Winter Crowds Heat Up at Disney World as Worst Weeks Arrive
It’s been a busy winter at Walt Disney World–a trend that’ll only worsen with the arrival of what’s likely to be the two most crowded weeks. This wait times report shares data for January and February 2024, our observations, plus surprises we’re seeing so far and how this compares with the last two years.
As covered in last month’s crowd report, Winter (Still) Is Not Off-Season at Walt Disney World, it’s been a surprisingly busy start to the year. Since around 2018, winter has had really high highs and relatively low lows. The busier dates have been driven by school breaks, runDisney races, youth sporting events at ESPN Wide World of Sports, and just a general increase of visitors fleeing to Florida to escape cold weather at home.
The slow dates have been due to more or less the opposite of that. School going back into session (and proximity to other breaks, making parents less likely to pull kids out of school), overall lower inbound traveler numbers to Florida versus milder months, lulls in the event schedule, etc. Even as Walt Disney World crowd levels had increased as a whole for winter, there were still sweet spots for visiting.
Accordingly, we expected there to be some great dates to visit in January and February 2024. So long as planners didn’t go in expecting totally ‘dead’ parks with crowd levels on par with what they used to be prior to Winter 2018 (or 2021, which was an anomaly), it’d be a good time to visit.
Between normal trends and the expectation that the exhaustion of pent-up demand would push crowds even lower year-over-year as compared to January and February 2023, there seemed like a few good to great weeks to visit this winter. It’s now safe to say that was some degree of incorrect. Crowds have been heating up over the course of the last month-plus, and that trend is only likely to worsen with what are historically two of the worst times to visit now arriving.
As always, what’s covered in these “crowd” reports is actually posted wait time data that’s pulled from My Disney Experience and compiled into graphs for tracking and comparing various days, weeks, months, and years. A lot can be gleaned from posted wait times, but it’s not necessarily conclusive of in-park congestion or crowds.
There are several other variables that can impact “feels like” crowds, from festivals at EPCOT to weather to guest demographics to ride breakdowns to operational efficiency to time of day or day of the week. (Literally everything on that list would be relevant in Winter 2024 thus far!) Yada yada yada…that’s just a partial list! Beyond that, wait times are often inflated, inaccurate, or otherwise manipulated by Walt Disney World.
In short, wait times are an imperfect measure of Walt Disney World’s raw attendance or crowds–which have increased by several million people over the course of the last decade-plus. With that out of the way, let’s dig into the data and look at Walt Disney World wait times. As always, all graphs and stats are courtesy of thrill-data.com:
We’ll start with a high-level look at the monthly numbers for Walt Disney World as a whole.
The last three months don’t look terrible if you’re looking at the first half of the graph, which has a lot of red. These months are “only” orange. However, that first half is the heart of “revenge travel” and ended up being the worst year ever for Walt Disney World in terms of wait times.
If you look instead at now versus last May through November, you can see a sharp contrast–the parks have been much busier in the last 3 months. (Really more like 2.5 months, since December 2023 started slow but the last two weeks more than made up for that.)
The weekly crowd level view makes the differences easier to spot. The week between Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve was off the charts–slightly busier than the same week year-over-year. The following week that encompasses winter break was still really bad, but not quite as bad as last year. That’s partly a matter of timing, though; this year’s holiday breaks ended earlier.
If you look at the weeks since then, there was really only one slow week and one moderate week. The last three weeks have been above-average. In fact, the last 5 weeks of January and February 2024 have all been busier than the same weeks last year.
That might not seem like a big deal, but it really is. Pent-up demand was still going strong last year through Spring Break, after which point it fell off a cliff. The wait times weren’t as bad as 2022, but they were still elevated. After Spring Break, every week was slower year-over-year in 2023.
That’s why we expected slightly lower levels in early 2024–because those dates were likewise “lapping” the pent-up demand period. Instead, they’ve been busier. (We expected January 28 to February 3, 2024 to be one of the best weeks of the year. Even if you hit Magic Kingdom on January 29 and the other parks on their optimal days, that still would not have been true!)
Above is a look at the daily numbers over the course of the last year.
Although no days the last few weeks have been even remotely on par with the weeks of Christmas, New Year’s, or even the final week of holiday break–but that’s never the case. Those are off-the-charts bad, to the point that they distort crowd levels for more normal times of the year.
A better comparison is to last year’s summer vacation or fall break. The last three weeks have been busier than any time during the summer tourist season, with many dates on par with the briefer but bad fall break window. Winter has also been much busier than the lulls during November or December. In short, it’s been busier than we’d expect this time of year to be–and that’s before the mid-winter break crowds really start to arrive in full force.
We’ll start the park-by-park data with Magic Kingdom, where crowd levels have mostly normalized after several consecutive months of Mickey’s Not So Scary Halloween Party and Mickey’s Very Merry Christmas Party dates during which there’s a “porcupine pattern” to attendance and wait times. Still, there have been about a half-dozen dates this year that have been quite quiet.
Some of these are not easy to explain–and are likely a matter of ride refurbishments & breakdowns, weather, and the changes to park reservations and hopping rules. This was my experience with Magic Kingdom last month, with lots of downtime (both planned and unplanned) plus weather causing even more unpredictability than normal.
On a positive note, at least for anyone who heeded our advice, January 29, 2024 was uncrowded. That was the day that the park closed at 4:30 p.m. for a Cast Member recognition event. This happens every January, and usually is one of the 5 least-busy days of the year as a result. And thus far, that’s accurate–but it was busier than the same date last year and there’s a decent-enough chance that Party Season dates in August and September will be even slower. So even January 29, slow as it was, actually exceeded expectations.
Predictably, it also caused a ripple effect for adjacent dates and other parks. So if you were at Walt Disney World that week and didn’t do Magic Kingdom on January 29, the degree to which the earlier closing displaced crowds negatively impacted you.
Animal Kingdom is coming off its holiday highs, when wait times were absolutely off-the-charts. If crowd levels weren’t capped at 10/10, those dates between Christmas and New Year’s Eve would’ve been like 15/10–they were that much higher than the normal 10/10 range.
Wait times were manageable post-winter break, but there was a spike for the Martin Luther King Jr. Day holiday weekend and several other dates have hit 9/10 or 10/10 crowd levels. This includes the aforementioned crowd displacement on January 29, as well as February 3, which was a truly awful day for DAK.
I was in Animal Kingdom for two of those 9/10 days last month, and they were bad. Shockingly so, to the point that I was surprised they were “only” 9/10. If my experience was representative, I’d expect 7/10 and 8/10 crowd levels there to be pretty miserable, too. This included long waits for attractions that often are easier to accomplish, such as the stage shows having actual lines and Lightning Lanes being valuable at them. Ditto Dinosaur and Kilimanjaro Safaris, which had overflow queues spilling far out their attraction entrances along with triple-digit waits. (Kilimanjaro having 90+ minute waits is not necessarily abnormal, but that being an all-day thing isn’t.)
Then there’s Disney’s Hollywood Studios. After colossal crowds throughout the holiday season, it’s now averaging low-to-moderate crowd levels (in the 3/10 to 6/10 range).
It’s doubtful that any first-timers to the park would “agree” with the data. Hollywood Studios is unpleasant when wait times are “only” moderate–it’s downright miserable at 10/10. DHS simply cannot absorb elevated attendance, and “feels like” crowds can be pretty bad once the crowd level is at 6/10 or above.
Also, the baseline is higher. Disney’s Hollywood Studios is averaging 44 minutes per attraction for 4/10 crowd levels the last few weeks. That’s still much worse than Magic Kingdom’s ~31 minute range, which is due to a disproportionate number of headliners at DHS and not enough ‘small stuff’ that doesn’t draw as long of waits.
It also doesn’t help that Rock ‘n’ Roller Coaster is closed for refurbishment and it seems like multiple breakdowns occur at other attractions throughout the day. Early Entry or nighttime remain the easiest ways to “beat” DHS, followed by (or alongside) Lightning Lanes.
Continuing to EPCOT, where crowd levels are officially high with weekly average crowd levels of 7/10 to 8/10 for the last 3 weeks.
That may not seem awful, but outside of Christmas and New Year’s, this has been the worst 3-week stretch at EPCOT since last Spring Break season. Not only that, but it’s important to emphasize that this is festival season, and there’s a gap between crowd levels as represented by ride wait times and crowd levels as represented by congestion or, say, the average length of a line for a Food Studio at Festival of the Arts.
As a reminder, nothing at EPCOT’s festivals has a posted wait time, so this congestion is not “picked up” by crowd levels. Meaning that locals showing up, wandering around, grazing the food booths, enjoying art and entertainment, but NOT doing a single attraction contribute to congestion but not to crowd levels.
Locals and Annual Passholders at EPCOT are worse for crowdedness, as they’re pretty much always in walkways and not in standby lines. Call it the “EPCOT Effect” or whatever, but it’s noticeable at this park more than any of the others. Anyway, it was an objectively bad 3-week stretch at EPCOT, but subjectively, I’m sure it felt even worse. (There should be a secondary crowd calendar for EPCOT that simply counts cars in the parking lot–several days in the last few weeks involved grass parking, which would basically be a 10/10 on that scale.)
Ultimately, how bad this winter has been so far at Walt Disney World depends upon a few factors: whether you went immediately after Marathon Weekend in the one (1) lull, which days you did each park, and expectations–were you anticipating off-season or above-average crowds, or something in between. While there have been opportunities to beat the crowds and enjoy a near off-season (more like shoulder season) experience, those options have been limited.
On balance and as a whole, our view is that this winter has been worse than expected. Instead of continuing the trend of pent-up demand dying down further, January and February 2024 have mostly reversed course. The most noteworthy part of this crowd report is that the last 5 weeks of January and February 2024 have all been busier than the same weeks last year. When you combine that with our expectation that crowds would drop slightly this winter as compared to last, there’s a significant predictions vs. reality gap.
While it’s still too early to call this a trend that’ll continue for the rest of the year, it is worrisome. As discussed recently in Why Are Walt Disney World Resorts Sold Out in 2024?, Visit Orlando has reported that hotel bookings for 2024 are already outpacing last year by over 5%, and advance airline ticket sales into Orlando are also up in the first quarter of 2024 by roughly 10%.
Those numbers are not conclusive of higher attendance at Walt Disney World, but they certainly aren’t positive signals for anyone hoping for lower crowd levels. (However, it is noteworthy that Disney itself did not discuss forward-looking occupancy or attendance for Walt Disney World on last week’s earnings call; silence usually means it’s not positive–if it were, they’d brag about it.)
In any case, what we might be seeing is a normalization or slight ‘reverberation’ after the pent-up demand of 2022. That 2023 was the ‘off’ year for families that visit semi-frequently, and they’re returning in 2024. Fears of a recession are diminishing, consumer confidence is improving, discounts are getting better, and policies are returning closer to pre-closure norms.
All of this could result in a bounce-back year for Walt Disney World. Or that the company is doing what’s necessary to incentivize fans to return, pulling the correct “levers,” etc. That could all mean that Walt Disney World’s numbers are not “boast-worthy” on the company’s earnings calls, but are trending back upwards after a slow ~8 months from mid-April through mid-December of last year.
Whatever happens in the medium term over the course of 2024, we’re pretty confident that, in the near term, February 2024 only gets worse from here. As we’ve warned before, all bets are off once Mardi Gras, Presidents’ Day, and Princess Half Marathon Weekend roll around. (See Mardi Gras Crowds at Disney World and Avoid Ski Week Crowds at Disney for more.)
Mardi Gras is here now, and there isn’t much of a reprieve until around February 26, 2024 after all of those other breaks and events end. Genie+ prices have already shot up, with the Magic Kingdom and Park Hopper options both priced at $29 since Friday, which is the highest they’ve been since January 4. We expect those prices to increase further next week, along with crowd levels.
That amounts to over 2 weeks of elevated attendance, which could be enough to push average wait times for February 2024 as a whole high enough that this ends up being the worst month since 2022. (It’s only 2 minutes away right now.) Suffice to say, we aren’t predicting the second half of February to be the off-season at Walt Disney World…but then again, we never were. The next two weeks were always expected to be bad–the only real question was and is: how bad?!
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YOUR THOUGHTS
What has your experience been with crowds at Walt Disney World thus far in Winter 2024? Have you been surprised by the wait times or congestion in January or February? Have you encountered ‘dead’ days during this time? Do you agree or disagree with our take on the crowds? If you visited WDW during January or February 2018-2020, what was your experience with wait times then (versus now)? Any questions we can help you answer? Hearing feedback about your experiences is both interesting to us and helpful to other readers, so please share your thoughts below in the comments!
We are currently locals and have spent much more time in Epcot than normal because of Festival of the Arts. We have seen three of the Disney on Broadway evening shows and just love them! And I agree the walkways have been really crowded especially on the weekends!
I’ve stopped trying to pick weeks based on crowd levels, and use threshold markers instead. I avoid weeks where either the average temperature is above 90 or expected crowd levels are above 8.
Gaming the 3-5 levels vs the 6-7 levels has been a fools errand for me even pre-Covid. I use good touring strategy and accept that the parks will never be pleasantly empty given my parameters. (Though the MK on holiday party days with early park closing comes close!)
That’s a smart approach!
We were there 1/27-2/3 and I agree the crowds felt worse this trip. We took your advice and did MK on 1/29 but it still was more crowded than we hoped. HS (1/30) was downright stressful. I can’t imagine going to Disney World without major research and strategy. Luckily, I enjoy those things, so it worked out fine for my group. But I could see how it might be a very unpleasant experience for someone expecting low crowds and with little prep work.
With these new trends emerging, are you going to change your recommendations on which weeks will be best to visit in 2025?
“With these new trends emerging, are you going to change your recommendations on which weeks will be best to visit in 2025?”
Possibly. If so, the most likely outcome will be switching this particular week to earlier in January. I’m somewhat reluctant to do that due to Festival of the Arts, though. I might just add more caveats about crowds.
The reason for not moving around more dates is because, to me, “best” is about so much more than crowds. If it weren’t, that would just be a bunch of weeks in August and September. I could also add another week during the holiday season, but I’d like to avoid ‘weighting’ the calendar too much to any one time of year. That also makes it less useful.
We were at Disney from January 28 to February 3 and were really shocked at the crowds compared to past years. Other than January 29 at MK (thanks Tom for that tip), it was much more crowded than last year or other years we have attended in Jan/Feb. We still had a great time and enjoyed the wonderful weather but not sure we’ll be back in January or February. We overheard lots of conversations about how people were attending in winter due to the heat they experienced last summer. If the heat continues, maybe summer is going to become the new off-season?
I don’t know what I was expecting, but the last week of January didn’t really seem TOO bad compared to the same week in 2020…but our strategy involved early entry, park hopping every 3-4 hours, and not getting in any standby lines with a posted wait longer than 60 minutes. We “only” did 6-8 rides each day, but we weren’t trying to win a challenge or anything, and we got on all our favorites twice.
We went to MK then park hopped to Epcot 1/29, and did Epcot/MK 1/31 and AK/HS/Epcot 2/2. Overall we accomplished the top things on our lists, but definitely found myself thinking MANY times that if this was one of the less crowded times of year, I’d hate to go at a busy time!!
Honestly the weather being good made wait times much more tolerable though. I’d still go this time of year again.
We were there December 27 to January 3rd. We were surprised at the crowds at Animal Kingdom. FoP was over a 5 hour wait. The end of the line was all the way to Lion King. Also Kilimanjaro Safari was wrapped around Tusker House.
Animal Kingdom I thought was the least popular park. We go same time every year, this year AK was so crowded. What is up with AK?
As always, great information! I can’t speak for anyone but our family, but we are now solidly January/February Disney World travelers because we dont want to be there when it’s hot and muggy (we get enough of that here in Houston). Even as it gets more and more crowded I don’t see us pivoting back to another time of year. Maybe more and more people are feeling the same way about the heat?
You are definitely scaring me — going with my 10 year old for her first trip President’s Day week! Our plan is to do Animal Kingdom on Tuesday, MK on Wednesday and Hollywood on Thursday, but have to leave early to get at 7 p.m. flight home.
We were planning on doing Genie on MK only and doing early entry each day, figuring Tron won’t happen, but very much want to do Rise of the Resistance. If we don’t get RotR at 8:20 a.m. on Wednesday, will paying for the LL be pointless b/c the time will be too late for when we need to leave?
Will we need Genie for AK if we don’t plan to do Avatar/Navi, instead early entry to Everest and then Safari?
Have you heard, are Discovery Trails (flamingos) back open?
You’ll be fine.
With regard to Early Entry, make sure you’re at DHS way before 8:20am. EE starts at 8am that day, so you need to arrive (IMO) by 7:30am. This should give you a rough idea of what to expect–just adjust by 30 minutes for the later opening time: https://www.disneytouristblog.com/hollywood-studios-early-entry-strategy-tips/
Early Entry is a huge advantage at Animal Kingdom because it is so early. I would NOT encourage you to skip Pandora, unless you’re just really not interested in those attractions for whatever reason. Here’s a runthrough for that: https://www.disneytouristblog.com/early-entry-animal-kingdom-park-opening-strategy/
You will want Genie+ at MK regardless of Early Entry.
My niece was just there for her dance competition at WWoS and said she thought the parks were “normal” – which I am going to translate from teen speak is- we live in OC, CA and the crowd levels are what we are used to experiencing here.
I think you were the first – and one of the only still – to state that Feb is no longer off season as a general statement. Other sites continue to say for years now it’s a great time to go, which I feel increases crowds and bursts expectations of visitors that go by those publications.
We are going for our annual early June trip. We felt the revenge crowds in June 2022 and the let up of some crowds in June 2023. I think we are going to expect June 2022 crowds when taking into account bookings (although you mentioned not always indicative of park crowds…) but seems like a safe bet.
And I know I am not alone in the appreciation of your posts and I like the length (that’s what she said) because I find them enjoyable. Can’t please everyone I guess….
You go on and on and on and on and on and on …… too freaking much!! Get to the point of the headline already ♀️
Rude!
Tom spends a lot of time trying to analyze and explain trends and expectations so people understand what is going on.
If you want a quick headline, get yourself over to X.
The point of the headline is the headline itself: “Winter Crowds Heat Up at Disney World as Worst Weeks Arrive.” There’s no need to keep reading if one doesn’t care about “how” or “why.”
My initial suspicion was that we’re seeing the results of discounting shifting into the next gear. I thought that there’s an argument to be made that we’ve seen “higher than expected” crowds for long enough to assume that these are long term effects. (Seeing Tom make that argument makes me think I’m not overthinking it!) Quite frankly, the All-Star Resorts are now competitively priced with off-site motels seven days a week, so anyone who’s price watching trips to WDW have got to at least be considering a trip.
That being said, watching rain turn to snow flurries turn to snow fall outside my Mid-Atlantic window while I’m writing this makes me think everyone mentioning the weather is correct, too! Kudos!
We frequently go at the end of January and the fall as well.
We were just there a couple weeks ago. We were booked from Jan 21st through the 29th. The crowd we experienced a couple weeks ago was definitely brutal compared to the same week last year. In Magic Kingdom we had a terrible time just trying to cross from one side of a walk way to the other. It was a nigtmare. It was just a sea of people everywhere all the time, and alot of ride closures that week in Magic Kingdom made things worse.
We bought Genie but still couldn’t always get on the rides we wanted and we did get a reservation it was never close to when we wanted to ride, not by a long shot.
Even trying to shop in the shops on mainstream was a headache, same with Disney Springs. We just couldn’t get a break from the crowds anywhere.
It may sound crazy to some, but we left 3 days early! We drove to WDW this time, so we had our car. We just packed up and drove back to PA 3 days early.
We’ve been to Disney so many times before so we’ve experienced big crowds, low crowds and everything in bewteen in the past but this trip felt difderent. We just chalked this one up to a loss and drove home early.
I will say, if these kinds if crowds persist we’ll probably stop going altogether. I love Walt Disney World, but encountering that level of crowd on the regular would be a deal breaker for us. I don’t speak for everyone, but sadly, it just wasn’t fun for any of us this time.
We went that Jan. 28-Feb. 3 week, and while the crowds were a little higher than I hoped, I’d still recommend that week (the Jan. 30 date was an anomaly, though). The weather was great, we rode basically everything we wanted (early entry helped), kids met plenty of characters with little wait time, and while we didn’t go crazy with reservations, booked the four places we wanted with no problems (Topolinos, Whispering Canyons, Via Napoli, Trattoria).
“The weather was great…”
This and EPCOT’s Festival of the Arts are why I’m reluctant to stop recommending that week, or shifting to earlier in January (before FARTs starts). I’m really on the fence, though. I doubt these crowd levels are what anyone would expect from one of the “best” weeks of the year. At the very least, there needs to be more of a warning about the potential for elevated attendance.
We were there 2/4 to 2/10 and I can confirm it was insane! SO much busier than the same timeframe in 2022. All of the crowd predictors said it would be a low to moderate week, which is why we chose it. One thing that’s interesting to me: I noticed a few weeks before our trip that the hotels were completely booked. Now I’m thinking that might be a good barometer to check in the future before a trip, i.e. if hotels are completely packed, maybe I’ll choose a different week. Do you think hotel occupancy would be a pretty good indicator for someone who’s trying to avoid high crowd times?
Not necessarily. It’s probably a good sign the parks won’t be dead, but it doesn’t get you all the way there to heavy/high crowds.
The ‘why’ of that is covered in this recent post: https://www.disneytouristblog.com/disney-world-resorts-sold-out/
Any chance you could do these reports for DisneyLand? Curious as to how the two coasts differ and what impacts the wait times.
I was in MK on 1/29 and then we went to Epcot that evening. I’d agree that MK was pleasant but not all the way to ghost town. Epcot in the evening was complete madness. people everywhere and everyone was upset about it. Food lines crazy long (we lucked into a mobile order window at connections eatery that saved the day), Skyliner line all the way back to beach club… Definitely strongly affected by MK early closure.
The whole week (1/27-2/3) was busier than I hoped but we were able to do very well with good strategy and Genie+ choices. I think I only really got unlucky with Rise which went down when I was trying to do the end of day strategy.
“I think I only really got unlucky with Rise which went down when I was trying to do the end of day strategy.”
Oh no! I hope you had a chance to experience it outside of then. I love doing it at the end of the day because most of the time the posted wait time is massively inflated, but it is playing with fire given how much that ride still breaks down.
I’ve done it quite a few times which is why I felt comfortable enough with the riskier strategy and with bouncing before they cleared the line so I could get a seat for Fantasmic. I felt so bad for the first timers in line with me though!
i have march 2nd to march 6th planned, with epcot on march 3rd. i will purchase genie plus, since it is a sunday. hopefully this is the sweet spot, God willing if i can make it there!
thanks
I still think that’s a sweet spot…but I also thought the same thing about late Jan/early Feb, so who knows.
EPCOT will definitely be congested regardless of wait times so close to the start of F&GF.
Your post is spot-on about Epcot. We just got back from 4 days in the parks from 2/7 to 2/10 (group of 10 of us). The first two days were moderate crowds and felt very manageable, especially because our last two trips were in December when crowds were way worse. We did early entry at MK on 2/7 and used Genie, and we were able to do 10 attractions by about 2PM. We walked around Epcot that night and it wasn’t terribly congested, but lines for the booths were pretty bad. Then early entry at AK on 2/8 without Genie, we hit all the main attractions no problem (bought an ILL for Flight of Passage). Crowds at all parks on 2/11 and 2/12 were brutal though, and Epcot in particular was unbearable. Just hordes of people everywhere, including many large groups of adults there to party and drink. Since we had four young kids in our group, we didn’t have the time and patience to wait in any of the lines for the booths, which all looked to be 30 mins or more! Unfortunately Epcot is usually my favorite park and we had planned to check out many of the food and drinks for the festival, but we couldn’t handle these crowds and I just wanted to exit the World Showcase every time we entered. We still had an amazing trip and with Genie and early entry, hardly waited in any long lines for rides. But definitely agree with your post, anyone going to Epcot in the coming weeks with the hope of enjoying the festival food/drinks, be warned!
Thanks for sharing your experiences!
EPCOT definitely seems to be getting hit harder than the other parks right now, even if that isn’t always showing up in the wait times data. Probably a confluence of circumstances–construction wrapping up, Luminous still being new, locals loving Festival of the Arts, more conventions resuming, etc.
We were there both the weekend before MLK day (as a couple) and Feb 3-8 as a family (2 kids < 10). The Feb dates definitely 'felt' worse than Jan which surprised me a bit, but managing family expectations could have played into that. Also, both of these visits were significantly more crowded than the first week in October when we travelled during fall break.
One thing I've noticed this Jan/Feb compared to previous trips last year (Jan & Oct) is an increase in both the large number of student groups (cheer/band/dance/etc) and the number of international travelers and groups. Wondering if both of those took a little longer to bounce back than US family travel did…
I think all of those assessments are right on the money.
We have gone during the same week (last week of January into first week of February) over the last three years. This year was brutal. We hit MK on 1/30 and it was crazy busy compared to the previous two years. The other parks were not quite as bad, but way busier then the last two years. If we are looking at going based strictly on wait times, do you think this is a aberration, and we can plan for this week again, or should we look at weeks in September?
I’m honestly not sure why you’d trust my judgment on this, because I whiffed on those exact dates this year pretty badly.
With that said, my guess is that it is NOT an aberration. Maybe it’s off by ~10%, but even that would still be fairly busy. This could be a return to 2018-2020 normal for January and February, which had become far worse than mid-August through September. Just keep in mind that September weather can be much worse.