Touring Plans Accuracy

[MomOTwins]

Interesting comments here. Many seem to suggest Spring Break this year can be compared to other years. I have noticed many high schools and colleges are skipping a spring break altogether. I would be surprised if the crowds are ridiculously crazy. We did not find crowds awful on NYE, we go every year.

I expect the same for March. Lines and waits will be long due to physical distancing but I bet we don’t see shoulder to shoulder masses at the choke points as in years past. My 2 cents...

I take your point on colleges, but another thing to consider is that a LOT of people with kids age K-12 who still do get a break this year had their spring break trips cancelled last year due to the park closure. That makes me suspect a lot of them may be rescheduling for this year. In other words, we could be seeing two years worth of guests rather than one. And you also have to take account of the vaccine making high-risk people who have been vaccinated more comfortable with travel.

Definitely not easy to predict--so many factors that make this year not like other years.

 

[Tom_E_D]

Crowd calendars are bunk in the era of Covid.

Crowd calendars were bunk in the pre-Covid era too, at least if you were looking at them to determine which park to go to on which day.

 

[Tom_E_D]

Touring Plans gives Epcot a 2 on March 18th and a 1 on the 20th at AK. How accurate is Touring Plans?

TP has a history of changing their predictions multiple times, then comparing their final prediction to the actual wait times and boasting when they're only off one or two levels. I wouldn't plan which parks to go to based on TP's predictions, especially their predictions a few weeks ahead of time.

I wouldn't rely on anyone else's predictions either.

 

[disneydentist]

A crowd level of two at Epcot means wait times of 20-95 minutes. That might not be unrealistic. A level 6 is 25-120 minutes.

 

[tinkerbelletreasure]

It’s pretty much impossible to make accurate predictions right now. They’ve never had to predict a pandemic before and WDW hasn’t been reopened a year to statistical data to go by. Even once we hit summer, capacity has changed since it first reopened. They are bring back more and more things, so it will probably be 2+ years before I think they could accurately predict crowd numbers.

 

[Wosmama6]

Then to OP’s original question it’s not a very good crowd predictor is it? Especially since we’ve all known for weeks before the hours got extended that mid March was going to be crow-a-palooza with spring break for most of Florida and Texas.

It reminds me of that scene in Mean Girls where Amanda Seifreid says “There’s a 90% chance it’s raining right now.”

Yeah, precovid they were super accurate and I never toured without them. Now it's mostly a crapshoot but len's team is in the park every day analyzing and trying to make sense of the current crazy.

 

[Upatnoon]

I've thought about creating my own crowd calendar. It would be free for all to use and every week would have super-low numbers -- except for one week with all 10s -- the week I'm planning to go...

 

[yaya74]

I recently purchased a 3 years subscription of TouringPlan. I have used it everytime when going to Disney and love it.
TP has data analysis everyday on their rides during covid. Most predictions are within 3 minutes and some are within 10 minutes.
Although it is not exact, I thought is good to have a tool to provide some type of educated predication.