Crows Calendars Trustworthy?

[Sparrow'sLady]

We are not paying for hoppers, so I am curious about crowd calendars.

Are crowd calendars and best park suggestions still trustworthy and applicable? I was looking at Touring Plans and Undercover Tourist and they could not be more opposite of one another.

 

[scrappinginontario]

You will find as many opinions about this as there are crowd calendars available. For our family, we use Touring Plans.

No calendar is 100% accurate as it's predictions so find one you'd like and find easy to use and go with that is my recommendation.

 

[FallsChurchDad]

Those two (Touring Plans and UT) are both trying their best, based on the data they gather. Nobody has a perfect crystal ball. Some other crowd calendars are more iffy. I also like Disney Tourist Blog's crowd calendar analysis - he gives thoughtful explanations, not just a literal calendar with a bunch of reds and greens.

If TP and UT are saying something different for your dates, maybe post the differences here, and the folks here may have good insight on which is more likely.

 

[DisneyFive]

I have found Touringplans to typically be historically +/- one level. For instance if they predict a 5 it could easily be a 6 or a 4. It's less common for them to be are off by 2 levels.

Having said that, if I wanted to go to HS and my schedule was flexible enough. If there was a day rated as an 8 and a day rated a 5, I would choose the day for HS that is a 5. I trust it to that extent.

Sometimes schedules don't allow though. We pretty much always choose MK as our last full park day regardless of crowd predictions because we want to end our stay there and "say our goodbye's" from there.

 

[Upatnoon]

You are better off doing some planning about HOW you will tour the parks instead of just looking at a number.

You can get a lot done with a high crowd number and you can get little done with a low crowd number.

The numbers are somewhat useful as a warning to people planning to go on Christmas week or in the middle of March and not knowing it will be busy, but overall I think they are the least useful metric for planning a visit.

Everyone is looking for the shortcut to low crowds and they are easy to understand, so much discussed and pondered over.