WDW Crowd Calendar clarification

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Hello! I’ve been lurking on the WDW forum here and on the app for a while. I really appreciate this site, the analysis, and the community in general. I’ve learned a ton from TP and its fans. I’m trying to wrap my head around the “How does it work?” section of the Crowd Calendar. A couple things I’d appreciate some clarity on:

  • I think the selected rides are just examples of the most popular for each park, so basically showing the worst-case waits for each Park, correct? Those specific rides are not all that goes into predicting the crowd level / wait times, and evaluating the predictions, correct?
  • I understand that there would be some overlap in wait times for the different levels, but I’m struggling with the span of some of them, especially for HS/RotR. Levels 3 - 7 all go up to 165 minutes (the ranges for levels 4 and 5 overlap completely, except for 3 minutes); others have the same lower/higher end of the range of at least one other level. Also, the ranges for this park seem so much wider than the other parks… For 7DMT and TT, the range for most levels is under 40 min; for RoTR, level 1 goes from 25 - 103 minutes. The difference between waiting 25 minutes and 1 hour 43 minutes feels like a completely different experience to me. Is there something about RotR that requires such wide margins and overlap? It makes the levels much less meaningful to me at HS.

Appreciate any insight y’all have! Thanks!

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Welcome to the forum! I am going to tag @len and @david in the hope that one of them will see your post.

I think other liners may have some ideas about your questions, but Len and David most likely could answer you fully and correctly!

If you don’t get an answer here, you could also use the “contact us” button on the homepage of the app.

As a liner that spends a lot of time both here and on chat- welcome! Please join in any/all threads!

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The #1 complaint we get about the crowd calendar is that the numbers aren’t accurate. This is true even if we’re spot on. I (len) think this is becase we don’t go a good job of explaining that a crowd level of ‘2’ can still mean an 80-minute posted wait for Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. – Len Testa (@len ) Feb 2023

For some insight into the Crowd Calendar and what it represents take a look at this topic:

https://forum.touringplans.com/t/how-often-does-the-predicted-crowd-calendar-get-adjusted-or-does-it-at-all/105037/

Make sure to follow the cited TP Blog post as well as the illustrations created by @Jeff_AZ. The crowd calendar is derived from an extensive collection of wait time data using a statistical analysis technique called Cluster Analysis.

If you really want to hurt your head (apologies to Fred and Becky) take a look at this for more background: Cluster analysis - Wikipedia

TL/DR - the result is not going to be linear.

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