Avoid Ski Week Crowds at Disney
One of the busiest weeks of 2024 will soon arrive at Disney, to the surprise of many tourists who have never even heard of “ski week” and expect winter to be off-season in the parks. This post covers dates to avoid, why it’ll be so busy, what the heck ski week even is and who is celebrating this holiday.
Let’s start with the good news. Statistically speaking, January and February contain some of the slowest weeks of the year at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland. This is particularly pronounced in California, where the 4-5 week window between mid-January and mid-February has been among the slowest stretches of the year for each of the past 2 years.
The bad news is that longtime fans expecting low attendance levels across the board during January or February are setting themselves up for disappointment. These two months are not what they were a decade ago, when the ‘sleepy off-season’ started after Christmas and continued until spring break. In Winter Is Not Off-Season at Walt Disney World, we explain how January and February crowds have grown since ~2017, and what’s the new normal for this time of year.
One of these particularly bad time frames is known as “Ski Week.”
I’m going to be totally honest with you–I hadn’t even heard of this until last year. You know how there are some things you never hear about, but once you do, you start hearing about them over and over again? To the point that you wonder, how did I go so many years of my life without ever hearing about this before?!
Anyway, that’s the story of me and Ski Week. It’s one of those things to which I was totally oblivious for ages, and now I hear about it all the time. (I like to joke to Sarah this type of thing is proof there’s a glitch in The Simulation. Speaking of which, ask Sarah how much she loves to hear me talk about The Simulation!)
For those of you who haven’t heard about Ski Week, it’s pretty much what the name suggests: a week when people going skiing. More specifically, it’s a week when a lot of schools are out of session for a break that’s primarily used to going skiing.
It’s our understanding that Ski Week is a West Coast thing, which makes sense given that most of America’s destination ski resorts are out west. Suffice to say, there probably aren’t a lot of schools in Alabama that are celebrating Ski Week. Obviously, students are not required to go skiing during this time–even the beach celebrates Ski Week!
This coming winter, school districts that offer Ski Week will be on recess February 19-23, 2024.
I won’t pretend to be a sudden authority on Ski Week, but what we’ve heard from friends is that Ski Week started as a long weekend for Presidents’ Day and became “a thing” because so many families were pulling their kids out of school for the entire week that districts adjusted accordingly and started giving the entire week off.
Again, I have no clue if this origin story is true, but it certainly checks out in reviewing school district calendars. A 1998 story from the San Francisco Chronicle, referring to the time as “hooky week,” would seem to corroborate.
According to that article, the trend started in Marin County’s 19 school districts about 20 years ago (from 1998) and increased to at least 33 of 154 Bay Area school districts giving students a nine-day holiday (again, as of 1998). Since then, it’s reportedly become more common and spread beyond California’s Bay Area.
It’s also my understanding that “Ski Week” is the colloquial or legacy name for this break. That the parents call it Ski Week because that’s what it was when they were kids and that’s the purpose of the break, but the school districts themselves typically refer to it as Mid-Winter Break.
(A full week of Mid-Winter Break is definitely a thing outside of the West Coast. In past research for crowd calendars, I’ve found several major districts in the Northeast and a few in the upper Midwest that also offer this. I can’t find any connection to those weeks and skiing, but the result is the same.)
In researching Ski Week, I stumbled upon multiple articles arguing that the term is “elitist,” including that aforementioned article from 1998 in the San Francisco Chronicle. If something was controversial 25 years ago, you better believe it’s only gotten more contentious! (I might have wasted several hours going down an online rabbit hole reading about Ski Week in newspaper archives. It really captured my curiosity, for some reason.)
The term Ski Week being something of a relic of the past would also help explain why I’m just starting to hear about it. For one thing, I’ve yet to find a single school district calendar that actually lists it as Ski Week. Even on the West Coast, every district that has the full week off calls it Mid-Winter Break/Recess or Presidents’ Break/Recess.
For another thing, although I’ve reviewed school district calendars from Northern and Southern California for years, I’ve focused on the largest public schools. If all of these articles are to be believed, those are not the ones that have Ski Week off. It’s the smaller and more affluent or private schools that do.
Finally, our circumstances are now different as we’ve become parents and started doing parent things. Namely, we’re talking to a lot more people. (I guess that’s how this works? Suddenly I’m going to be in a bunch of parent groups and become friends-by-default with the other dads? Here’s hoping they like football.) So perhaps it’s less a glitch in The Simulation and more a blind spot/knowledge gap.
Against that backdrop, you can probably surmise that Ski Week has more of an outsized impact on Disneyland than it does Walt Disney World. At least, that’s our guess. Ski Week is primarily a West Coast break, and disproportionately a California thing. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a large impact on Walt Disney World, though.
For the last two years, crowd levels have actually been higher at Walt Disney World than Disneyland during Ski Week. However, this is almost certainly a matter of correlation rather than causation. As intimated above, Presidents’ Day falls during Ski Week. Last year (and 3 of the last 4 years), Mardi Gras has also fallen around the week of Presidents’ Day.
As Walt Disney World fans undoubtedly know, Mardi Gras is a big deal for school districts in the Southeast. On our highly scientific scale of LSU and Saints shirts spotted in the parks, basically half the state of Louisiana visits Walt Disney World that week. Mardi Gras is basically Ski Week for jesters!
Not only that, but the Disney Princess Half Marathon Weekend usually encompasses the weekend after Presidents’ Day. This is a popular runDisney event that people travel to attend. On top of that, there are usually a couple of major youth sporting tournaments at the ESPN Wide World of Sports around Presidents’ Day.
This means there are two popular long weekends for Walt Disney World visitors back-to-back plus the week of Mardi Gras, all on top of one another. We’ve written about the crowds around this time of year at Walt Disney World on multiple occasions (see Mardi Gras Crowds at WDW or Worst Week of Winter is Coming from last year), and for years we’ve warned about both that and Presidents’ Day in our February Crowd Calendar for Walt Disney World. Really the only thing new here is the Ski Week angle.
It’s also impossible to assess the impact of Ski Week on Walt Disney World because you can’t separate it out from everything else on that list. It is no doubt contributing to crowds. This is especially true in an era when barriers to travel are lower and the Disney fandom is increasing bicoastal. (There’s a reason Breeze Airways offers nonstop Orange County to Orange County flights!)
There’s also the practical reality that not everyone likes to ski, and that California is colder than Florida in the winter–making Walt Disney World a nice reprieve from the weather. Anecdotally, we know Californians who will be visiting Walt Disney World for their not-so-Ski Week in 2024.
Nevertheless, it’s a near certainty that Ski Week has a bigger impact on Disneyland. Even though the overall crowd level has been lower in the California parks that week during the last few years, there also aren’t the other contributing factors. Mardi Gras isn’t really a thing in California. There is runDisney race nor do the parks host youth sporting events. It’s pretty much just Presidents’ Day and Ski Week that cause higher crowd levels at Disneyland.
With that said, there are other factors that can further exacerbate the Ski Week crowds at Disneyland. The first is Magic Key blockouts, or lack thereof. There isn’t a single tier of Annual Pass that’s blocked out the entire week. Only the lowest tier is blocked out on Presidents’ Day and the following Friday. The next highest tier has additional blockouts the weekends before and after. The Believe Key is only blocked out February 17, and the Imagine Key is valid for all dates.
To make matters worse, discounts are not blocked out for those travel dates. This isn’t really such a big deal for room discounts, as there are only three on-site hotels at Disneyland and very limited room inventory on the deals, especially as compared to Anaheim as a whole. I’d hazard a guess that hotel discounts have zero impact on crowd levels at Disneyland.
It’s a totally different story with ticket deals, though. During that timeframe, there’s both the 2024 Southern California Resident Disneyland Ticket Deal and a special offer on theme park tickets for kids. There’s one version of the SoCal ticket that’s only valid Mondays through Thursdays, but aside from that, there’s no additional blockout during Ski Week for either of these discounts.
Ultimately, we’re putting Ski Week on the radar of Disney fans as yet another reason why February 16 to February 25, 2024 will be very busy at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland. This shouldn’t be as necessary for Florida fans, as these dates already made our list of the Best & Worst Weeks to Visit Walt Disney World in 2024 & 2025 (on the ‘worst’ side of the ledger) and we’ve been warning of crowds around this timeframe for years.
However, we haven’t extended that warning for Disneyland to nearly the same degree, beyond pointing out that Presidents’ Day is a holiday weekend. What we’ve found in the past is that crowds during the middle of the winter “off-season” have caught even longtime Disney fans by surprise, so we figured you could use all the warning you could get.
Not many people have Presidents’ Day off work, so unless you have kids who have a school recess, it might not register as a holiday that would meaningfully impact attendance. It’s not exactly like Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s Eve–weeks that everyone (or so it seems) has off. It’s one of those lower profile holidays that doesn’t attract a lot of attention, but nevertheless has an outsized impact on crowds–a lot like Veterans Day in November.
The degree to which a couple of states or a region having a school break can impact crowd levels is actually pretty significant. As mentioned above, Mardi Gras is a prime example of this–a popular travel period for the Southeast that has a big impact on crowds. (This is most evident when separated from Presidents’ Day, as it will be this year.)
The same thing happens with Jersey Week, which is a big break for New Jersey schools that has a surprisingly significant impact on crowd levels at Walt Disney World. If you don’t live in the locations where these breaks are common, they are understandable blind spots. Given that and the interesting (I think) background about Ski Week, I thought this was worth highlighting.
The open question is just how bad February 16-25, 2024 will end up being at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland. This past year, the Florida parks were 9/10 for the week as a whole and California parks were 8/10 for the week. In both cases, that was before pent-up demand really started exhausting itself. For 2024, we’d expect lower wait times year-over-year at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland due to “revenge travel” burning out.
Crowds in the 7/10 to 8/10 range are more likely, which isn’t terrible relative to real peak weeks. However, as contrasted with the rest of the winter “off-season” it’s quite the jump. Suffice to say, we recommend planning your January and February visits accordingly to avoid the “surprise” spike in attendance. If it’s too late for that, do what you can to position yourself to beat the potential crowds!
Planning a Southern California vacation? For park admission deals, read Tips for Saving Money on Disneyland Tickets. Learn about on-site and off-site hotels in our Anaheim Hotel Reviews & Rankings. For where to eat, check out our Disneyland Restaurant Reviews. For unique ideas of things that’ll improve your trip, check out What to Pack for Disney. For comprehensive advice, consult our Disneyland Vacation Planning Guide. Finally, for guides beyond Disney, check out our Southern California Itineraries for day trips to Los Angeles, Laguna Beach, and many other SoCal cities!
YOUR THOUGHTS
Are you in school district that has Ski Week off? Is it actually called Ski Week on the calendar, or is it referred to as Mid-Winter Break/Recess? Have you visited the parks during this week in the past? Any parks, times of day, or days of the week noticeably worse than the others? What’s your expectation for February 16-25, 2024? Do you agree or disagree with our assessment? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing your feedback–even when you disagree with us–is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
My district is close to Big Bear in CA-we have ski clubs and have students who leave early to go to “ski school” but we don’t get this week off. I’ve never heard that week called ski week but I’m sure it is in more affluent areas. Kids still go to school for at least 180 days-it just gets spread out differently depending on the district. I would say any week that includes a school holiday is always going to be busy but if you plan, you can still have a great time. We went on the most rides we’ve ever been on Easter weekend-Genie+ was a must!
I teach in a public school district in Washington State that does take midwinter break for a full week. My family will be in Disney World for that week this year, but we always end up taking vacations during “teacher breaks”, so we are never in the parks during lower attendance times, and we are very used to living that Genie+ & smart strategy life. That said, we are Disneyland people, and this will be our first big family trip to WDW. I have no idea if crowds at World “hit different” or if it feels about the same. What I do know is that showing up expecting low crowds (which we did once in mid-January at Disneyland only to find that the Main St. Electrical Parade was making its grand return and therefore the passholder crowds were incredibly intense) is a recipe for disappointment and frustration. Accepting the crowds in advance, studying up on key strategy (this blog is amazing), and deciding to be happy and embrace the mayhem, has honestly made all the difference.
Also, unrelated to this post, I love your photographs! They are just wonderful.
“…which we did once in mid-January at Disneyland only to find that the Main St. Electrical Parade was making its grand return and therefore the passholder crowds were incredibly intense…”
If you’re talking about Winter 2017, that was brutal.
It wasn’t just the return of MSEP, although that was obviously the biggest factor. They also offered a better than normal SoCal ticket deal (basically an extra free day) and did a huge marketing blitz because there were internal fears about post-60th Anniversary crowds. They missed the mark completely with that forecast, as the popularity of the 60th was like a springboard for the years to come.
(Thanks for the kind words, too!)
I’m over 70 years old. We had February and April vacations when I was a kid here in Massachusetts! Always the third week of the months, coinciding with Presidents Day and Patriots Day (a MA holiday). And, yes, lots of families go to WDW during those weeks.
I’ve joked with my coworkers who have kids that it seems like FL schools are never in session. [Here comes a back in my day rant lol], but seriously we used to get summer, Christmas break, Thanksgiving and the Friday after, spring break, and then the bank holidays off. Now, there’s a fall break, this midwinter break, Thanksgiving is a full week, and at least in the Panhandle, a lot of these other weeklong breaks start with a working day for the teachers the following Monday, so the kids still have off. I feel like once you add this all together, there’s probably a full extra month that kids are out of school than what I (firmly in the middle of the millenials) had growing up lol. Plenty of opportunities to head to a Disney park!
@Kimberly: Wow! I’m in a Florida School District (St Johns County) and we don’t have off any of the breaks that you mentioned, outside of the typical ones. We don’t get a separate Fall Break, in addition to Thanksgiving. And we don’t get off a full week for Thanksgiving (just 3 days). And we do not get a week off in February or a MidWinter Break. Our next Break isn’t until Spring Break in March. I guess each school district in the state operates differently?! Maybe I should move to your district! LOL
“The same thing happens with Jersey Week”
Literally! Just swap out Presidents’ Day for Veterans’ Day:
A federal holiday that most schools have off but most businesses don’t.
The three-day weekend enables a longer vacation for families at Disney.
The longer vacation becomes a week, noticeably so given the prevalence of weekday/weekend price differences.
I live in the Atlanta suburbs and we have had this week off for years. Not when I was in school but definitely since my teens have been going. We’ve tried WDW a few times that week and let me tell you, BIG MISTAKE. Like you mentioned, it also happened to line up with Mardi Gras, Jersey Week and even Chinese Lunar New Year once. It was hellacious. We’ve since learned our lesson and have made different plans the last few years.
This article was my introduction to the “Ski Week” reference, and I can’t help but chuckle about it. I’m from Maine, where skiing is a season long pursuit, and the entire state’s schools have had this week off for a lot longer than I’ve been alive! It’s such a mainstay that our state university campus that has the largest education major program matches the k-12 school schedule, giving all of their students a vacation in February and April (like Massachusetts, Maine schools also have the third week of April off to coincide with our Patriots’ Day Weekend) so that the education majors don’t have their student teaching schedules blown up. Nevertheless, it has never once been known as Ski Week up here. A glitch in the matrix for me or just more proof that we learn something new everyday? Who knows?!
Michigander here- my kids get a long weekend for ‘midwinter break” February 23-26. We will be in in WDW from Feb 22-March 3. Our first park day is Feb 24, hubby is running the half marathon on Feb 25, and we’ll have the bulk of our park time Feb 26-March 2. I’m really hoping the worst of the crowds are gone by then! I figured it was better than going during the last week of March for spring break at least.
Long time reader, first time poster. I live in NM and lived in CO. I have an elementary aged child. Avid skier with a mountain 15 minutes from doorstep. Ski Week is either a total glitch in the Matrix and the machines are messing with us, or it’s specifically a NoCal thing. Because our friends in SoCal who are magic key holders responded when asked about “Ski Week” like…WHAAAAA?
I wish I had known this 11 months ago when I rented points that can’t b changed
I’m not sure if this is a real reason, but I remember hearing years ago the reason schools in the northeast gave the winter break week was to save money on heating costs during the winter. I question this because I doubt schools are frigid coolers that week, but maybe at one time they really did I cut the heat back for the week.
Here in Delaware there’s just the break the week of Christmas and Spring Break (which here is always the week following Easter.
So I actually stumbled upon this multiple times during my research–it certainly appears to be true.
“In 1977, New York City’s Board of Education unanimously approved closing schools for a week in February during the 1977-78 school year. A memo from the board at that time called the decision “an experiment for the purpose of energy-saving.” (The city was also in the midst of a fiscal crisis, so it didn’t hurt that it would also be money-saving.)”
https://www.wnyc.org/story/301742-why-february/
But you’d still have to keep the schools heated else the pipes would freeze?
New England has had this as February break for at least 35 years …never ever heard it referred to as ski week though. Such expensive flights to Florida that week. New England has that week in February and one in April as well. As an elementary teacher I always had lots of kids who had been in Disney those weeks!
Right! Every New Englander knows to expect bad crowd/travel times anywhere the week starting the 3rd Monday of February and 3rd Monday of April.
Yep, February vacation in the Northeast! Nearly every New England state has school vacations that week. Not sure it really affects Disneyland, but we all absolutely pack WDW! There’s probably more New Englander’s in FL that week than in the Northeast!
NYC public schools have that week off as well! And so, I believe, do most school districts in Westchester. And per the comments above, Long Island. That makes for most of the NY metro area. February break has long been a busy time for NYers to go to Disney World.
In northern NY our districts have that week off, but we call it February break. Lots of families go to Disney that week and flights are much higher than when we go in January. I’ve never heard the phrase “ski week,” and I live 45 mins from a town that hosted the Winter Olympics twice.
Was coming here to comment the same thing. Central NY Dad here. We have February break too. I also grew up in Maine and it was the same timing – February break.
FAST state testing for Florida schools started today, 1/11 (little one’s reading FAST test was today) through mid next week (little one’s math FAST test in next Tuesday but we will be staying at a DVC resort so that will have to be a makeup test later on.) Since it is DVC we couldn’t change the dates and they just told parents 2 weeks ago the FAST dates at our school. This always effects WDW attendance mid-January.
Sorry to be obtuse, does it decrease attendance or increase it?
WDW decrease. It is why points are cheaper that week to use.
Midwest private school mom here and it’s not called ski week here and many schools don’t give the full week, but many, many families take the full week and the vast majority go skiing.
Next up: Vacations for “National Jello Week!” (Yes, there was once a National Jello Week.) Essentially, people will take time off to celebrate anything. We actually found Valentines Day Week to be fine last year. We all have our favorite times. Just go when you can and enjoy what you can. Our motto has always been that overthinking can ruin our fun . . . . so except that we avoid summer like the plague, we don’t really worry. We go when we can get the resort venue we want.
In Epcot it’s called jello-shot week
I’ve never heard the term “ski week” in Massachusetts. We call it February vacation. But it is a huge travel week for families up here. Flights costs to Orlando and other warm places tend to be insane. So much so that we decided to switch it up and go to Disneyland for that week this year, thinking it would be easier…I’m apparently an unwitting test case for your theories! I can say that flights from Boston and DVC booking was cheaper and easier than prior February vacation trips to WDW.
We are on Long Island and have always had a week off in February. We call it midwinter break, I’ve never heard ski week before. Everyone seems to go to the Florida or the Carribean that week. I never did and was always so jealous of the kids that came back with a sunburn!
Fellow Long Islander here (and teacher who gets this vacation), and I agree, I’ve never heard the term “ski week”, it’s “midwinter recess”, and you’re right, it’s the week when everyone goes South to get warm and tan! I know two teachers who are going with their families to Disneyland that week this year, two going to Disney World, and one going to Universal Studios, along with a bunch going to the Florida coast, the Caribbean and Puerto Rico. A lot of my students go on cruises that week also.