Just returned from a week - Saturday 14th through 21st. We have gone many times, and at least once every month of the year and were shocked to find the lowest crowds we've seen at WDW in a long time. At one point in Epcot walking around the world showcase in the afternoon, there was literally no one anywhere near us. Several afternoons I checked wait times and the longest wait on property was Flights of Passage at 90 minutes. We used Minnie Vans several times and a few of the cast members driving mentioned how slow it had been after the July 4 crowds left. I guess this is the new summer trend!
Summer Crowds
- Thread starter clayton
- Start date
Art Vandelay
that's a shame
I hope it stays like that for a few weeks.
I think it's a trend. As crowd calendars are circulated more and more, families are opting, and more willing, to pull their kids from school for a week rather than melt in the summer crowds. My gut say that in 3 years, the crowds will continue to shift to a point where it's virtually evened out. An when the "off-peak" times start to have no advantage over school friendly dates, the dates will shift back. I'm sure Disney's package deals will reflect the changes too.
Just a contrarian hunch
Just a contrarian hunch
D
Deleted member 832
Guest
And a lot of times you don't even have to pull your kids out of school. The school calendar is anything but traditional any more.
More and more schools are expanding the school year/shrinking the summer break, to eventually reach a year round school schedule.
This affords families some more unique times off from school. I know here in our area we still have a summer break but it's different than it used to be.
On top of that we get about 10 days (counting weekends) off in the Fall and over 3 weeks off at Christmas. Our Spring break is also nearly 10 days.
They do this by combining a break with Teacher in-service training days so the kids can get a full week, the 2 week ends on both ends of that plus one additional week day to begin or end the break.
So it doesn't take a lot of creativity to find a time to make a trip, without taking the kids out of school or melting in the summer.
That's not even taking in to account the high numbers who home school.
More and more schools are expanding the school year/shrinking the summer break, to eventually reach a year round school schedule.
This affords families some more unique times off from school. I know here in our area we still have a summer break but it's different than it used to be.
On top of that we get about 10 days (counting weekends) off in the Fall and over 3 weeks off at Christmas. Our Spring break is also nearly 10 days.
They do this by combining a break with Teacher in-service training days so the kids can get a full week, the 2 week ends on both ends of that plus one additional week day to begin or end the break.
So it doesn't take a lot of creativity to find a time to make a trip, without taking the kids out of school or melting in the summer.
That's not even taking in to account the high numbers who home school.
RetroCOTfan
Well-known member
We just got back, too (7/14-7/22), and absolutely loved the crowds. We went over Spring Break last year (early March, before the "big" SB rush, even) and the difference was really astonishing. I had to send a "feels crowded" tweet to Josh on one of our AK days, because we were so amazed at just how much concrete we could see. And that was a running theme, even at MK. I think the longest we waited for anything was about 35 minutes for Dinosaur, and that was only because we had nothing else to do and were waiting for our FoP FP window to open up. Otherwise, 20 minutes was about our longest, I think. If you can deal with the heat, it's fine. And, strangely, we're from Dallas, so we actually escaped the heat by heading to Florida in July this year. We'll definitely be going back in the summer rather than Spring Break.
YES we had the same experience with low crowds! We were at the MK After Hours Party on Saturday, July 14 and even arriving at the MK at 6:30 it was not overly crowded and we enjoyed several low wait attractions prior to the closing of the park/start of the party! We spent a day at Epcot and seriously walked on Soarin twice in the morning and once around dinner time, it was AMAZING! Rode Frozen twice around 10 a.m. without FP and it was literally just a walk thru the line onto the boat situation. Our longest wait of the trip was for a Test Track FP we had due to it having been down earlier during the day and that was maybe 20 minutes.