One of the hot topics now that the Walt Disney World parks have reopened has been their low waits. How low? Well, in this post I’m going to take a look at wait times for some of the more popular rides in Magic Kingdom to see what we can learn…
Related Posts
We also have posts looking at the first week of wait times at the other parks:
Magic Kingdom Wait Times (Week End July 17) (you are here)
For a broader overview of the Disney World reopening, visit our Disney World Reopening Masterpost. We also have a guide to Magic Kingdom Rides and Entertainment (including the new cavalcades).
Data Source and Reminders
I’m using wait time data collected by Thrill-Data.com for the week of July 11 through July 17. I chose rides that have averaged over 10 minute waits for the week.
Remember two things throughout this post. First, posted wait times aren’t always accurate. While they’re generally a good indicator of how busy the park is, they’re imperfect.
Second, this is small data / simple analysis. This isn’t a statistics project. While I find all this information interesting, you also could do a post’s worth of analysis on any single data point here to explain why it is or isn’t significant. I tried to choose data points that were simple to understand, relevant to planning, and somewhat beyond what you’d personally do with the data.
July 17 Scorecard
I’ve built an Excel workbook that I hope I find time (and enjoyment) to update that produces a “scorecard” of wait times for a seven day period. I’ll present the data in four parts…
Data Source: Thrill-Data.com
Here we see Average Wait times for the week, Change from last week (n/a since this is my first week doing this), and a chart for each ride with the average waits throughout the day.
The bottom line here is waits are short. Splash Mountain has the longest waits, which isn’t surprising since it’s (1) summer, (2) presumably the last few months of this ride and (3) a boat ride.
Disney’s new sanitation procedures have caused the biggest delays in boat ride operations, which is why you also see Jungle Cruise among the leaders.
The charts aren’t terribly helpful. Peter Pan’s Flight has the slowest build-up to start the day. Haunted Mansion and Pirates of the Caribbean seem to ebb and flow. Space Mountain peaks early but spends most of the day with relatively low waits.
The next three tables are a little more fun. One thing I like to ask is “what’s the worst case scenario?” If I miss a ride when the park opens, how bad a wait am I looking at in the afternoon? The below table shows lowest wait time each ride have between 12PM and 5PM.
Data Source: Thrill-Data.com
I chose 12PM to 5PM because it’s traditionally one of the busier times of the day, but that might not be the case right now. Without park hopping, and with locals making up a large portion of guests, afternoon heat might be avoided.
Seven Dwarfs Mine Train and Splash Mountain tend to sustain long waits in the afternoon, rarely getting below 15/20 minutes. By contrast, Astro Orbiter, Peter Pan’s Flight, Pirates of the Caribbean, Space Mountain, and Haunted Mansion all regularly hit 5 or 10 minutes in the afternoon.
Maximum waits are another way of looking at the worst case. Here’s a chart of the maximum daily wait times for these rides:
Data Source: Thrill-Data.com
The longest wait this week was 50 minutes, with 30 to 45 minutes being a more common daily maximum. By the end of the week (Wednesday/Thursday/Friday), few rides were hitting above 25 minutes.
Both the above two tables share the same flaw—they’re easily skewed by one wrong wait time. There’s a big difference between a ride having a 5-minute wait or a 45-minute wait for just a few minutes and it spending the entire day at one of those points.
Rather than looking at peaks and bottoms, we can look at how much time the rides spend at or under certain wait times:
Data Source: Thrill-Data.com
This last table asks “how much of the week did this ride have a wait at or below X minutes?” If you look at the right, you can see the rides spent almost the entire week (rounded up to 99% or 100%) with waits under 45 minutes.
All of the rides spent most of the week at or under 30 minutes waits.
Suggested Ride Order
If I were visiting tomorrow, I’d start with this order:
Seven Dwarfs Mine Train
Big Thunder Mountain Railroad
Splash Mountain
Jungle Cruise
This assumes you’ll be getting to Splash and Jungle Cruise before their waits get too high. After this, you can pretty much go to any of these nine with the shortest waits.
Once you’ve exhausted these nine, or at least their shorter morning waits, you can visit the other 11 rides with wait times, which should be at 5 or 10 minutes most days (and if they’re not, they’ll probably still be shorter waits than these rides).
We’ll be building this into a more comprehensive itinerary, so keep your eyes open for that.
Conclusions
Magic Kingdom is still a big park. There are a total of 20 rides with wait times right now, plus shows like Enchanted Tiki Room, Carousel of Progress, Country Bear Jamboree, PhilharMagic, and Hall of Presidents.
In the past, Magic Kingdom was challenging, but not impossible to fit into a single day. Thing is, those were 9AM to 10PM days—13 hours. Nowadays you’re looking at shorter waits, but also a shorter day (10 hours).
And let’s not forget another twist—the waits are only shorter if you were spending a lot of time in standby before. We barely ever waited in a standby line in the afternoon since we relied heavily on FastPass+. A 10 minute wait for Pirates of the Caribbean is longer than we waited when used FastPass+ back in the day.
If you arrive when the park opens and focus on these nine rides early in the day, you’re going to have plenty of time. If you have to save a few of these for the afternoon, you’ll spend a bit more time in line, true. But for now, it looks like Magic Kingdom is an easy park to enjoy!