I understand that Crowd Predictions can change significantly based on new information, but does anyone know why the predictions for the first week of April increased hugely recently. For Epcot on Monday 4th April, the crowd level prediction increased by 7 whole points from 2 to 9. Other changes also occurred during that period but that was the biggest. Early April was an unusually quiet period based on where vacations fell this year. Has something changed recently that warrants such an enormous update?
This might seem like an overly simple answer, but the truth is everyone is rescheduling delayed / cancelled trips from the last 2+ years. The parks are currently packed and will stay that way for the remainder of the year as people want to get back out.
Fair enough - I guess what I don’t understand though is why the crowd estimates would have been so low just a couple weeks ago. Epcot rated 2 for crowd levels as recently as 19th March.
This is going to make forecasting interesting for my April 2023 trip. I won’t be able to use April 2022 as a reliable predictor (I hope - I do not want level 9 crowds).
Just an opinion - WDW is going to be overly crowded through 2024… So many ppl want to go back to “normal” AND locals will have new rides to do (GotG & Tron - hopefully!) and old shows returning
Although, interestingly, they updated dates that we have booked in December. Not sure I trust the numbers…but they were all adjusted downward, for whatever reason.
I’m going that week as well and had the same question about Epcot that Monday. I totally understand crowd predictions increasing across the board for the week, given how much more crowded it’s been lately, but that one seems odd. Every other park all week is now 5 or 6, so it seems strange to have that giant jump for Epcot that day. We were planning Epcot that Monday and plan on sticking with it and probably hopping to HS for the afternoon.
Yeah… I’ve seen that for years… We both know it’s an “historical average” based of the last couple of years. It doesn’t get really “updated” until it’s much closer to the actual dates.
The 2020 & 2021 CL in December were low, so the “historical average” is now lower - even though we both know how crazy WDW is and will be this year going forward.
Knowing that 2020 and some of 2021 was an anomaly, it would make sense to adjust the calculations to either leave them out and use 2018 & 2019, or add a blanket multiplier in to bring the numbers up to a more realistic range. As they are now it’s not only unhelpful, it’s misleading. People are choosing their vacation dates months in advance based on those numbers.
I love TP, but have no issue in pointing out some of the “flaws” that I had to discover over the years. It took me a long time to see that TP is a great tool in the parks, but it’s not how you should decide when to go.
