Avoid Ski Week Crowds at Disney
One of the busiest weeks of the year 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.
February 14, 2025 Update: After a magnificently malevolent Villaintine’s Day, it’s now Valentine’s Day. Or, as it’s known in some circles, the start of Ski Week. No, I’m not just making up random new holidays (as would be my right). Ski Week is a thing, and it starts today.
We’ve already covered what to expect during this year’s break in High Crowds & Wait Times Warning: Worst Week of Winter 2025 Coming to Walt Disney World! However, we also wanted to revisit the topic because we’ve heard from a handful of readers confused about the term “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 17-21, 2025.
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. It’s often the case that Mardi Gras falls 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, 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.
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 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 another reason why February 14-23, 2025 and February 13-22, 2026 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 2025 & 2026 (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. (See our list of the Best & Worst Weeks to Visit Disneyland & Disney California Adventure in 2025 & 2026.) 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 14-23, 2025 will end up being at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland (if at all possible, you might also want to avoid February 24, as Mondays are always the busiest day of the week on both coasts–but it’s not part of this break). 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 2025, we’d expect lower wait times year-over-year at both Walt Disney World and Disneyland due to “revenge travel” burning out. In the case of both, there’s also to be people postponing trips for various reasons. In California, that’ll be due to Disneyland’s 70th Anniversary. In Florida, it’ll be Universal’s Epic Universe opening. Both of those occur in May 2025, meaning a lot of families will drop winter and spring break trips in favor of summer vacation. More families might opt to actually go skiing instead of taking theme park trips.
Accordingly, Ski Week crowds in the 6/10 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? 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!
You and your family might like to try Colo or Utah skiing at least once. I am a 69 yr old Grandma and get to ski 2 days per year. Living in Kansas City we are able to drive to Colo in one day. A typical ski trip with our children would be at Easter. As a teacher I would need to follow the school schedule. We would drive as far as Hays Kansas after school into evening. The next morning we would drive to Salida Colo to ski Monarch, staying at a local motel or condo. Monarch has all natural snow, spectacular scenery on the continental Divide and a reasonable, dependable childrens program. The was a kids ski package of lesson, equipment and lift The group class was never over 6 kids. Our daughters skied with the Easter Bunny, or helped hike eggs when they got older. They loved playing in the snow and learning to ski. We would ski 3 days, driving to Colo Springs after the last ski days. Then drive back to Kansas City the next morning. I’ve been on busses with school kids, church groups, and Kansas City Ski Club groups. When our kids were in HS and college renting a condo for the group and driving to Steamboat, Keystone, Copper, or Winter Park
Discounts are different now. I hold an IKON pass and an EPIC. To get the best pricing I decide early in the season on the resort for the best pricing. I load my 2 days onto whatever pass I need for that resort. I really try not to ski on the weekend, less crowded and better lodging prices. We fly instead of risking the unexpected hazards winter driving. It is still an expensive trip but I am glad that we were able to introduce our girls to the sport. They enjoyed figure skating in Ogden UT, Breckenridge Co, Beaver Creek, and on the lake at Keystone on assorted trips as an evening activity in correlation with skiing.
We just returned from a week in DW with our children and grandchildren. We took our own children about every 3 years back in the 90’s and early 2000’s. Both types of vacation I think were an important part of their see America childhood experience. We are not fabulous skiers but I cherish the memories of skiing with the kids and their random snow play and enjoying the mountains as a family.
Ski week isn’t an affluent district thing. We didn’t have it in Aliso Niguel district (affluent) did have it in Oceanside (NOT affluent) and now have half a vacation in Vista (sort of in the middle).
Was it officially called Ski Week in Oceanside? Or do you mean that you had the break there but not Aliso Niguel?
Because the break itself doesn’t seem to be indicative of affluence–it’s the naming that is.
Maine resident here, and I can attest that February vacation (as well as April vacation) have been a thing since I was a young lad in school (I’m 62). We got a full week off (President’s week), and typically the 3rd week of April. As school doesn’t finish the year until mid June, it always seemed to make sense to break the winter/spring semester up, with two school breaks. As a teenager, I would see many of my friends at WDW during the February break, so I always thought the rest of the nation followed the same school patterns, but as I got older (and went to college) I realized a longer break in March (spring break) was the norm, and it was pretty much the northeast (NJ northward) that seemed to follow the February/April break model.
In Canada, the 3rd Monday of February is a holiday. Different provinces call it different things. Here in Alberta, it’s Family Day. A lot of schools tack teachers convention onto the holiday and we get the whole week off. We often visit Disneyland this week. In fact we did in 2023 as my son’s University had “Reading Week” at the same time as Family Day/Teachers convention. We’d never take the family to WDW for less than 10 days, but Disneyland is totally doable.
Almost all of Western New York has President’s Week off. We used to get 2 weeks at Easter, but parents took extra time at President’s Day because it was cheaper to escape the snow pack to Florida. Every upper class suburbanite mother used to book a trip to Florida. Now, they do that once, and then go to more exotic, out of the country places that they can be assured will be warm during February and make pretty social media pics. That’s definitely the new posh elitist way. I’m still more than pleased with Disney.
So growing up in southern NY we had a February break and an April break. Now in Atlanta, it’s also that way for almost all the public schools. But a bunch of the private schools in Atlanta actually have a 1st week of March break. (during which a Lot of folks go skiing… or somewhere sunny…. or
Disney). We did a 2019 Disney Trip that February Presidents break ( a little after Presidents day for us – so it actually was Thursday – Sunday, during the Princess Half). And it was definitely CROWDED. Best day for crowds was actually the Sunday of the half marathon at Epcot, even with the race. (We still had a blast though – lots of planning and it was our first family trip there).
My kids were in the NYC school system when “Heat Week” was introduced to save the City money. Apparently the teachers liked the time off and the name was changed to “Teacher Appreciation Week.” Now “Teacher Appreciation week is a National event in May. So the NYC schools will have off from February 19th to 25th this year. It’s now called “Mid Winter Recess.” You can verify it on the 2023/24 NYC school calendar. In addition, I believe schools on Long Island, NY may also be off those same dates. That might also add to the crowds in the parks.
Long Island NY has had President’s week off for 40+ years. I’m sure it has been a thing in other North East districts also. It was definitely popular to use that week for a Disney trip to get away from the cold (and presumably less crowds than Christmas).
Vermont has Winter Break that will be 2/26 to 3/6 this year. It used to be known as Sugaring Break (as in tapping sugar maples and making syrup and maple sugar). Nowadays it culminates with Town Meeting Tuesday and voting (School gyms and cafeterias are use as polling stations). we’re usually out the week after most other schools’ breaks.
In the UK its call half term , but typically it’s when senior schools do their ski school trips so it’s a week everyone without kids avoids.
Resharing this higher up in the comments since it keeps being mentioned and I think it’s interesting:
“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/
I grew up in MD and we had a week off in February called Energy Conservation Week. Normally the 2nd week of February and we would drive down to DW.
Yeah, back in the day that was called Heat Week. When I was a kid in the 80s it was just Midwinter break and private schools observed it as well. We always went down to Disney during that time. The west coast just caught up to the northeast.
Louisiana resident here. Growing up, Mardi Gras break meant 1 of 3 things depending on your family’s tradition…attending Mardi Gras parades and chilling the rest of the week, going to Disney World, or going skiing. Even though we are a good distance away, you would be surprised how many Louisiana folks go skiing for Mardi Gras break. Never called it ski week since we have the local holiday but if you were leaving town for the week, it was always either to Disney World or Colorado/Utah.
“Even though we are a good distance away, you would be surprised how many Louisiana folks go skiing for Mardi Gras break.”
You’re right, I am very surprised!
When I moved from Michigan to Indiana, I was told that people don’t ski in “the South.” (That’s also right–some people south of Indianapolis consider Indiana the South…which makes zero sense to me, but whatever!)
As a native New Orleanian, this is quite true. Yes, there is a dedicated base of skiers in Southeastern Louisiana, and that 3-pronged description was indeed how it was growing up: Mardi Gras at home, Disney World, or skiing in Aspen or Vail (mostly). All of this remains true, but it has also expanded to add out of the country vacations as well.
NYC Schools have been off for a week in mid February since the 1970s. It started as an energy-saving measure during the oil crisis. It was more economical for schools to shut down their utilities for the entire week, as opposed to closing for two days on Lincoln’s birthday and Washington’s Birthday. It is commonly referred to as the “Presidents Week Break” in NY. And it is widely known to be a very popular Disney week for New Yorkers.
In Truckee, CA (a top skiing destination) it was called Ski Skate Week. It was a chance for the kids who enjoyed skiing a chance to go during the week when the tourists weren’t there and for them to not miss so much school. The rest of us used it as an early spring break if we could get out of town.
Is the ‘skate’ part of that for hockey or ‘skating’ out of town?
I’m in metro Atlanta and we’ve had a mid winter break that week of February for years. Disney is a big destination.
It’s a New England thing too. MA/CT/RI all are the same week, and NH the week after. I’ll add that for a lot of the skiing season pass holders will go to Disney instead of skiing that week since it’s so busy.
Mississippi just got a 3 week Christmas Break and we’ll get a week in March for Spring Break, and another 4 day break for Easter. Then our schools are generally out for the summer by May 20th. we do not really need another week in February 🙂
MA and other NE states took the third week of Feb off, beginning on President’s Day. We were lucky to live in NH who took the following week off. The best deal ever for NH! We had the slopes to ourselves, as well as other winter vacation attractions. It was also waaaay better if going to Disney World. So, Ski Week under any name is a thing.
NYC and much of CT has that week off. It’s called mid-winter break and originated in the 70s when schools needed to save money on heating oil.
When I taught in Chicago in the early 2000s, at a private school, there was a mid-winter break in February that was absolutely known as “Ski Week”. Granted, many families took off for warmer weather, but skiing was the primary focus. I had never heard of it and assumed it was a wealthy school thing, but in the years since, the majority of the schools I have worked in have had a winter break around the Presidential holidays.
Perhaps Megatron will learn to ski early, seeing as though she has deep Midwestern roots. 😉
“Perhaps Megatron will learn to ski early, seeing as though she has deep Midwestern roots.”
Megatron’s mom is going to have to learn to ski in order for that to happen! Sarah and I have gone skiing together exactly once and, uh, it did not go well. Turns out there is a very big difference between growing up in Michigan versus Indiana when it comes to skiing!
We’ve lived in Washington state for decades and have never heard of mid-winter break referred to as ski week.
And here I was, thinking that “Ski Week” at Disney was being set aside for those of us whose names end in Ski!
So do you go by Mr. Lebowski or the Dude…or His Dudeness…or El Duderino if you’re not into the whole brevity thing?
Sorry Tom, but that “Ski” comment has been percolating behind my eyeballs ever since you mentioned “Ski Week”! I just couldn’t let it pass. Low hanging fruit and all that! Not to conflate two of your columns, but that pic of your wife and daughter chilling on the bed in the “Smallest Disney Room” was absolutely precious! You sure have a talent for catching and framing moments! Don’t know if we could hack that “Smallest Room” for any amount of time tho. Space has always been our thing, even on vacation.