The kids have been in Disney withdrawal as of late, so DM asked me to start planning out a trip for Feb 2020. Unfortunately we can only go during President day week ! Crowds, Crowds, Crowds.
So, as usual, I start here on TP… I scroll down on the CC to next Feb.
And I see, 6’s and and 5’s ???
How can that possibly be, when the the current Presidents week is 10’s?
Have I missed something?
The crowds for this week were initially posted as some 3s! They were updated before my trip (there now). I would plan for 8s-10s.
I’ve been here all week. Honestly, it’s busy but not bad. Just have a good Touring plan and you’ll be fine…
We went in 2017 and the crowd calendar said (I believe) 7’s before we went but ended up being 9’ and 10’s for the weekend and less as the week went on. I would plan on Presidents weekend being super crowded and getting better as the week goes on. We just ended up doing what we had planned which was to go first thing in the morning and hit as much as we could before noon. We would leave and relax at the hotel/pool until 4 and then head back to the parks for a couple of hours. It was busy but actually we still had a great time. Our kids were 5 and 8 at the time and we only had one meltdown and that was a day we tried to push it and stay at the park longer (learned our lesson that day!!)
The highest CLs we’ve had were during a summer week trip: 8/9s. It was grands’ 1st Disney trip, they were 2 and 4. Parks had just recently switched to fpps, from paper fast passes.
Due to all these reasons, I set up a personal TP for the 1st time. B4 I’d just gone by the standardized TPs.
I was amazed how well we did. With RD, fpps, afternoons resting and especially the personalTP, we actually had no waits at rides, beyond 10 minutes or so max. Only exception being a couple of rides that went down. So we waited a bit more for those.
Looking back, one of the key things to the success was taking the afternoon break. Recently reading Len’s article re how they gauge CLs, I saw that they base the CLs on time frame of around 11am to 5pm. We typically leave parks around noon, return after early (5pmish) dinner, which is either in that park or outside of it.