When running a plan with the same exact attractions, the total wait time increases on a crowd level 5 day (12/10) versus a crowd level 6 (12/9) in EPCOT. Similar, at Animal Kingdom, the total wait times remain constant when comparing a crowd level 6 day (12/10) to a level 4 (12/9).
How can that be?
It all depends on the attractions you are choosing. Some of them have scaleable capacity, meaning that when the crowds get bigger the attraction can be tweaked to handle more people per hour, so wait times don’t go up that much, if at all. Other attractions, like some shows and play areas, really don’t have a wait that is affected by CL. Given the right mix of attractions, you can have an optimized TP that is insensitive to CL changes within a given range…
Thanks for the reply. Makes sense to me in some respect re shows but most if not all were rides. But as a planning tool, the days ranking should take that into account (ride capacity, shows, etc). Intuitively, a day with a lower crowd level should have corresponding lower wait times. I could be wrong, but the crowd levels are based in wait times.
"We at Touring Plans define a ‘crowd’ as the average posted wait time for the key attractions between 10:00 am and 5:00 pm. "
Using that logic, hard to see how waiting times could be longer or the same on a lower rated day. What was a nice easy look at which park to chose based on crowd levels, has now become more complicated.
Also consider that crowd levels are based on average wait times during the day. It may just be unfortunate timing (possibly due to shows chosen that have a fixed time so other activities have to fit around them) that the best time to visit have slightly higher wait times on a lower crowd day.
Also what setting do you have your plan on? Unless you have it set to minimal wait time this another reason why times may be higher on lower crowd day as the software is trying to balance between walking and wait times.
I was playing around with my walking speed, and at MK over about 12 rides in Fantasyland and Tomorrowor land, my walking time increases by 20 mins for each speed. It was interesting to see the knock on wait time effects from only increasing my speed to relaxed.