Our peak crowd day at Disney’s Animal Kingdom continues as we see how things look when Park Passes are completely sold-out days before our visit, indicating that what we encounter is about as “bad” as crowds and wait times can get given current capacity constraints. You had about six months to read the first part of this series, but it’s still available here, in case, like me, you forgot. The main difference being that now there are no temperature checks. And we’ll be moving to three-feet stickers instead of six-feet markers in a lot of locations.

According to the Disney site, it’s the first paragraph that’s rewritten after the first sentence:

And Disney will no longer skip rows when parking automobiles, which had allowed guests more room to take out everything they apparently own, on top of what they purchased specifically for the trip, out of the Chrysler Town & Country. Those vans somehow seemed to continue back forever as strollers that appeared to be larger than the minivan itself were whisked out and unfolded like they had been a million times before as Zoey and Paisley hop in. I’m not entirely sure why you would move away from that model of filling the lots given the increased comfort right off the bat. We’ve probably all struggled to see whose door is swinging open first back in the pack ’em in days that are returning faster than I would have expected. Filling in every row probably takes a couple fewer cast as you don’t need any extras staying behind, and with parking only costing like $27, margins are going to be pretty slim on that one.

More recently, in Part Two, we began our touring in Pandora, before considering how we wanted to plot out the rest of our day. With a break, or plans to take it easy from 11am to 4pm or so, heading to Asia and DinoLand next to take advantage of nearly nonexistent crowds and waits makes the most sense. Without a break, heading to Kilimanjaro Safaris next is our best play as our wait should be closer to 20 to 30 minutes than the 45 to 70 minutes that it will quote from 9am until much later in the afternoon.

Looking ahead towards Creature Comfort Starbucks on the left, it doesn’t look too bad, but we’re only a half hour into the day as hundreds of people head towards Harambe.

Of course, even with a million people threatening to pass us, we can’t saunter by the cotton-top tamarins enjoying breakfast without enjoying a peek at the funny little creatures. There are more to come. Only half of which are bloggers.

Continue reading “Early Morning Touring in Africa’s Harambe at Disney’s Animal Kingdom with Kilimanjaro Safaris”

We pick our morning up at Disney’s Animal Kingdom on a relatively busy day after getting going later than we would have liked, and making a quick ride on Flight of Passage an impossibility. If you missed that post, or would like a refresher, you can pull it up here.

We’re not “late late,” as we entered the Park right around the official 8am open.

Continue reading “Disney’s Animal Kingdom Morning Touring With Current Capacity Crowds”

We’ll make our triumphant return to Walt Disney World to see what we can accomplish given current wait times and crowd levels. Currently, each of the Parks basically sell out of Passes across each ticket type every day, indicating capacity crowds and peak waits given current restrictions, whether you visit on a Tuesday or a Saturday.

Here’s a look at Disney Park Pass availability for the rest of the month:

Even on a Wednesday and the Easter holiday weeks ago, Animal Kingdom is sold out across each of the ticket segments most days for the rest of the month. So what you see as we go about our day is typical. At least at the moment.

Continue reading “Rope Dropping Disney’s Animal Kingdom at Official Park Open”

We continue from Festival Favorites, also in the World ShowPlace building.

Cider House squeezes its way in between the Festival Favorites and Farmers Feast kitchens in World ShowPlace. With the switchbacks heading just about every which way, you just sort of have to pick one and hope for the best. If you get to the front of the line and it turns out to be Electric Umbrella offering their standard day-old hamburgers, “for extra flavor and maybe more protein,” you can always fake some sort of injury and shuttle off to try again. In reality, it’s easy to find the correct line.

This is of course assuming you know the difference between World Showcase and World ShowPlace. I’ve had a number of entertaining conversations about the topic over the years:

The names are similar enough that some confusion isn’t surprising.

Continue reading “Cider House Review Epcot Flower and Garden Festival”

We’ll analyze how well Disney’s Hollywood Studios is faring these days after taking an in-depth look at how Magic Kingdom crowds and wait times have ebbed and flowed since the Parks reopened in July of 2020. The Magic Kingdom post offers a lot more background into the changes Disney has implemented over the past year, including ranking each week so far by wait time, so you may want to check that out if you missed it and compare how well you did versus other weeks. Or see if your usual week was “crazy crowded” or you managed to visit over that first summer, when it very much was not. Since we’re talking about Hollywood Studios, the answer to our first question is obviously “not well,” so if you have something else to do, that will be the main takeaway by the time this post ends.

While we have the average overall wait across all attractions for every day since the Studios reopened, we’ll largely be focusing on wait times from this year. There are a number of reasons for that that we’ll get to in a moment.

Here’s the full chart of weekly average waits for Disney’s Hollywood Studios since the Park reopened on July 15th, 2020:

Larger: Here.

The chart’s movement doesn’t necessarily differentiate itself that greatly from the Magic Kingdom chart, which we see below:

Continue reading “Reassessing Disney’s Hollywood Studios Crowds and Waits in 2021”