Crowd calendars & planning

[minnie moomoo]

I am wondering about park days and crowd calendars.
I love touring plans and the dibbs crowd calendars. With all the changes made, extra hours at all parks, evening hours vert limited etc will there actually be better or worse days to go to a park ?
We are going in August, I remember the needing to plan around MNSSHP past trip but it looks like ticketed events happen after park close now instead of forcing an early closure.

I love the extra planning that's needed by obsessing and cross referencing crowd calendars but I am not sure if a Tuesday is much like a Wednesday now 😃
I would like to plan, don't want to be hitting a red 8 park when I could have went the day before when it was a green 4 😂

What are we (collectively the dibb super planners) doing ?

[loldis]

Even when the crowds were more heavily swung by EMH, there wasn't generally huge shifts from one day to the next unless it was the day before/after a holiday weekend. Typically it was only 1 or 2 points difference. One exception was MK during the holiday parties as everyone crowded into them on the full days but that should be a non-issue now that they're after hours events.

I'm finding the crowd calendars are still skewed by the old EMH data. As an example, they're still putting AK higher on Monday as it was the old EMH morning. Will take a while for new data to filter through. So I'm ignoring it for the most part and just booking the days that fit in my schedule.

The one rule I don't ignore though is avoiding Epcot Fri/Sat nights, as I really dislike the drinking around the world crowds.

[Bozza]

I'll be honest, we tend to plan park days quite extensively, but in somewhere between 30 and 40 visits, I've never consulted a crowd calendar.

[minnie moomoo]

Thankyou. I thought I may have been missing something.
I think I'll look at our plan again as my original planning was around the calenders and it seems pointless.

[Guest]

I’m wondering the same as I’m also thinking data could be skewed from last year?

There’s a couple of ‘peak’ days on calendars showing in our plan but we can’t work out why as events should have finished by the weekend but they run into Mon, Tue and Wed.

Perhaps I should go off-plan!

[minnie moomoo]

Yeah. I was looking and some random weekday is an 8 when everything else around that date is a 4 or 5. Makes no sense.

I think I'm going just fly by the seat of my pants 😂

[loldis]

Originally Posted by minnie moomoo

Yeah. I was looking and some random weekday is an 8 when everything else around that date is a 4 or 5. Makes no sense.

I think I'm going just fly by the seat of my pants 😂

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If it's MK, it's probably data still skewed by the Halloween parties (as mentioned above) where there would be larger spikes in the crowds on non-party days since the park didn't close early.

I can see one random Epcot day for next August that's high for no reason. Without digging into it, most likely it was the first day of food and wine in a previous year. Which is a prime example of historical data not always being the best way to predict future data.

[Slore]

I need to replan our trips. Weekends are always going to be busier but I’ve heard to definitely avoid water parks and Epcot. Are Sundays better at Epcot if I had to choose? Again travelling in August.

[Roses]

There is a noticeable drop off of crowds at the end of August. We have stayed into the first week in September and had walk on to some main rides. Schools go back earlier in Florida so we have usually had lower crowds during the week in the second half of school hols. We have used the crowd calendars but so are many others, we have tried arriving later at Animal Kingdom and staying until close & that can be successful. Have also tried the rides in Epcot late in the day and that can work in your favour, but keep an eye on closure times as they shut some of the attractions before the fireworks if it isn't a late hours day.