Which Crowd Calendar Do You Trust Most?

[shanew21]

Disney gives you a crowd calendar. Go when it's cheap and it likely won't be that crowded.

Also park hours are a good barometer.

 

[Craig W]

Hello ALL!! A quick question about crowds. I am going with the fam October 20-27. I originally had HS for Wednesday and AK for Thursday. Kenny the Pirate is telling me to switch these 2 around. I know either way will work but what do you guys think?

Thanks!

 

[SaintsManiac]

Hello ALL!! A quick question about crowds. I am going with the fam October 20-27. I originally had HS for Wednesday and AK for Thursday. Kenny the Pirate is telling me to switch these 2 around. I know either way will work but what do you guys think?

Thanks!

I would say it doesn't make a bit of difference.

 

[Minsc]

I agree with PP. This far out, it isn't going to make much difference. Particularly since things like park hours and EMH are not really set in stone yet. If you look at Disney's ticket pricing for these dates, they have the 20th as orange (Peak), the 21st through 24th as yellow (Regular), the 25th as orange, and the 26th as red (Max). This makes sense because that week is on the downhill side of Fall Break, but still smack dab in the middle of Wine and Food Festival. Weekdays should be pretty decent, and weekends pretty busy, particularly at EPCOT.

I know KtP favors HS on Thursday and AK on Wednesday, but both of them are probably a 4 or 5 on the busy scale, so you probably won't notice a difference. Now, if park hours change or EMH change, that could make a difference. If I were going this week (We are going the week before) it really wouldn't influence our normal park strategy.

 

[ellbell]

I don't follow any. I use to follow KTP (when he decided that he had rights to charge people for information on the refresh method I unfollowed on all social media ) but really they all just want to commercialize on common sense.
I go with the expectation that everyday will be busy and utilize fastpasses and the refresh method. Doing this has never let me down. Your best bet is just to have a good plan.

 

[SaintsManiac]

I don't follow any. I use to follow KTP (when he decided that he had rights to charge people for information on the refresh method I unfollowed on all social media ) but really they all just want to commercialize on common sense.
I go with the expectation that everyday will be busy and utilize fastpasses and the refresh method. Doing this has never let me down. Your best bet is just to have a good plan.

Amen to every word of your post!

 

[MJ6987]

Even Touring Plans themselves admit that picking the “right day” to go to a park is far less important than your touring strategy for that particular day, regardless which day you go.

Basically, get there as early as possible (pre opening), do headliner rides in the first hour and have other headliner rides set up as fast passes after that. Have a nice break for food in the middle of the day (which seems to be the busiest time generally) and then do shows / things that aren’t that popular in the afternoon, together with any remaining fast passes.

If you want to do one park for all day or most of the day I would avoid the EMH am park. In my opinion, if you do EMH am you should look to hop to another park once it starts getting busy.

 

[monkyby87]

Hello ALL!! A quick question about crowds. I am going with the fam October 20-27. I originally had HS for Wednesday and AK for Thursday. Kenny the Pirate is telling me to switch these 2 around. I know either way will work but what do you guys think?

Thanks!

I wouldn't bother switching around unless one day works better for FP+ compared to another. I wouldn't mess around with switching days just because of a crowd calendar prediction, which are getting increasingly less accurate as time goes on.

 

[klmall]

Crowd calendars seemed to work great for us through 2014. I would always chart the predictions from Touring Plans; Kenny the Pirate; Undercover Tourist and EasyWDW etc. and usually find some consensus to plan our days. For our 2017 trip none of the calendars were even close....and that includes the weather forecasts. The crowd predictions were way low and the late April/early May temperatures were hotter and drier than we expected. Rain would have cut the crowds and cooled everyone off but no such luck.

For my 2019 trip in November I plan to look at the calendars in general but also the MVMCP party dates. Since I always have a PH I will adjust plans on the spot and go where I can get the Fastpasses I really want. It's really a shame though because I think using those calendars helped many people plan their trips.....

 

[GAN]

I just looked at the Lines app, and funny enough, the crowd levels are 9/10 this week, but the wait times are the exact same as when I was there 2 weeks ago and the crowds were only 5/10 or 6/10. Yeah there's more people around, but looking at this snapshot it makes no difference on actual ride wait times. I'm sure it affects getting a table at a QS restaurant, and transportation and all that, but the ride waits are the exact same.

Part of this problem is that you can't gauge crowd level with wait times -Disney ramps down ride capacity during slower times which artificially(or unnecessarily) increases the times. The other thing that makes predicting difficult, which you alluded to, are the events like After-Hours and EMM etc ...which further complicates the forecast as it's hard to predict who or how many will take advantage rather than go to a Park. That being said, I've always preferred TP over any other tool and still use it for planning

 

[ccarolinec]

I like to look at places like TP and Undercover Tourist for a rough idea, but normally my strategy has been to just avoid parks with EMH (unless I plan to park hop and use them) and avoid weekends and holidays. I just always assume it's going to be crowded so that way if it's not too bad I'm pleasantly surprised.

 

[Craig W]

Thank you EVERYONE!!

 

[Tiggerlover91]

I have a habit of looking at Kenny the Pirate's and Touring Plans and making decisions based on what they both agree on. Lately, though, the overlap seems rare if at all, and our last two trips didn't seem to line up with either (other than the fact that the week of Christmas was, of course, busy).

I'm curious which crowd calendar all of you DISers find most reliable? If not one of these two, which?

I don't use crowd calendars. Why bother? I go into Disney saying they're going to be busy, then I plan accordingly.

 

[PrincessWithABlaster]

Hello ALL!! A quick question about crowds. I am going with the fam October 20-27. I originally had HS for Wednesday and AK for Thursday. Kenny the Pirate is telling me to switch these 2 around. I know either way will work but what do you guys think?

Thanks!

How important to you is a SDD FP? If it's important I would move DHS to Thurs to give yourself a little better chance. Lately it's been harder to get than FOP (although they seem to switch back and forth on that). With SWGE opening with no FPs for smugglers run there are going to be more people in the park and they're not going to have a SW ride to use their Tier 1 FP on.

If an FOP FP is more important to you than I'd leave it as you have it.

 

[glamdring269]

Crowd calendars are simply a tool to help you make an informed decision on where to spend your time that day. It is all about relativity to other parks while you’re visiting. It doesn’t mean it won’t ‘feel’ crowded if you pick a green park.

So with in mind I typically use one just to sanity check my plan and look for opportunities. Used to use easywdw but more recently have used TP and KTP. Can’t really go wrong with either.

 

[deanimal]

Crowd calendars seemed to work great for us through 2014. I would always chart the predictions from Touring Plans; Kenny the Pirate; Undercover Tourist and EasyWDW etc. and usually find some consensus to plan our days. For our 2017 trip none of the calendars were even close....and that includes the weather forecasts. The crowd predictions were way low and the late April/early May temperatures were hotter and drier than we expected. Rain would have cut the crowds and cooled everyone off but no such luck.

For my 2019 trip in November I plan to look at the calendars in general but also the MVMCP party dates. Since I always have a PH I will adjust plans on the spot and go where I can get the Fastpasses I really want. It's really a shame though because I think using those calendars helped many people plan their trips.....

Totally agree with this! It feels like anything beyond the most basic generalizations (busy at Christmas, crowds decrease after Labour Day, etc) has gone out the window lately. And the new Galaxy's Edge opening in late August will be even more disruptive. What works for us is to use crowd calendars as a very general guide and just expect the worst. That way, if it's crazy, I'm not disappointed, and if it's less than crazy it's a pleasant surprise. I've been burned a few times with wall to wall people on a day I was hoping for light crowds and this method is much easier on me mentally!

 

[GaryDis]

I like Touring Plans because of their quantitative approach.

But to borrow a saying from an old professor, these don’t mean you get to check your brains at the door.

I had originally scheduled AK for Saturday and HS for Wednesday, mostly because TP showed AK as a 6 for that Saturday, and everything else 7 or higher. That’s in spite of Saturday being morning EMH at AK.

But then I learned, from reading here, that short of FastPasses, there’s no way to see FOP without insane lines other than getting up at the crack of dawn, to be at the bus stop at 6:15 in order to catch a 6:30 bus to get to AK by 7. Not for me, especially not on the fifth day of a busy Orlando vacation. So I swapped AK with our Wednesday HS. Fortunately, both the Tiffins reservation and the Fantasmic Mama Melrose reservations were still easy to get.

The point being that my goal isn’t to see as much as possible at AK. It’s to see FOP and NRJ. I’m not worried about FPs for other popular stuff there. I realize that by doing this, I decreased my chances of FOP FPs slightly, but it’s all a gamble anyway.

 

[RealBlast3]

To pick my week, I have always relied on your_firstvisit and to pick my day, I always used easywdw and undercover tourist, only the latter now. I have found this to be both accurate and satisfying.

But I mean, if you just use common sense and are able to plan your trip by avoiding the obvious pitfalls, some of which have already been mentioned, you can have a great, stress-free time. If possible, avoid the holidays, and avoid the days when kids are off from school en masse. That's the basic 401. And generally, try to hit parks at park opening, and take a nice lunch break/rest around noon or so and then hit the parks again a bit later. Use fast passes for the obvious rides that you need it and wait in line for the stuff you don't need the fast passes for.

I mean, I have been going to Disney about every other year since 2005 (including last year) and have not noticed any discernible difference in crowd levels as long as I stuck to the "plan". I have even seen a relatively "dead" park, at times, so to speak, the one year I went the last week of January and the first week of February which was in 2016 - I went literally a day before a crippling blizzard hit the entire east coast, dropping 2 to 3 feet on tons of states, so that might have had something to do with it. But anyway, I have always been very happy with my decisions using the guides available and have never felt let down by them.

 

[ScoutsMom21]

We love Touring Plans. But we never use them to decide WHEN we'll vacation at WDW. Truth be told, the only times of year that work for us because of my daughter's school schedule and our vacation availability from work are always busy times of year. But we love the Lines app and have had great success planning which days we'll visit which parks based upon the TP algorithm. As many have said, you can still have a great vacation at WDW during peak times. You just need to be prepared to plan out your FP's and days a little in advance, eat off hours a bit, make reservations when you can, etc. TP helps us make sure our strategies are sound. That said, at the end of the day we do what we feel works best for us. Sometimes that's not what TP recommends, sometimes it is. But it's nice to have them in my back pocket when I feel I need them.

 

[GeorgiaHoo]

My take is that crowd calendars were really awesome through maybe 2010 or so, and became less useful as the years progressed. That's because everyone has the Internet, and most everyone who goes to Disney does a bit of research on the "best" times to go, so they can look at Kenny's calendar, or Touring Plan's, or Josh's. So now October/November are super-crowded, along with January/February and just about every other month. I think the only time that still has "low" crowds is September, and that's simply a function of everyone's work/school calendar--teachers and students can't take off the first few weeks they are back in school, so the crowds in September are pretty low. The rest of the year sucks for crowds.