Lines wait times vs Disney provided wait times

Walt Disney World Touring Plans
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Hi there,

I have been doing some reading about this in the forum, and I don’t care to get too much into the weeds as we prepare for our early May trip. In short, is it generally believed that Disney purposely inflates wait times a lot of the time, especially at the end of the night? Are there certain rides that they are known to inflate frequently? I plan to use the Lines app wait times in the park (while also looking at Disney times,) and right now I am looking at wait times to try to familiarize myself of trends as we prepare our plans.

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A really good source for an easy-to-read report on this is the weekly TP blog known as the Disney Data Dump. Becky includes a section on The Most Inflated Posted Wait Times. Here is the link to the most recent blog. Keep an eye on these weekly blogs, and you’ll get a feel for things.

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Wow, thanks! A rhetorical question, or just a comment, I am not quite sure how Disney can get away with consistently intentionally inflating wait times. Anyhoo, this will be a helpful read for the next couple of weeks!

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There are many reasons to inflate ride times including moving the crowd along throughout the park. From a guest perspective: if the wait time says an hour and you wait 45 minutes, you’re happy; if the wait time says 45 minutes and you wait an hour, you’re unhappy.

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If they were underreporting wait times, they’d get more complaints from people who waited longer than they expected. Whereas no one complains if they wait less than planned. It’s all about managing expectations. Under-promise, over-deliver.

That and crowd management, especially around park close.

Sometimes it bugs me when they seriously inflate wait times, but I’m human too so I prefer it to alternative.

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Yes and, we tend to have a better overall impression of the entire situation! We’re more likely to have a positive view of an attraction if we start the ride by being pleased we “beat” the posted wait time!

Very sneaky, Disney!

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The other huge problem with inflated weight times is that Disney applies those exact posted wait times to all DAS holders in the parks, so they have to wait longer than necessary for ride access.

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I’ve got graphs showing the historical relationship between actual and posteds waits for every WDW, DLR, and UOR attraction.

For example, here’s Kilimanjaro Safaris:

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The dashed blue line is the posted wait. If every actual wait was EXACTLY the posted wait, every data point would be on that dashed blue line.

Every data point is not on that dashed blue line.

The red line is the 40th percentile of average actual waits, expressed as a ratio of the posted wait.

For example, at 300 minutes after park opening, the 40th percentile is around 0.70. So whatever the posted wait is at 300 minutes after park opening, 40% of those waits will be less than 70% of that number (and 60% will be that or more). So if the posted wait at 300 minutes after park opening is 60 minutes, 40% of actual waits will be 42 minutes or less.

The purple line is the 50th percentile, which means “half of actual waits will be higher and half will be lower.”

The green line represents 63% of actual wait times. So for Kilimanjaro Safaris it’s safe to say that most actual waits are less than the posteds.

The orange line is the 75th percentile.

Here’s Flight of Passage:

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For the first half of the day, a significant number of actual waits are higher than the posted waits.

Here’s TRON Lightcycle Run:

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Extremely tight ranges. Whatever the posted wait is, is your likely actual wait.

We use these ratios when making days-in-advance wait-time predictions and intraday adjustments.

For what it’s worth, our estimates of your actual wait are better than or equal to Disney’s around 70% of the time. (As you can imagine, I have a daily spreadsheet broken out by resort, park, ride, and time of day.)

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Thanks so much for taking the time to send this. It certainly confirms my plan to follow your wait times on my upcoming trip!

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I should’ve added that the numbers on the orange line’s data points are the number of actual wait times we’ve received, for that ride at that time of day, since the DAS rules changes were fully in effect. We have that date as 2024-07-01.

So for Flight of Passage, we’ve got 288 actual wait times since then, just for the time period between 0 and 15 minutes after the park has opened.

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I’ve just gotten back and used the lines app extensively the for week we visited the 4 parks. I must admit that the Disney posted line waits for us were consistently more accurate than those in the lines app, which was significantly under estimating the wait time quite regularly.

We were visiting on low/moderate crowd days though, so could be that on those days Disney are doing less crowd management via posted wait times.

I still found the app useful, but thought I’d share my experiences with it.

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Thank you! Hmmm…we will be there during fairly low to moderate crowds also. On a different note, did you use EEH on your trip? I have been eyeing the ride times to plan, and I am dismayed at how often the headliners, often multiple in the same park, are offline first thing. I hate to drag everyone out of bed at 6:30am for that experience. Also, if you have any other insight or successful strategies from your recent trip, please feel free to share! Thanks!