Note If you're trying to minimize the time you'll spend waiting in line, having a good touring plan is about five times more important than choosing the right day of the week. A one-year subscription to our touring plan service costs $8.95 and provides access to more than 100 different touring plans designed to reduce waits at Disney World's most popular attractions. Subscribe now. We offer a full 45-day money-back guarantee.

How accurate are these predictions? Unofficial Guide statistician Fred Hazelton writes about the Crowd Calendar's performance and answers questions on the TouringPlans.com Blog (read only Fred's articles here). You can also follow our crowd updates on Twitter.

Abbreviations

MK=Magic Kingdom
EP=Epcot,
DS=Disney Hollywood Studios
AK=Animal Kingdom
MNSSHP=Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party (link)
MVMCP=Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party (link)

The Crowd Level column is based on a scale from 1 to 10, with 1 being least crowded conditions and 10 being most crowded. The scale measures the peak wait time at the Magic Kingdom's three headliner attractions (Space Mountain, Splash Mountain, and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad). Thus, the Crowd Level is a "worst case" scenario, predicting the longest wait at any of these three attractions on a particular day. Note that predictions for parks other than the Magic Kingdom are an approximation.

Overview
Each year, we receive more than a thousand e-mails and letters inquiring about crowd conditions on specific dates throughout the year. Readers also want to know which park is best to visit on each day of their stay. To make things easier for you (and us!), we provide a calendar covering the next 12 months. For each date, we offer a crowd-level index based on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being least crowded conditions and 10 being most crowded. Our calendar takes into account all holidays, special events, and more, as described in the following sections.

How We Determine Crowd Levels and Best Days
A number of factors contribute to the models we use to predict both crowd levels and the best days to visit each theme park. Data we use to predict crowd levels include:

• Historical park hours from the same time period in previous years
• Disney's special events calendar (e.g., Grad Nights, Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party, etc.)
• Legal holidays in the United States
• Public school schedules (including spring break schedules for the 50 largest public school districts east of the Mississippi, plus Massachusetts and Connecticut)
• Weekly historical occupancy rates for Orlando-area hotels
• Central Florida tourism demographics

Historical park hours include the actual park operating hours for 2004 through the present. Special events include everything from official Disney-sanctioned events such as "grad nights" and Super Soap Weekend, to unsanctioned events like "Gay Days." Our hotel data contain weekly occupancy rates for seven different areas within the Orlando market, including the key Disney-area hotels in Lake Buena Vista and International Drive. Our Central Florida tourism demographics cover everything from which cities Orlando visitors come from and how long they stay, to how many people they bring and which theme parks they visit.

Data we use to determine the best days for each park include:

• Actual wait time statistics gathered in the parks
• Our own counting of guests in Disney's parks
• Disney's Extra Magic Hours schedule
• Special events calendars
• U.S. legal holidays
• Outside sources (e.g., the U.S. Department of Transportation, Consumer Reports, etc.)

Some of these data, such as historical park hours, Disney's Extra Magic Hours schedule, and U.S. legal holidays, are widely available on the Internet. Other data, such as public school schedules, are available, but not from a single source (we had to look up each school's calendar individually). The more detailed data, including hotel occupancy rates and government statistics, require not only access, but fairly sophisticated analysis. And some data, such as wait times, we had to get ourselves.

Wait Times For our latest recommendations, our Orlando-based data collection team visited the parks at least seven straight days each month from January through October, 2005. Each day, the team wrote down the standby wait and FASTPASS distribution times for the park's most popular attractions, every 30 minutes, from park opening to park closing. In the Magic Kindgom, for example, the team collected statistics at the 27 most popular attractions. The team also stood in line at key rides to ensure the posted wait times corresponded to the actual wait times.

Counting Guests With Disney's permission, we actually counted the number of guests headed into each theme park, over a six month period from January to July 2007. For the Magic Kingdom, for example, we put researchers at the Pop Century bus stop to estimate Disney resort guest attendance, and at the Transportation and Ticket Center, to count day guests. On a typical day our researchers counted between 7,000 and 14,000 people. We had additional researchers stationed inside the parks, recording the wait times at each park's major attractions. This allowed us to determine the days on which each park was busiest. The results are below.

A couple of interesting things to note in the above graph: First, 25 to 50% more guests visit the Magic Kingdom on Thursday than Tuesday. And more guests visit any Disney theme park on Sunday than on Saturday. In fact, Saturday ranks no higher than fourth (Epcot) on the list of busiest days at each park, and Sunday was listed more frequently than Saturday for every Walt Disney World theme park. Why? Our theory is that Saturday is a travel day for many families, and most families (71% of Orlando visitors in 2003) drive to Walt Disney World. The difference in water parks are more pronounced. During summer, it's not uncommon for twice as many guests to visit a water park on a Thursday than on a Saturday.

This theory gets some support from the Department of Transportation's National Household Travel Survey (NHTS). The NHTS data show Saturday and Sunday as the most frequent days to begin travel for one-way trips of less than 500 miles, and Friday as the most frequent day to begin travel for one-way trips of 500 to 1,000 miles. Assuming those longer trips take two days - a relatively safe assumption - then Saturday is the most frequent day of travel. To verify this, we called several Disney-area hotels, who confirmed that Saturday is usually their busiest night of the week. (Thanks to Consumer Reports for this article that tipped us off, and to Mary Waring of Mousesavers.com for checking with her hotel contacts to confirm this.)

What about the impact of Central Florida-area residents, you ask? Good question. We've often heard that "locals" tend to swamp the parks on weekends, especially at the Magic Kingdom. We're not yet convinced this is true, for a couple of reasons. For one, their numbers don't appear to be that large: in 2003, only 11% of domestic leisure visitors in Orlando came from Orlando. Second, more Floridians said they visited Orlando as part of a general vacation than a "getaway weekend," meaning their influence is more likely spread out over several days, rather than just Saturday or Sunday. Third, families from Florida visiting Orlando tend to be slightly smaller (2.7 people) than non-Florida families (3.1 people), further diluting their impact.

Why Do Some of These Recommendations Contradict
Other Advice in the Book?
You'll occasionally see a particular recommendation here that contradicts the general advice given in the printed Unofficial Guide. As an example, the Unofficial Guide generally recommends avoiding any park on its Extra Magic Hour days. We recommend Epcot on July 4th, 2005, however, even though it was Epcot's Extra Magic Hour Morning. Why did we make this recommendation? Because Epcot's the best park to be in when crowds are large, such as on July 4th. And the incremental crowds from Epcot's Extra Magic Hour Morning paled in comparison to the effects felt from the crowds in the other parks, especially the Magic Kingdom. In this case, Epcot's not so much a "good" choice as it is the "least bad."

Likewise, we'll occasionally recommend the Magic Kingdom on a Thursday or Monday, especially during the slower months, even if there's a special event like Mickey's Not So Scary Halloween Party scheduled there. This is because we're trying to recommend each park at least once in any seven-day period, so that families taking a weeklong vacation can be sure to visit each park on a reasonably good day. When all of the other rules used don't fulfill this requirement, we're forced to make other "least bad" recommendations, similar to that explained above. The next section tells why the potential negative impact of these "least bad" recommendations isn't generally much to get concerned over.

How Important Is Choosing the Right Day?
Worrying about the day of the week before you have a good touring plan is like ordering two triple cheeseburgers with fries, then wondering whether the restaurant has Diet Coke. Things like the predicted crowd level, the time of day, and the attractions that you wish to visit will all affect how long you have to stand in line, and in general how crowded a park will be. Other factors, such as day of the week and whether it's a holiday can affect the crowd levels too. Our research team measures all of these factors to develop a model that will predict the amount of time you'll spend waiting in line. The following table shows how important these factors are in determining how long you wait. An importance level of 10 means that a variable has a huge effect; while a level of 1 means that it has virtually no effect at all.

So what does this tell us? According to our data, the attractions you visit and the time of day at which you visit them will have the greatest influence on how long you wait. On the other hand, the day of week and the weather will play only a small role. Statistically speaking, the time of day is 5 times more important than the day of the week.

Put another way, a good touring plan is much more important than choosing the right day to visit the parks. If you followed the Unofficial Guide's Magic Kingdom One-Day Touring Plan for Adults on a typical slow Tuesday and a typical busy Thursday, you'd only wait in line about 20 more minutes on Thursday - a little less than one incremental minute of wait time per attraction. In contrast, that same touring plan can save up to four hours of standing in line when compared to not following a plan.

Click here for exceptions to Disney's Extra Magic Hour schedule

Special Thanks
Special thanks to the research staff of the Orlando/Orange County Convention & Visitors Bureau, who provided the detailed demographic data on Orlando visitors we used in this calendar. We're indebted (as always) to statistician Fred Hazelton, for putting the "best days" recommendations into context, and for endless revisions to the data.