Looks like crowds over the last weeks have been a higher/lower than TP predicted. Does TP take this into consideration and adjust upcoming weeks?
We are going to WDW 10/26-11/1 - predicted to be 3/4 crowd days at most parks (except steady 5s in EP due to Food & Wine). Will we see TP adjust crowds / line times given last week? Or once the prediction is made, do they stick to their guns?
The predictions are based on historical data, but I’m not sure how much one single week’s variances would affect the predictions going forward. There are weekly reports on the predictions vs actuals on the TP Blog, and if they anticipated major changes in predictions based on a given week’s results they would probably report it there.
I was also wondering how often data is updated. I only want to know as I created my TP the first week of September and then last week hit Evaluate and some waits had become longer so I had to adjust my TP. I have a trip coming up in 2 weeks and would like to finalize my plans.
I"m gonna tag @len @Lentesta. But I do know that part of the draw of the app is to be able to optimize the plan in real time and have it adjust based on more current data (although that’s not usually how we try to plan since the app/optimizer tends to rearrange stuff that we want to remain static like FPP’s and breaks).
We usually update a couple of models per week, so the predictions do change.
We compare our predictions for each attraction against other crowd calendar predictions for the same attraction. We update a model when we’re not twice as accurate as a competitor. For example, we’d update any model that isn’t more accurate than any competitor, at least 20 times in the last 30 days.
We’d also update the model if we see that the average error for our prediction exceeds 10 minutes either way, over the course of a month.
Some models, like Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster, can go 90 days without an update. I think our Spaceship Earth model hasn’t been beat in about a month, for example. Other models, especially those where Disney tweaks the Fastpass+ usage, get updated pretty much monthly.
@chouinam, did the park hours change on the days you re-evaluated? I had a couple of days where the hours changed to open an hour earlier, so my rope-drop attractions were no longer rope-drop and the wait times increased significantly. Once I adjusted my hours of attendance, my wait times dropped back and were much closer to what I started with.
Yes, a change to park hours is one of the things that’ll lead to new predictions.
Hey @len, I don’t mean to hijack this thread, but a little while ago you mentioned that you were working on user-definable durations for certain attractions like the WS pavilions. Is that going to be released soon?
Probably not by December 1, but it’s within the next few releases of the Desktop/Mobile upgrades.