I'll say that from our perspective, which uses Disney's posted wait times at key attractions to measure crowds, one of the big issues we face is that posted wait times are often far from accurate.
That mean that part of making crowd calendar predictions is trying to guess how 'wrong' the posted wait times are.
For example, here's Seven Dwarfs Mine Train from yesterday (8/31). Black dots are Disney's posted wait times in
MDE. Green dots are actual wait times as submitted by guests and our staff.
View attachment 789962
So at 9 a.m., the actual wait for 7DMT was
5 minutes and the MDE said it was
50.
Likewise, at 10 a.m. the actual wait was
28 minutes and the posted was
45.
The posted wait times were off by a factor of roughly 2 to 10. It's really hard to model crowds with that kind of error.
The other, and I think larger, issue is that incorrect posted wait times harm guests directly. When you don't know how long something is going to take, you can't make good decisions about where to spend your time.
I'm sure that scores of guests walked up to 7DMT at 9 a.m., saw the 50 minute posted wait, and went somewhere else. If they had more accurate information, they would've enjoyed very low waits at a very popular attraction.