1/21/2024 0 Comments Midnight castle update 2022Again, 45 minutes was the average–I would’ve guessed a number around 47-49 minutes, which is not an insignificant difference.Īnd this brings us to the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. More significantly, because Christmas falling on a Monday–instead of later in the week–made it likely that holiday break crowds would be consolidated into the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve.Įven with the benefit of seeing wait time data, trends throughout the year, and precedent from the prior year (when Christmas fell on a Sunday–so same idea), the wait time averages for Christmas week were slightly lower than I expected. In part because that’s been the trend for several years. Regardless, we’ve long anticipated that the week leading up to Christmas would be far less busy than the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve. When you account for the exhaustion of pent-up demand and timing of Christmas Day, that’s about what we expected–maybe a tad lower. The week leading up to Christmas had an average wait time of 45 minutes, making it busier than Thanksgiving or any week of the year since Easter. That brings us to the last couple of weeks, which were unsurprisingly busy. A lot of people have the knowledge–far fewer can act upon it!) This makes the downtime even more pronounced, with the exception of locals and diehard Disney fans who know about the better times and are able to visit during them. People are less likely to take off of work or pull their kids out of school when a built-in break is just around the corner. The breaks act as crowd magnets, of sorts, for Walt Disney World. The very good news is that in between those holidays, there are lulls in crowds. Others, like Jersey Week, are decidedly less so. Some of these are obvious–the weeks of Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Eve. We’ve made this point before, but the key takeaway is that the holiday season is a roller coaster for crowds. Between the start of November and early January, there are no fewer than a half-dozen holidays and breaks that have huge impacts on crowd levels. There are a lot of attendance anomalies in the last few years that defy explanation. Our suspicion is that Thanksgiving falling earlier than normal might’ve resulted in crowd levels being lower than normal, but that’s just a guess. Normally Thanksgiving would see significantly higher crowd levels than Veterans Day, and the week before would be slightly busier. Across the board, those weekly wait times are both below average by historical standards and lower than the pent-up demand period seen the last couple of years. It’s not normal for the numbers to be that clean, for lack of a better term. It’s purely coincidental (and a little weird, frankly) that these weeks are all 31/41 minute averages. Then Thanksgiving, with a 41 minute average. Then another lull, with another 31 minute average. After that came Veterans Day and Jersey Week, which saw a fairly significant spike and a 41 minute average. Average wait times were 31 minutes for both the last week of October and first full week of November. It was a similar story prior to that to end October and start November. We’ll put that into context in just a minute, but suffice to say, those are exceptionally good crowd levels. Average wait times across the entirety of Walt Disney World ranged from 29 to 34 minutes during that 3-week stretch. That along with the first two weeks of December all ended up having low crowd levels, especially as compared to what followed. It wasn’t just the week immediately after Thanksgiving that was blissfully uncrowded. That was on December 1, after Thanksgiving ended and our favorite week of the year at Walt Disney World had begun. While we’ve done updates on Genie+ selling out over the course of the last couple of weeks that also discussed wait times, our last true crowd report was One of the Worst Weeks Ends & Best Begins for Walt Disney World’s Christmas Crowds. While this is a fundamentally a recap, our goal is offering insight for those planning Christmas and New Year’s 20 trips to Walt Disney World. This crowd report takes a look at the triple-digit wait times for the entire month of December, entirety of last year, and the last ~3 years to put into context just how bad the week leading up to NYE really was. Happy New Year! It’s officially 2024, but before we completely close the book on last year, we want to take a final look at the week between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, which earned the dubious distinction of being the #1 worst week at Walt Disney World.
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