Disneyland LESS crowded than DCA?

I have a trip planned for this coming weekend (January 22-24) which was chosen because it’s a slow period right after the holidays. Everything has been planned for a while and I haven’t been monitoring the crowd levels for any changes. I logged in today to double check some things and I had a small panic attack when I saw the crowd levels were 7 out of 10. Looking closer I realized that was the overall crowds and that Disneyland was still a mild 4 but California Adventures was a 9!

I have never seen DCA listed as being that crowded while Disneyland was calm. Usually it’s the other way around or Disneyland is one or two points higher. I’m really hoping that the crowd calendar is correct, I’m just curious what could be going on to make DCA that crowded that weekend. I’m assuming there must be some sort of event, but I can’t find anything that explains this.

We’ve had this question on a few threads on DL chat recently. NAMM music convention is coming up next week but most will be at parks during evening hours so can’t quite figure out why crowd levels which are based on wait times are high. One of the liners sent an email to TP which will be forwarded to the statisticians.

1 Like

We’ve scheduled our very first family DLR trip Mar 14-16. We have 3-day, one park per day tickets and trying to figure out which day to visit DCA (we’ll do Disneyland the other two). The crowd calendar shows DCA at a 9/10 each of those three days, and Disneyland at a 7/10. Any ideas why DCA is forecasted to be so much more crowded these three days?

My “guess” on this is number of rides. The CL is a function of how long the lines will be, and as there are considerably more rides in DL; the crowd is dispersed over a greater number of rides. DL always “feels” more crowded because the walkways are smaller and the ride density is higher, but it takes fewer people in the park to drive up the wait times in DCA.