Thanks very much. You're all very kind, and we appreciate the support.
We've always tried to do two things with the calendar: make it objective, and be transparent.
By "objective" we mean that our predictions are things that all of us can agree either happened or didn't happen.
For example, we say things like "the average posted wait time at Space Mountain will be 64 to 80 minutes between 10 a.m. and 5 p.m." That's pretty easy to check either through
MDE or with code.
We don't use words like "busy crowds" because those don't mean anything. My grandmother, with the patience of a saint, would wait two hours for Small World. My daughter complains if any line is over 10 minutes. They have two very different definitions of "busy." That's why numbers are important - we can all talk about the parks using the same language to understand what happened. (I feel like I should have quoted Spaceship Earth just now.)
By "transparent" we mean that we show the actual crowd levels that happened, along with what we predicted, every day, for everyone to see. It hurts to be wrong, of course, but transparency motivates everyone to get better.
Of course they're not perfect and can't predict events like weather or ride breakdowns that may affect wait times.
We're looking to add short-term weather predictions to the crowd calendar in 2018. We think we know enough about how rain affects crowds from one day to the next.
Ride breakdowns are an interesting topic. We're adding to the daily crowd report a metric that shows how much of each park's capacity was lost to refurbishments and unscheduled downtime. For parks like DHS and AK, with relatively few ride-based attractions, one or two unscheduled outages can really increase wait times across the park.
Thanks again for the support.
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