TouringPlans.com - accuracy during pandemic

[wammers2003]

Just curious if anyone has found TouringPlans.com park crowd and wait times predictions to be accurate during the pandemic? Thanks!

 

[Trackmaster]

The numbers might be accurate if you just compare them to other pandemic numbers. But personally, I don't see in what world a 1 is a 1. Maybe before Covid I just had different standards where seeing swarms of people didn't bother me as much, but now when I think 1, I want it to be empty. Not just whatever they're calling this. It also may not take into account the extremely reduced hours and the extremely reduced throughput of the rides (and the fact that you have to wait in those lines with no FP+). So use it to compare within Covid levels, but I feel like a 1 isn't what you're thinking a 1 would be like.

 

[wammers2003]

Thank you. I just realized that if you look at the wait time of the prior day, for example, yesterday 11/5, they show the predicted wait time and the actual wait time. They were pretty close yesterday On a personal note, we are going to AK on 12/14, staying at CCV 12/13-12/15, and we cannot wait! Miss the WDW so bad, typically make it there 3 times years from Virginia. Expectations are low but excitement is high!

 

[Trackmaster]

Thank you. I just realized that if you look at the wait time of the prior day, for example, yesterday 11/5, they show the predicted wait time and the actual wait time. They were pretty close yesterday On a personal note, we are going to AK on 12/14, staying at CCV 12/13-12/15, and we cannot wait! Miss the WDW so bad, typically make it there 3 times years from Virginia. Expectations are low but excitement is high!

Well I don't know. When the parks first opened for Covid, Flight of Passage was a walk-on and they set up short-cuts so you could literally just walk around and marathon it. I went a few weeks ago and it was still middle of the week and Flight of Passage has a 90 minute line the whole day (and they were calling it a 1/10). So I'm not sure if I quite understand their scaling. To me 1/10's should not including a minimum of 90 minute waits without the possibility of a FP+. Had FP+ been taking 80% of the capacity that would have been 3+ hours.

 

[soniam]

TP doesn’t indicate park crowdedness, just wait times. Not sure what it’s like now. It does look like they are updating times according to what’s happening now vs previous years. In July, they only had pre-Covid data, so it was totally wrong. Looking at stuff for my Thanksgiving week trip, it looks about like I would expect, having been following crowd/wait time discussions here. I plan on using them.

However, the first ride of the day of/at parks opening, if it’s a headliner, will be wrong if you got into the park before opening or at the beginning of the crowd. The software can only predict wait times at scheduled park opening, which can be long if you actually get in the line that has already formed at the official opening time. It’s always been like this though.

 

[chicagodisfan]

We were there October 6-12 and I used the Lines app regularly. I love it, but this trip I found huge variability in their accuracy. For instance, at Star Tours the posted wait was 60 minutes and Lines said 12. I couldn’t believe they could be that far off so we took a chance and they were right - we waited 14 minutes. However, on the flip side we were at dinner at Sci-Fi and I told my daughter we could try to jump in line for MMRR after we were done before closing to try to get a second ride in and when I checked the app it says it was closed. My heart sank but I thought we should check it out in person. It was running with a full line so I don’t think it was ever closed. I was really glad I double checked. (As an aside, we ended up waiting 37 minutes including ride time so it was a great time to go.) Other times, the wait would change while we were in the line. For Muppets, it says it was a 15 minute wait when we got in line but we waited closer to 40 and time increased while we were in line. Those were all Studios experiences. We found it to be more accurate at the other parks. In fact, it was predicting a 13 minute wait at Space Mountain and my husbands and sons ran over there and it was right and pretty much a walk-on. In general, I found it to be more accurate than the posted wait times but not as consistent as before. But if there is a huge difference in their time and the posted wait, I’d take their word for it. As far as crowd levels, I have no idea what they think a 1 is now, so we used it as an idea of how the days we were there related to each other. We went over Columbus Day weekend with our first day being the Wednesday before. It was listed as a 1 at MK that day and our second MK day that Sunday was rated a 6, so we expected it to be way busier. It was, but nothing crazy and with the longer hours we probably got more done. So I’m not sure the how helpful the crowd level calculator is. On Saturday we were at AK predicted to be a 6 too and it was really only crowded in Pandora. Hope that helps! Have a great trip!

 

[Trackmaster]

If TP really only considers wait times in their X/10 score, I could see how present day WDW wouldn't accurately reflect the expected experience. Really, back in the day (a few months ago LOL), stand-by was really supposed to be for emergency use only, and you were expected to do a good job with collecting FP+'s. Even a brutal stand-by if only like 15 minutes or less when you have a valid FP+. So if the stand-bys are an hour for the mediocre stuff and three hours for the top tier stuff, you could still have a decent day if you only waited in those sparingly and had some good FP+'s.

These days you're not really comparing apples to apples if you only consider the stand-by wait times when you compare. Waiting it out the whole day without any FP+ really cuts into your production if the stand-bys are the same. So really, to make the TP X/10 ratings comparable, maybe double their stand-by expectations to arrive at the X/10 score to compare to the old days.


And there's also a psychological factor. Before people cared about viruses in public or super spreader events, they were perfectly OK with packing themselves in shoulder to shoulder with strangers. Now you look around, and if you're going to break quarantine and roll the dice to go out in public, you freak out when strangers invade your 6' of space and start coughing around you. A 2/10 from before feels like a 9/10 now.

 

[soniam]

We were there October 6-12 and I used the Lines app regularly. I love it, but this trip I found huge variability in their accuracy. For instance, at Star Tours the posted wait was 60 minutes and Lines said 12. I couldn’t believe they could be that far off so we took a chance and they were right - we waited 14 minutes. However, on the flip side we were at dinner at Sci-Fi and I told my daughter we could try to jump in line for MMRR after we were done before closing to try to get a second ride in and when I checked the app it says it was closed. My heart sank but I thought we should check it out in person. It was running with a full line so I don’t think it was ever closed. I was really glad I double checked. (As an aside, we ended up waiting 37 minutes including ride time so it was a great time to go.) Other times, the wait would change while we were in the line. For Muppets, it says it was a 15 minute wait when we got in line but we waited closer to 40 and time increased while we were in line. Those were all Studios experiences. We found it to be more accurate at the other parks. In fact, it was predicting a 13 minute wait at Space Mountain and my husbands and sons ran over there and it was right and pretty much a walk-on. In general, I found it to be more accurate than the posted wait times but not as consistent as before. But if there is a huge difference in their time and the posted wait, I’d take their word for it. As far as crowd levels, I have no idea what they think a 1 is now, so we used it as an idea of how the days we were there related to each other. We went over Columbus Day weekend with our first day being the Wednesday before. It was listed as a 1 at MK that day and our second MK day that Sunday was rated a 6, so we expected it to be way busier. It was, but nothing crazy and with the longer hours we probably got more done. So I’m not sure the how helpful the crowd level calculator is. On Saturday we were at AK predicted to be a 6 too and it was really only crowded in Pandora. Hope that helps! Have a great trip!

I think the variable times are due to cleaning. If you hit a cleaning cycle, it can really increase your time. Even in July, when it was dead, we waited for more than 30 minutes for BTMRR. They started cleaning right as we hit the end of the ramp before you go into the numbered queues. They said they were doing a cleaning cycle and that it could take 30 minutes. We bailed, because we had already been inside for a while and people weren't being great about distancing. Plus, that queue is pretty tight.

 

[CarrianneB]

Any recent experience here? I was thinking of subscribing for upcoming trips this fall.

 

[AnnaKristoff2013]

Any recent experience here? I was thinking of subscribing for upcoming trips this fall.

I went July 9-19th. The Lines app was fantastic. I found it to basically always be +-5 minutes of the actual wait time whereas the official disney app was often grossly inflated.

 

[CSLucas]

I went July 9-19th. The Lines app was fantastic. I found it to basically always be +-5 minutes of the actual wait time whereas the official disney app was often grossly inflated.

Did you use the planning feature, or did you just check times yourself? I signed up last night and put all our plans in and I'm pretty skeptical of the results. Our trip isn't for 2 weeks so I guess maybe the predicted waits might increase between now and then, but the predictions it is giving me don't really seem to match up with what people have been saying about the parks right now (I think the longest wait it gave me at any of the 4 parks was 85 minutes for FoP)

 

[AnnaKristoff2013]

Did you use the planning feature, or did you just check times yourself? I signed up last night and put all our plans in and I'm pretty skeptical of the results. Our trip isn't for 2 weeks so I guess maybe the predicted waits might increase between now and then, but the predictions it is giving me don't really seem to match up with what people have been saying about the parks right now (I think the longest wait it gave me at any of the 4 parks was 85 minutes for FoP)

No, I’ve got a 2 and a 5 year old so “planning” is pretty worthless to me as anything I plan inevitably gets changed 50 times during the course of the day. I think touringplans is worth it for the lines app alone.

 

[CSLucas]

No, I’ve got a 2 and a 5 year old so “planning” is pretty worthless to me as anything I plan inevitably gets changed 50 times during the course of the day. I think touringplans is worth it for the lines app alone.

Thanks. We have a 6 and 3 yr old (turning 4 during our trip) so we've never tried a plan either. I was going to try it out this time just because everyone has been saying how terrible the parks are right now, but if you had a good experience just using Lines without a plan then we might go that route as well. TP says the crowds will be between a 2 and 4 for the duration of our trip, so I'm hoping that is accurate - other sites' crowd calendars are putting two of our days as a 7/10.

 

[AnnaKristoff2013]

Thanks. We have a 6 and 3 yr old (turning 4 during our trip) so we've never tried a plan either. I was going to try it out this time just because everyone has been saying how terrible the parks are right now, but if you had a good experience just using Lines without a plan then we might go that route as well. TP says the crowds will be between a 2 and 4 for the duration of our trip, so I'm hoping that is accurate - other sites' crowd calendars are putting two of our days as a 7/10.

So we had a very long trip (10 days), and honestly by the end of it we were only going to the parks in the late afternoon/early evening. It was very crowded. The lines app was good because it allowed us to find rides that didn’t have terrible waits, but for the headliners… You’re going to wait. I didn’t even bother with the super popular rides like 7dmt. Magic Kingdom wasn’t terrible because of the number of rides and is probably what you’re going ot want to stick with with those ages because Hollywood Studios had horrific lines the entire time we were there. Epcot was ok as well, and we only did AK one day so I can’t really speak to it.

 

[Cabius]

but the predictions it is giving me don't really seem to match up with what people have been saying about the parks right now (I think the longest wait it gave me at any of the 4 parks was 85 minutes for FoP)

People often report the posted wait times, and then don’t actually Get in the queue.

From my experience (also in July) those posted wait times were often very inflated, and Lines was MUCH more accurate. We would see a posted 40-minute wait time for PotC or HM, Lines would say 12, and Lines would be right. Disney is way overstating lines on many attractions for crowd control purposes — the queues just can’t hold the number of people who would get in them if they knew it was only a 15-minute wait!

The exceptions to this revolve around rope drop (ether you are at the front or back of the rope drop crowd really matters for that first attraction!) or immediately when there are closures due to weather or technical issues. If FEA goes down, everybody will take their crying kid to Gran Fiesta Tour and the Lines app won’t necessarily reflect that right away. I think they must periodically scrape posted waits and ride downtime from the official app, but it isn’t instantaneous.

 

[MapleGirl]

I LOVE the lines app and have used it for years. I find it to be much more accurate than the posted Disney times. I also really enjoy the stop watch feature for reporting my time in a line. We're going to FL tomorrow. I got an email this morning that all the park crowd predictions for next week have gone from 5's and 6's to 2's and 3's. I assume this is because of Tropical Storm Fred.

 

[CSLucas]

I LOVE the lines app and have used it for years. I find it to be much more accurate than the posted Disney times. I also really enjoy the stop watch feature for reporting my time in a line. We're going to FL tomorrow. I got an email this morning that all the park crowd predictions for next week have gone from 5's and 6's to 2's and 3's. I assume this is because of Tropical Storm Fred.

Would love to hear how accurate that decrease is once you're back! I got an email this morning about all but one of my parks decreasing as well, but we won't be there for 2 weeks. We have mostly 1's and 2's now and I'm really hoping that stays accurate (although I'm trying not to get my hopes up)

 

[Rusty2rules]

I LOVE the lines app and have used it for years. I find it to be much more accurate than the posted Disney times. I also really enjoy the stop watch feature for reporting my time in a line. We're going to FL tomorrow. I got an email this morning that all the park crowd predictions for next week have gone from 5's and 6's to 2's and 3's. I assume this is because of Tropical Storm Fred.

I'm going mid-September. I got an email last night dropping my days to 1's and 2's also, so Fred isn't affecting my numbers at all. I wouldn't assume your changes are because of Fred (although, that could be a part of it). I'm assuming people are cancelling/postponing their trips due to the covid numbers in Florida.

 

[MomOTwins]

I'm going mid-September. I got an email last night dropping my days to 1's and 2's also, so Fred isn't affecting my numbers at all. I wouldn't assume your changes are because of Fred (although, that could be a part of it). I'm assuming people are cancelling/postponing their trips due to the covid numbers in Florida.

Yep. Or because they don’t want to wear masks.

 

[Cabius]

One thing to keep in mind: I believe the 1-10 scale is calculated based on the distribution of crowds, so a 1 is "in the 10% least crowded days".

If you calculated the average wait times for every day of the year, a 1 would be in the least busy 36 days, a 2 in the next busy 36 days... and a 10 would be one of the busies 36 days.

But that doesn't mean that a 1 is 1/10th as busy as a 10. The least crowded day of the year could still have a 45-minute wait for 7DMT or a 90-minute wait for FoP!

The specific wait times for individual apps are more useful in planning your day; otherwise the 1-10 scale is marginally helpful, mostly in choosing between park days on a longer trip.