I have been looking at WDW Passport.
Many schools up here in the northeast had their last day of classes last week. A few are still finishing up, or have final exams and graduations later this month. I would expect attendance to continue to swell over the next couple of weeks as people from this part of the country make their celebratory "end of the year" or "graduation" trips to Disney World.
You're right. FWIW, we were at Universal for 4 days leading up to and including Memorial Day this year, and although we could visibly see that the parks were significantly more crowded and congested on Memorial Day than they had been the 3 prior days, anyone measuring the crowds by wait times alone would NOT have noted any difference (nor did Touring Plans, whose historical crowd calendar correctly shows "crowds" - measured by wait times - as being the same or less on Memorial Day as the days leading up to it), since the attractions we saw were all running at full capacity and fully staffed on Memorial Day, whereas they hadn't been on the previous days.
If you put in May 27 on Thrill Data for Magic Kingdom, which tracks wait times every hour of the day, you can definitely see that wait times were about on par with a crowd level of 3. Compare that with Epcot and wait times were higher on average than MK on that specific day.
Until Disney releases the actual number of guests that went through their gates, I'm just going to follow my perception.
What Thrill Data reports on has nothing to do with attendance but rather wait times and LL availability but okay.
Got it! I was fixating on the crowd size since one of the posts mentioned that people were not going to WDW during Memorial Weekend. I know crowd size is subjective, but when you had to sit on the floor while waiting to enter Awesome Planet.....
Lately, the weekends have been slow at MK. It may be that the locals are staying at home due to heat.
Hopefully it will continue to be slow. We're coming next month on a weekend for Tiana.
Wait.. If they are in school that late, when do they start? This year we start on 8/21 and the last day of school is May 16
I used to love those days when I was a kid, though they usually occurred at the beginning of the year. I guess we must not have had AC in the schools then. My kids never get half days for heat, but we get a ridiculous amount of snow days. Perhaps the best thing that came out of the pandemic was that they figured out virtual school. So now when there are snow days, the 1st 3 days are "free" then the next 3 they do virtual school. So like, an hour of school work, maybe a 15 min zoom. And so on. So the last day of school is never extended past the scheduled date. Every year pre pandemic the year was usually extended a week or so due to snow days. We don't get a ton of snow most years, but 85% of the students in the district are on gravel roads so it doesn't take much to make those roads sloppy.
I Think Money has a lot to do with it. By the time you add the park tickets, and we can get Fl resident which right now for summer is really low. then hotels rates & then add Genie +. We usually try 2 trips a year, but we are down to one and we just booked this weekend June 21 - June 24 for a quick 3 day to Disney so I guess we will see how crowds are. We usually never do summer due to heat. which I think plays into the crowds. I know I had no issues getting any dining reservations.
I was shocked too. We had some spare airline credit and dvc points, so we decided to sneak down around July 4th.
I agree!
