We noticed some strange trends in crowds at the Disney World parks!
Disney’s Animal Kingdom
When it comes to Disney World parks, there are a ton of things that can impact the crowds. For example, if there’s a festival, a new attraction, or a special event at a certain park, the crowds are likely to spike. But sometimes, we see weird fluctuations that don’t have an obvious cause!
As of January 9th, 2024, Disney World no longer requires theme park reservations for guests with regular, date-based tickets. But there are still some ticket types that need park reservations, including student group tickets, sport and convention tickets, Disney Military Salute tickets, Florida Resident Disney Thrills tickets, and Annual Passholders.
Annual Pass
We’ve been keeping an eye on the availability of park pass reservations and we noticed something unexpected on Friday, April 26th — reservations were sold out for Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It isn’t necessarily unexpected to see Disney’s Hollywood Studios sold out, but since Disney’s Animal Kingdom is often the last park with reservations still available on busy days, we were surprised to see it booked up when there were still spots open for Magic Kingdom and EPCOT!
Animal Kingdom was sold out!
We were in Animal Kingdom on Friday, so we paid extra attention to the crowds to see if we got “sold out” vibes from them. In some ways, we definitely felt it. It was super crowded when we walked through the Asia section of the park, and at one point during the day, Expedition Everest got up to a 120-minute wait.
Crowds in Asia
We also felt the crowds in Pandora, although that’s fairly normal since it’s home to two of the park’s most popular attractions. We asked a Cast Member near Flight of Passage if it felt like a sold-out day in the park and she said it did, both due to long wait times at the attractions and just feeling more crowded in general.
Pandora Crowds
But even though we definitely noticed the crowds in some areas, there were other times that it didn’t feel “sold-out” to us at all. For example, we saw super short lines for both Joffery’s and Starbucks. This might be because of the large number of school groups and athletic groups visiting at the time, which don’t necessarily follow the same traffic trends as other types of guests.
Crowds Near Dinosaur
We’ll continue to keep an eye on the crowd trends as we get closer to the summer months in Disney World, so stay tuned to DFB to stay in the loop on what to expect for your next Disney vacation!
Something WEIRD Is Going On With the Crowds at Disney World
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Just got back from WDW, and NONE of the parks were as crowded as they used to be. And the shops have substantially fewer display racks, variety of stock, or customers. The food quality was down too. Overall it was a disappointment except for the transportation which the years of construction and reorganization have paid off. The buses are now reliable and useful.