Checked out early - Parks too crowded.

I'm copying this from another thread so as not to have to type it again. I was there Monday through yesterday. Every park was, by my definition, insane. I have greater than 10 WDW trips and 5 DLR trips, so I am not a novice to this. Even Spaceship Earth was 60 minute standby! It was crazy. We tried to park hop and it was over 90 minutes wasted in waiting on the buses and then getting through security/entrance lines at the next park. There was no option to swim at the resort since the temps were in the 30s-50s all week. Water parks were closed down due to cold temperatures, so anyone who would have been dispersed to those parks was now most likely in one of the other parks, making the crowds there even worse! We did not cut our vacation short, but it was not the experience we were hoping for. I expected high crowds, and planned for them, but this was insane and not enjoyable. I did not feel that Disney responded well to the exceedingly high crowds, especially in regards to the buses.

Here is my other response:

We just got back tonight from our first (and last) trip over spring break. We typically pull the kids out at a non-holiday time in May but we added a few park days onto a short Disney cruise, so there we were. The crowds were so much worse than I ever expected. I'm sure someone will say "a crowded day at Disney is better than being at work" but I can't agree with that. I don't want to be using time off from work, spending this much money, to be herded and pushed around for 3 days.

Yes, we rope dropped, booked FP, tried to book 4th FPs on the app, had dining reservations, had a touring plan, etc. We did all the big rides we could with FP. There was very little 4th FP availability, as expected. Lines were awful (though FP lines moved quickly). I did not ride standby for much, as SB waits were over 150-180 minutes for SM, RNR and other headliners for hours each day. Even "lesser rides" like Spaceship Earth were 60+ minutes Standby. The places we really noticed the lines the most were at the buses at park close. We stayed at AKL, and buses literally came 30 minutes apart at night to the parks. It was made worse by the unpredicted cold snap that left many without clothes for the weather. We waited almost one hour last night for a bus from DHS to AKL. The temps were in the 40s! We had some warm clothes from the cruise, but many others didn't even have a long sleeved shirt or pants. Miserable. We will Uber next time, but I don't like feeling I'm being "forced" to spend money on Uber when transportation is one of the perks of staying onsite. I realize there can't be a bus to each resort every 5 minutes, but at park close, they should put every bus on a route to get people moved in less than one hour.

We still had a good time, but this is our one and only spring break trip. We have been numerous times and never felt like this. I felt buses were being diverted to the upgraded park to park transport service, so there were less buses on the regular routes. Bathrooms in all parks were dirty, and at least 30% of paper towel holders were empty ( this was at all 4 parks and was a noticeable change that I had never experienced). I'm used to seeing someone cleaning those bathrooms nearly all day long, and I rarely saw a CM in any bathroom. CMs overall were great, and AKL and their CM were superb. We did a VIP tour day with a plaid, and it was the saving grace of the trip. We met some other great park guests and had some pixie dust from another guest pin trading. We passed on some pixie dust by giving our paper fantasmic FPs from our lunch package to a family that had been in the hotel for the prior 4 days with the stomach flu!

Planning is going to help anyone going at a busy time, but I feel that even with the utmost planning, I do not enjoy this level of crowds. Everyone has their own threshold, and I met mine this week.

The state of the bathrooms leads me to believe staffing was not operating at max levels...I would love to know if all rides were operating at 100% capacity at all times and all shows were running at max daily showings...
 
The state of the bathrooms leads me to believe staffing was not operating at max levels...I would love to know if all rides were operating at 100% capacity at all times and all shows were running at max daily showings...

I know that all three "sides" of TSM were operating at DHS, all three theaters of Soarin' were operating at EPCOT. So to my eye, rides did seem to be running at full capacity. I do not know enough about the show schedules to know if they were running at full showings, but there were several times for Beauty and the Beast and Indiana Jones the day we were at DHS (though we couldn't get into either one standby at any point in the day because they closed the shows to capacity before the shows even started; this is in contrast to prior trips where we could walk up and still find a seat in the back or to the side for either of these shows, no problem, during the day, very close to the start time of the show). I DO know that they did NOT have all tapstyles open at the front gates of any park, there were closed windows at the ticket windows and Guest services at all parks, some bag check lines were covered and closed. So those areas were definitely NOT at full capacity, despite enormous crowds.
 
This same thought entered my mind. I wonder if they were unprepared based on the drop in crowds recently

Possibly not. As i said, our trip 3/4-3/12 was mostly fine, but 3/11 DAK was a bit crazy. We got in standby for everest when it said 50 minute wait. 90 minutes later we are still in line and not even to the final building! Finally something gives and the standby starts moving more than 2 feet every 2 minutes (literally!), and after two hours total we were on the ride. Must have been running at reduced capacity, and combined with FP+, standby was getting shafted.

As an aside, this was our first time to DW since FP+, and i thought it was mostly fine, except (as everest example illustrates) when it comes to apportioning rides between fp and standby. I get people are mad if they have to wait at FP, but there needs to be a little fairness, no? Taking 98 fp people and two standby is ridiculous, at least go 50/50. Disneyland seems to be able to apportion fp/standby reasonably, dw could take a lesson or two.
 

I feel sorry for people who went this week. It's been solid 9s and 10s at every park under TP's new crowd scale. YUCK!
 
Yeah, I've seen SM get a line that's listed as that long. When that happens, we go do something else. Like you said, we don't wait in lines more than 30 minutes either. But we never find it to be an issue in doing things we want.

I'm sorry, I just don't understand all of this whining about crowds. WDW is one of the most, if not THE most, visited tourist destinations in the entire USA. What exactly are you expecting? It's crowded, it's always going to be. Frankly, every time someone says "I'm done, I hate the crowds", my first thought is "Great, one less person who may be in the parks". To me, whining about WDW crowds (especially during a holiday season), is kinda like going to Alaska in January and complaining about how cold it is.
I didn't read it as whining, just stating the facts.
Personally I wouldn't wait 215 minutes for SM either. I may leave the park, but not likely cut the vaca short.

MG
 
I have never been when it was too crowded I wanted to leave early. We got a lot right before Christmas too but we got at rope drop and get in most everything by lunch. I plan Fps for early afternoon. Even right before Christmas we rarely waited in line for any rides. I have never been during spring break before though. I went early February and walked on most everything, it was great!
 
If I was saving a significant amount of money or work vacation time by leaving early, I might definitely leave early...no sense dropping an extra $400/night on a villa if all I was gonna do was swim and then buy another meal out and I was already sick of all that...

Now, I've never left a full vacation early, but I have cut my losses in other areas of my life when they were obvious disasters and just ate the costs (I remember leaving a live theater event performance at intermission b/c I couldn't imagine sitting through another 90 minutes of it)...so, I could even see leaving it and being out the costs if all I was dealing with was whiny, cranky family who just wanted to go home...
 
Wow! I'm thinking my decision to swap my March WDW trip with my May non-WDW trip may have been the right one this year. I have never left a WDW trip early, but I have had trips where I spent the last day or two just unwinding at the resort before heading back to the real world. I don't usually spend the whole day in the parks, even when it's not busy. Since I am local, I find the resort to be just as enjoyable, if not more so, than the parks.

I would not wait longer than 30 minutes for an attraction either.
 
Touring plans had predicted this week to be 6s and 7s. They missed that 'bigly' in my opinion. I suspect that Disney missed their forecast as well as there seemed to be some staffing issues. (Entry touch points, Bag Checks, and SM seemed to have an entire area of the right queue shutdown. I have even seen long lines at the French Quarter front desk :( )
 
This is always such a tough topic. Vacations, at least to me, are almost sacred things. To use my time off from work and to use my limited vacation funds...it is always awful when a trip doesn't work out as I planned.

I remember in 2015 I planned a trip to WDW during the fall time. I had read trip reports from the year's previous during that exact time and the parks looked like a ghost town. At no point in my trip did any of the parks look like a ghost town. Ride waits are up, some areas were very crowded and hard to even make your way through. That isn't the case here, the OP expected a crowded park but the parks were even worse. But still, different than what was expected.

It can be incredibly disappointing to encounter huge crowds and long waits, even if you are expecting that. I have nothing buy sympathy.

Sure, to others there are lots of things to do around the Disney resort, but I think some people visit for the parks and that is ok. For example, lots of people enjoy pool time but I can't stand it. I'm a fair skinned redhead who burns if I look outside on a sunny day. I also don't really like to swim (I hate getting chlorine in my hair so I have to immediately go wash it). So for me, if the parks were slammed I couldn't just leave and enjoy sitting at the pool, it's just not my thing.

Honestly, with how crowded DL and WDW have been lately I really think Disney could open another US park and be just fine.
 
It's funny - when Disney went to try to "right-size" staffing, we've had many more disastrous trip complaints over the last year, especially during unexpectedly busier times. I'm wondering if it will start being penny-wise, pound-foolish for Disney b/c saving the costs of, say 100 minimum wage workers for the day (to have the parks always run at max level), vs giving thousands of people bad views of Disney and their mid-4-digit and higher $$ trips is probably not a good trade off for Disney to make...unless they believe there will always be more...
 
I'd have just gotten on the app and looked at all park ride times and headed to a different one, or...you know, drank around the world. The kids could have candy/snakcs around the world, right?
 
It's funny - when Disney went to try to "right-size" staffing, we've had many more disastrous trip complaints over the last year, especially during unexpectedly busier times. I'm wondering if it will start being penny-wise, pound-foolish for Disney b/c saving the costs of, say 100 minimum wage workers for the day (to have the parks always run at max level), vs giving thousands of people bad views of Disney and their mid-4-digit and higher $$ trips is probably not a good trade off for Disney to make...unless they believe there will always be more...
Eventually they are bound to run out of guests but thus far, there have always been more. For every 1 that stops going due to costs or crowds (or both) there are 10 more in their place.
 
I'd have just gotten on the app and looked at all park ride times and headed to a different one, or...you know, drank around the world. The kids could have candy/snakcs around the world, right?

We did get on the app Monday to Thursday this week, and EVERY park was the same. They were all slammed with horrific wait times for rides that I wouldn't even do if they were walk-on. I was certainly not waiting 60 minutes for Spaceship Earth. Drinking around the world showcase would have been fun but it was about 45 degrees in the day time (and colder and windy at night, or drizzling), so the appeal of all of those cold beers and frozen drinks was markedly reduced! It was just bad, but normally I am with you: drinking something fruity will cheer me up in heavy crowds!
 
I didn't read it as whining, just stating the facts.
Personally I wouldn't wait 215 minutes for SM either. I may leave the park, but not likely cut the vaca short.

MG
I'd wait 215 minutes for a $5 million check. But there's not a single ride at Disney that I'd wait more than 30 minutes to ride. Hate to hear that the OP's vacation didn't work out. I probably wouldn't have left, but would have hit the pool/bars instead. That being said, you pay a lot of money to stay at a Disney resort just for alcohol and a swimming pool.
 
This is always such a tough topic. Vacations, at least to me, are almost sacred things. To use my time off from work and to use my limited vacation funds...it is always awful when a trip doesn't work out as I planned.

I remember in 2015 I planned a trip to WDW during the fall time. I had read trip reports from the year's previous during that exact time and the parks looked like a ghost town. At no point in my trip did any of the parks look like a ghost town. Ride waits are up, some areas were very crowded and hard to even make your way through. That isn't the case here, the OP expected a crowded park but the parks were even worse. But still, different than what was expected.

It can be incredibly disappointing to encounter huge crowds and long waits, even if you are expecting that. I have nothing buy sympathy.

Sure, to others there are lots of things to do around the Disney resort, but I think some people visit for the parks and that is ok. For example, lots of people enjoy pool time but I can't stand it. I'm a fair skinned redhead who burns if I look outside on a sunny day. I also don't really like to swim (I hate getting chlorine in my hair so I have to immediately go wash it). So for me, if the parks were slammed I couldn't just leave and enjoy sitting at the pool, it's just not my thing.

Honestly, with how crowded DL and WDW have been lately I really think Disney could open another US park and be just fine.

That first paragraph is spot on. Folks spend a lot of time planning a trip, and a TON of money visiting Disney. I could take my family to Europe for a week for less than I spend on a trip to Disney World, and to go to Disney and face 215 minute waits for a ride would simply be awful.
 
I'd wait 215 minutes for a $5 million check. But there's not a single ride at Disney that I'd wait more than 30 minutes to ride. Hate to hear that the OP's vacation didn't work out. I probably wouldn't have left, but would have hit the pool/bars instead. That being said, you pay a lot of money to stay at a Disney resort just for alcohol and a swimming pool.
Believe it or not people do. People post frequently about ideas for a stay at Disney with no park tickets. Not something I'd do but people do. But even then, I'm not going to pay a fee to change my flights just because the parks are too crowded. We don't swim but we'd find something fun to do
 
Unless one of us were sick I couldn't see leaving our vacation early. I would just see so much time,effort and $ flying out the window..oh and the real world getting closer to my view, no thank you, I'll take every last second of Disney that I can. Even if it's siting in the Polynesian lobby smelling it all in. And I'm so not with the consensus here, 30 mins is barely enough time for me to eat a Dole Whip!!:eek: I'm getting in that line, that's a pretty short wait to me, there's even time for a churro too!! :hyper: I guess Einstein had it right, it's all relative.
 












Save Up to 30% on Rooms at Walt Disney World!

Save up to 30% on rooms at select Disney Resorts Collection hotels when you stay 5 consecutive nights or longer in late summer and early fall. Plus, enjoy other savings for shorter stays.This offer is valid for stays most nights from August 1 to October 11, 2025.
CLICK HERE







New Posts







DIS Facebook DIS youtube DIS Instagram DIS Pinterest

Back
Top