See people, this is why procrastination is good for you. If you don’t make plans till last minute, there aren’t any changes!
I really need to make my touring plans.
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I’m think it is partially due to increased park hours, MK went to 11pm closings and AK went to 10pm closings for some days, so it will possibly draw more people.
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I just checked mine and waits went up very slightly in the other three parks but in MK it was a crazy difference. Not worried. We will have a blast and I will rework our plan. But I am curious. I have been in MK on much higher CL days with waits nothing near this. Wondering if they heard word that Disney is cutting capacity in July when we’re going? But surprised that the TP staff haven’t shared a heads up and rationale. Did I miss a blog or message?? When my wait times have changed in significant ways before, it has always corresponded with a CL shift during one of their regular updates/adjustments. This time the CL and hours on my days haven’t changed so I don’t know that I would have even checked my TPs except for this thread. Once I get them where I like them, I usually only check back when they have released a CL update, hours change, or its my ADR or FP days.
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My trip is for the 2nd week in Dec. I’m not going to even think about TPs, CLs and wait times until Nov. I’ll probably work out a rough plan in time to make some tentative ADRs at my 180 day (but I’m not looking for any of the “hot” ones, and I only have two “must do” considerations. My choice of FPPs is independent of CL, so by Oct we might have an idea of what post-SWGE WDW might look like. I’m going solo, so I have no “pressure” to plan the “perfect trip” (like my last trip). I’ve never been so un-stressed about planning in my life…
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i need to be like you
Make a copy of your plan and then optimize. That way you can compare the old plan and the new.
It makes no sense for wait times to change significantly but the CLs don’t change (or vice versa) since CLs are calculated based on wait times. I think something is wrong with the system that the TP team needs to investigate.
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So what will everyone do? Re do their entire plans like it says to do? or stay with the original? or optimize the morning of and go with that? we are leaving next friday 24th. I cant handle any changes now.
Staying with the original is, in my opinion, not a good choice - working with outdated plans likely means inaccuracies, which will cause lots of issues. I shared my perspective over or chat so sorry if you’ve seen it already, but in general I don’t see TPs as things that can be created and finalized far in advance. They give you an idea so you can book ADRs and FPP, but WDW (not to mention the thousands of guests) is a beast. Factors are bound to fluctuate. So the wait times data is also going to fluctuate.
I had a lot of success with my plans in January doing a few key things: 1) I evaluated the night before park day - so I knew I was using the most updated data - and double checked that nothing massive happened (I also evaluated frequently in the weeks leading up to the trip - so changes were minimal.) 2) I used the app and checked off rides/attractions as we did them, reevaluating if we got significantly ahead or behind the plan. 3) I knew our priorities so that if we did get behind and have to skip something, I knew what we would choose to skip.
Doing those things led to a very successful trip - we had CL10s both park days, and I my plan (though it did fluctuate) never turned into anything I had to throw out the window.
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i hope you are right. however i think based on previous wait times, something WAS wrong with the system and they fixed it. i mean prior to adjustment, a 5 pm navi no fpp on a cl 5 was 15 minutes…i don’t think so
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Curious about this too - except as I’m thinking through it, perhaps the increase is quite spread out. 100 minutes across a whole day of touring is not necessarily a significant increase per attraction or ride - say 15 attractions, only 6/7 minutes per ride. Wonder what the threshold is to warrant a bump in CL.
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we leave the 28th and I am stressing but hoping for the best!
I will leave ours and if something has to be dropped so be it. But I stick to a bare bones TP with the 3 FP, lunch, a break and a few want to do but not critical things for later.
The metrics used were posted once, but I couldn’t begin to locate that post. Unless things have changed, the CL only takes into account several of the “headliners” in each park, not every attraction. When some mathematical function of those times exceeds a certain threshold, the CL is raised. It’s been a while since I’ve read this; perhaps @len could post a link to a page that explains it in more detail…
We did an attraction wait time update on Friday. We had a few users notice that the predicted wait times were low for 7 Dwarfs Mine Train and other Magic Kingdom Headliners. Historically actual wait times are about 82% of the posted wait time. Reviewing the predictions we had some days and attractions where the ratio was around 60%.
@ryan1 - You are correct. Wait times predictions are used to determine the crowd levels. We actually use average posted wait times for crowd levels. Touring plans use actual wait times. Actual wait times is what changed in this update.
We predict both posted and actual wait times. We predict posted wait times because we can build and validate models based on data in MDE. Actual wait times data only comes from wait times that employees or users enter in the Lines app.
Unfortantitly we do not have a continuous source for actual wait time data. So the models look at the ratio of actual and posted wait times we do have and predict the actual wait time based on the posted wait time, attraction, time of day, and other factors.
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The Crowd Level pages (ex: https://touringplans.com/magic-kingdom/crowd-levels) shows the average peak wait times for each attraction by crowd levels. This is a bit different than the thresholds used to determine the crowd levels. To see the thresholds you have to choose a date in the past. You can either look at the wait time pages (ex: Magic Kingdom Wait Times - Friday, May 17, 2019) or a daily crowd level page (ex: https://touringplans.com/walt-disney-world/crowd-calendar/date/2019-05-17). Mousing over the charts will show the exact threshold values.
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Thanks for taking time to fill us in. I appreciate that when you find what you think is a mistake you fix it. As much as I liked the wait times before the update, if they are less likely to be accurate I prefer to plan around those you have more confidence in as a prediction. Even if it is the day before (and for me it isn’t I have plenty of time to adjust) I appreciate the heads up so I can adjust if needed/wanted. Thanks for all you do!
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Thank you for the update. I think HS wait times are really bring effected by the reduced TOT ride capacity. I expected this would be the case and the update for HS had far more dramatic changes than EP. Good to be able to plan!
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My times have all gone up. But I would rather go in realistically prepared and be pleasantly surprised if wait times are less.
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