DisNerds gonna Disnerd...

DisNerds gonna DisNerd...

October 13, 2023

I am a DisNerd. I realize that if you’re reading this, you probably are too, but at times, my Disney geekiness almost embarrasses me. Almost. For the most part, I wear the badge proudly. I am adept at keeping my Disney gushing restrained until I am around like-minded people. I can function in society without anyone even knowing that I prefer to spend all of my vacation dollars in the same location every year. I have my website, my Facebook groups, and my travel advisor work to blow off Disney steam and that is normally enough.

However, I started getting the itch this last summer to do a little bit extra. So along with everything else going on in my life, I started tracking wait times at all four Florida Disney theme parks. Every day. Seven days a week. Three times a day. For over 10 weeks.

Basically I wanted to see the ebb and flow of crowds in the late summer. I’ve always heard, anecdotally of course, that September is the slow month, but does that truly flesh out in hard data? In a word: yes. Late August seems to match September’s energy when it comes to low crowds as well. Of course there was a hurricane this year, and it showed up big time in the data, but even omitting that, there were some lessons to learn. So let’s look at the data. 

As you can see, there are some rock solid facts that come to light.

1.       DO NOT SLEEP ON MAGIC KINGDOM ON PARTY DAYS!! So many day guests give MK a pass on days when MNSSHP is happening because they don’t want to get kicked out of the park early. I get it, but you can seriously get the whole park done before 4:00 PM when they start letting the party guests in. The wait times show it, and on our trip at the end of September, we did it. By 2:00 PM we were doing shows that we don’t do every trip because we were done with everything else.

2.        If you’re picking a day of the week to do Disney Springs and not visit a park, make it a Monday! With the exception of Animal Kingdom, every park is pretty swamped on Mondays. MK and EPCOT are busier on Monday than any other day of the week.

3.       Sunday is the slowest day of the week at three out of the four parks. Once again, Animal Kingdom seems to march to the beat of a different drum, but Sunday seems to be a pretty good park touring day.

4.       Weekends over all are not as busy as they used to be. Animal Kingdom was the only park that Saturdays and Sundays were the busiest days. All of the other parks were slower on the weekend than Mondays, Wednesdays, and sometimes Tuesdays and Thursdays.

There were naturally some strange anomalies during this case study. There was a huge spike in wait times during the last week of July. Not sure what prompted that. Also the aforementioned hurricane occurred right before Labor Day. On Wednesday August 30th, the average wait time at Animal Kingdom was 10.23 minutes! That’s lunacy. But I figure it all averages out with enough data added into the mix.

So there is a peek behind the curtain of Disney Madness when it is allowed to go unchecked. The big takeaway here is that the late summer is a pretty great time to visit if you’re looking solely at wait times and park congestion, but please remember: It is stupid hot.