Friday! Surprising DGD for her 10th birthday
Actually, I think we are seeing during January that it can. When you compress open hours and give fewer hours to do the same things that folks are doing with 2, 3 more hours each day, it does make it feel more crowded and does tick wait times up a notch. Drastically? No. But trying to cram in to 8 hours what someone else gets 10, 11 hours to do does make a difference (just tossing numbers out there, no idea if those are accurate operating hours). I do think it's one of the many things that is driving wait times up so far this year.Nerd alert response - sorry!
My logic below is flawed given Disney’s tendency to change hours late these days.... but ‘generally speaking’ I look at MK hours as my cheap gut check of overall crowd possibilities.
For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that March MK hours are set. In the context of your question, we can see what current published MK hours “tell us” about March below (the chart shows the total number of open MK hours, not including EMH).
Your week in question is in orange. At the moment, that week has slightly lower park hours than the week before and after (2 hours less on average). Your week has mostly 9AM openings and 11PM closings. The weeks around you have a lot more 8AM openings and 12AM closings. Disney doesn’t do 8AM openings unless there’s a reason.
Will any of this make a difference in wait times and how things feel? Probably not. Not at all in fact. But, I do think hours can give us a few subtle clues as to what Disney is thinking.
Granted - ALL of this could totally become useless if Disney changes their hours that week, which is always a possibility!
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6-8 is a slow time at Disney these days.
But yes, I would guess less busy than the two weeks following it. Chicago suburbs have spring break the week of 3/24.
Nerd alert response - sorry!
My logic below is flawed given Disney’s tendency to change hours late these days.... but ‘generally speaking’ I look at MK hours as my cheap gut check of overall crowd possibilities.
For the sake of discussion, let’s assume that March MK hours are set. In the context of your question, we can see what current published MK hours “tell us” about March below (the chart shows the total number of open MK hours, not including EMH).
Your week in question is in orange. At the moment, that week has slightly lower park hours than the week before and after (2 hours less on average). Your week has mostly 9AM openings and 11PM closings. The weeks around you have a lot more 8AM openings and 12AM closings. Disney doesn’t do 8AM openings unless there’s a reason.
Will any of this make a difference in wait times and how things feel? Probably not. Not at all in fact. But, I do think hours can give us a few subtle clues as to what Disney is thinking.
Granted - ALL of this could totally become useless if Disney changes their hours that week, which is always a possibility!
View attachment 307297
And Len Testa talked about this in an interview on the Dis. Disney is under-staffing the parks and the parks feel overall more crowded because of it. He talked about how they've looked into the data and how there like wasn't more people in the parks in January and February yet we saw overall higher wait times because Disney is purposely lowering the capacity.
