Thanks for this.
For reference, here are some numbers around our 1-to-10 crowd calendar for all 365 days in 2017 for Orlando parks. I'll use them below to talk about what we're seeing in 2018:
- Our predictions were within 1.19 for the Magic Kingdom
- 1.12 for Epcot
- 1.09 for DHS
- 1.35 for AK
- 0.95 for Universal Studios Orlando
- 1.10 for IOA
Those numbers include days affected by hurricanes and other weather. each 1-point increment on our crowd level scale translates to a range of about 10 or 15 minutes in wait times at Space Mountain, 5 or 10 minutes at Pirates, and so on. So +/-1 at Space would be within +/-25 minutes worst case, +/-20 at Pirates.
Because Disney's posted wait times aren't perfectly accurate, I don't think it's possible yet to make predictions more accurate than about +/- 1.0 on our scale.
Still, based on those numbers for all of 2017, it seems like it's definitely possible to predict crowds to a level of accuracy that lots of people find useful, over a long period of time.
I don't think we forgot how to make predictions on January 1, 2018 - I think something changed.
If we look at our 2018 results so far, we see this:
- Magic Kingdom: +/- 1.27 Friday to Sunday and +/- 2.38 Mon-Thu
- Epcot: +/-1.22 Fri-Sun, +/- 1.92 Mon-Thu
- DHS: +/- 0.54 Fri-Sun, +/- 1.58 Mon-Thu
- AK: +/-1.9 Fri-Sun, +/- 3.0 Mon-Thu
So 2018 weekend predictions are just slightly worse than 2017 at MK, EP, and DHS (AK is Pandora).
Weekday predictions are doing much worse. Why?
Keep in mind that 95% of public schools are in session in January. But January's crowd levels were slightly higher than any 30-day period over summer 2017, when 95% of public schools were
not in session.
One theory is that parents are taking their kids out of school to visit WDW. But how likely is it that tends of thousands of parents decided - independently - that school was important all the way through 2017, but not as important starting January 1?
Maybe it's childless adults. There would have to be a whole lot more of them deciding a WDW vacation (in January) was for them, and I don't see a marketing campaign or any external reason for them to do that.
We don't think it's foreign tourists - tourism to the U.S. was down substantially through 3Q2017.
It could be residual vacations from September's hurricane. I think most large employers would not have carried over vacation days from 2017, but it's possible for smaller companies.
It could be the economy. As I said earlier, we haven't seen one this strong since we started collecting data. It's possible the models haven't picked up on that importance. But why January 2018 versus 4Q2017?
My personal theory is that Disney's cutting weekday ride capacity. Instead of staffing the rides so you could see a 10-minute wait at Space Mountain in January, they're running it so you see 30. I could be wrong. We're going to count riders for a month or so to see what we find.
If I put on my tinfoil hat, I note that if you want to raise prices by switching to seasonal pricing for multi-day tickets AND you control what the wait times are like at the rides, you can achieve any outcome you want. But I'm going to assume we're wrong first, then we'll look at that.
