!

Anyhow, with reduced hours, you have reduced crowds, whatever the reason, which means you can get more done in less time.

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4

I think the significance is that it is likely that the park times may be changed closer to the time.

This is especially true of MK, where on non-party days they may well extend the closing times.

However DHS might get some of the extended times this year because of TSL opening, which might come at the expense of AK.

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5

OK, good. Really hoping so as we love the midnight closing of MK in particular and it was predicted to be so for the last night of our visit. It’s become our tradition to close the park down super late on that last night.

6

The TP predictions are for the final park hours - the initial park hours that WDW has posted will more than likely be updated and extended.

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Ok, but TP has now changed their’s to reflect the ones Disney announced. So that’s throwing me off a bit.

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That happened to us for our June trip but just last week AK went from 9pm to 10:30pm and MK went from 10pm to 11pm every day but the one I’m going to be there.

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Yes, as soon as the WDW initial hours are announced TP replaces the predictions with them. I asked @len about keeping the predictions as a guideline for how things might pan out on the actual day, but his feeling was that this would confuse people.

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Here’s the process we use:

  1. We estimate park hours for those days that don’t have them. Then we calculate a crowd level.
  2. When Disney sets official park hours, we re-calculate the crowd level
  3. Disney may adjust park hours up until the last minute, and we re-calculate those crowd levels as they do

I’m a little surprised at the lower MK hours in November. The AK hours might have been a response to Pandora last year.

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11

Were you surprised by the lower hours across the board for October around Columbus Day? I was-- I’m assuming these will change since the hours predicted by TP changed a LOT compared to the Disney hours. And meanwhile the CL from TP increased also. Significantly…

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Do the November dates reflect possible party nights? On both of our November trips there were Christmas parties in MK and we had days where parks closed at 4 for private parties (these were actually great days to visit - crowds were super low!).