The holiday season at Walt Disney World is traditionally the busiest time of the year, but when do the crowds start heading home? In this article, we’ll take a look at recent crowd trends to try to answer the question of when crowds go back to normal at Walt Disney World after the holiday season.
To answer the question for 2024, we’re going to take a look back at 2023 and 2022 to try and spot a trend. In the graph below from thrill-data, we can see the ebbs and flows of the holiday season. The graph goes from early December on the left to late January on the right. The middle of the graph represents the Christmas to New Year peak week crowds.
As you can see, there are three distinct peaks during the holiday season. First, we see a peak in the week building up to Christmas. Typically, Christmas Eve is the valley in terms of holiday season wait times, and then a build-up to the peak of the holiday season a day or two before the New Year. At least, that’s what the 2022-23 data showed. What does the trend look like this year? Surprisingly similar.
In the graph below, we can see charted average wait times at Walt Disney World from early December through yesterday. If we compare it to the ’22-23 graph above, we can see that the ’23-24 graph below is going to follow trends quite closely. We saw a pre-Christmas bump with a dip near Christmas Eve, followed by a build to a peak just before the New Year. But to answer the question posed at the beginning of the article, we have to return to data from the ’22-23 season.
Going back to last year’s trends, we can expect another peak in crowds today or tomorrow before it starts to lower through the weekend. The reasoning for this can be laid at the feet of the Walt Disney World Marathon Weekend. Runners and their families are in town and enjoying the parks before the runners start using very valuable steps during the race, which leads to a more relaxed day in the parks post-race.
Going back to our question of when will the parks go back to “normal” following the holiday season? The answer, according to recent history, is the start of the second week of January. While many of the holiday season visitors are gone by the third day of January, the Marathon Weekend artificially prolongs the holiday season-like crowds in the theme parks. The return of lower-tier Annual Passholders also creates longer-than-normal waits during the end of the first week of January.
The rest of January is relatively relaxed with the EPCOT Festival of the Arts being a decent draw, but nothing like the other Festivals. The next significant week to circle on your calendar is the days surrounding Presidents’ Day in mid-to-late February. Spring Break crowds typically peak in the middle of March and there are also crowds in April for the Easter holiday period. Then, as has been the case in recent years, the Summer months are so oppressively hot that the Summer season isn’t nearly as bad as you might think. Crowds will typically be their lowest in the last days of August into September before climbing again in mid-Ocotber for a pre-Thanksgiving peak, dipping for Halloween, and then building again into the holiday season, but we might be getting ahead of ourselves.
As always, keep checking back with us here at BlogMickey.com as we continue to bring you the latest news, photos, and info from around the Disney Parks!