First a little history lesson. WDW used to publish the initial operating hours calendar for a given month in advance of the 180+10 day for that month. It was referred to as the ‘TA Calendar’ as it was originally intended for travel professionals, but the URLs were a badly kept secret. Consequently, it became the go-to resource for Type-A planners so they could have their initial park plans ready for ADR Day. Also, it usually was the first thing that was updated when park hours were changed.
However, WDW started getting sloppy about publishing the calendar, and eventually ceased doing it for months after April 2018. Therefore, people have been flying blind on ADR Day, not knowing what WDW’s initial plans were for park hours and EMH for the duration of their stay.
However, I discovered that Kenny the Pirate has been publishing calendars with operating hours on the same schedule that WDW used to publish the TA Calendars. It turns out that WDW is still making the calendars for internal planning purposes, but not releasing them. KtP has a ‘reliable source’ for this information, and after several months of testing I can confirm that his calendars match the initial hours published on the WDW website 180 days out.
You can read more about this on my original post about the TA Calendar Locations, but I decided to make a new post with cleaner links to KtP’s calendars. The list gives a link to each month’s calendar along with an indication of when the new calendar is published. Note that each link has calendars for all years, so January has 2018, 2017, 2016, etc.
- January (usually posts mid-June)
- February (usually posts mid-July)
- March (usually posts mid-August)
- April (usually posts mid-September)
- May (usually posts mid-October)
- June (usually posts mid-November)
- July (usually posts mid-December)
- August (usually posts mid-January)
- September (usually posts mid-February)
- October (usually posts mid-March)
- November (usually posts mid-April)
- December (usually posts mid-May)
One point of note: Although the calendars do appear to be accurate for the initial release of park hours, I do not know how quickly they are updated when park hours change. For that I always rely on the TP calendar, using the Crowd Tracker which will send you an e-mail alert when park hours or Crowd Levels change.
EDIT 03/23:
- I have been following KtP’s calendars for over three months now, and they have almost always been correct for park hours, EMH days, and event days - only 4 differences, and they were all very minor.
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EDIT 01/04: This trick no longer appears to work.
Although the main park hours calendar at https://disneyworld.disney.go.com/ only goes out 180 days, there is a trick that allows you to see up to 190 days out. From the main menu, select MyDisneyExperience and then ‘My Itinerary’ under ‘Plan and Manage’ (you will need to login to your MDE account in order to do this). On that page, select ‘Add Plans’ and then ‘Add Parks and Places’. You can then select a date on the calendar displayed there up to 190 days out and see parks hours, EMH, and published events.
EDIT 05/15:
One thing to note when comparing KtP’s calendar to TP’s calendar is that TP’s predictions are for final park hours, not the initial park hours that WDW releases on day 180.