Travel guide crowd level calendars

[junedis]

Does anyone know if the crowd level calendars that are listed in some travel books are accurate when they suggest specific weekdays for specific parks? Would it be advisable to schedule your parks around these? Thanks-:mickey:

[PhilHarHarMagic]

I'm thinking it depends on the one you follow. We've had great luck with the one associated with the Unofficial Guide.

[CaptSmee]

They are hit and miss. They are predictions after all...

[CleveRocks]

Even the Unofficial Guide itself, the creator of one of the most popular crowd prediction calendar, says that a good touring plan is much more important than which day in which park. They say that if you had to pick between a good touring plan on a "bad" day, or no touring plan on a "good day," you should choose the touring plan.

Personally, I ignore their "best days" and "worst days" predictions. However, I do follow their general advice to avoid parks with Extra Magic Hours IF you do not intend to use those Extra Magic Hours.

The one part of their crowd calendar that I pay very close attention to is their predicted attendance levels ... not to decide each and every day, but rather what week to go or what general time of year to go.

[stephntampa]

We take a lot of day trips, and I always check out the crowd predictor online. I find that they are almost always on the mark.. the problem is that unless you subscribe, you are only able to view one month in advance.

[iheartdisney]

This is such an interesting topic for me. We've been going almost every year since WDW opened. I can say from our experience that the best day/worst day guides worked fairly well until our trip in Dec. 2002. We followed a very popular guide's suggestions that had never let us down before. It was a nightmare. Everything was sooooo crowded. None of our previous tricks were of any use. Then, my father and I were chatting up with one of the CMs - waiting for my mother to finish shopping, no doubt. He said that ever since 9/11 (our last visit was August 2001 - just before 9/11) predicting crowd levels had been very difficult. They had been finding that attendence levels were 'leveling out' somewhat. Yes, it was still very busy during vacation times but that other times were now getting busy, too. People trying to live more in the moment, I guess. Since that trip I don't pay attention to predictions anymore. We do the best we can with EMH, resting in the middle of the day, etc. I figure based on our experiences we can make predictions as good as anyone else can. So far, we've done ok.

[DisneyFan1979]

The one part of their crowd calendar that I pay very close attention to is their predicted attendance levels ... not to decide each and every day, but rather what week to go or what general time of year to go.

We pay close attention to this aspect of the crowd calendar as well and have found it to be very helpful and fairly accurate.

The past few trips we've made note of the predicted crowd level each day on our trip schedule and have found it to be a decent predictor. Say, for example, if the calendar says it will be a 6 at Epcot on Sunday and then a 5 on Monday and we go to Epcot both days, we'll notice less crowds from Sunday to Monday.

We're not touring plan people so I can't speak to whether a good touring plan is more important then following crowd levels.

[GoBlueLacheta]

Obviously the time of year makes a big impact on the overall crowd levels but from day to day we've found the biggest impact on the crowds is the number of daily travelers that are present. Sometimes we "predict" incorrectly and find that when and if we hop parks that day we find another park is fairly empty comparatively. The number of those day groups (which are almost always highest at MK) have a big influence.

They're split camps on the EMH and whether or not they are beneficial etc. (also depends highly on the time of year you travel) ,but a general rule we follow is to try and head to parks that had previously had late evening EMH for the night before. This detours the on-property guests to another park the next day because odds are a good percentage were at that park late the previous evening.

[WDWFanatic]

a general rule we follow is to try and head to parks that had previously had late evening EMH for the night before. This detours the on-property guests to another park the next day because odds are a good percentage were at that park late the previous evening.


I hadn't thought of that before, great tip.

[NLODisney]

We went to the parks that a tour plan said to go to last week and we had a great time at all the parks. We even got to do Toy Story Mania at DHS with less than a 20 minute wait and this was after we had two rides each on ToT and RnRC first. I had told my family we could just go and see what the wait was but should expect it to be over an hour and FP gone because that was what I had been reading. We were quite surprised with the posted wait of 20 min. and FP available with a 1:20 to 2:20 return time. We were in and out of the ride in less than 20 min. We generally had 10- 15 min waits (or less) for all the rides we did at all of the parks.

[brownie]

I've found Birnbuam's to be a good general guide, but they are just guidelines. My main guide was to avoid the park with morning extra magic hours.

[Daddy Mouse]

DW and I like UG for touring plans. We are not totally dependent on UG. Long before we discovered UG we had our own plans for touring the parks and we had a max wait of 20 minutes on any attraction, this was early in the summer months early 90's. (Yes, I'm bragging) With the addition of AK and DHS we found it easier to use UG touring plans.

[DawsonAR]

I use the UG to help with our plans, but we also look at EMH and any special events that may be going on. I do think they are as accurate as anything can be about predicting future attendance on any given day.

[Aurora]

He said that ever since 9/11 (our last visit was August 2001 - just before 9/11) predicting crowd levels had been very difficult. They had been finding that attendence levels were 'leveling out' somewhat. Yes, it was still very busy during vacation times but that other times were now getting busy, too. People trying to live more in the moment, I guess.

Or more like Disney has figured out how to promote events during lower seasons to get the crowds in -- like free dining in September and the Food and Wine Festival.

Authors of the Unofficial Guide have had data for nearly 8 years since 9/11. Their predictions are based not only on observations but scientific matrix data (I'm not kidding!). I think they're really the best source for this kind of information.