Any doubts about whether crowds would visit Walt Disney World for Thanksgiving were dispelled today, as the Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, and Animal Kingdom saw posted wait time averages in the top 3 of the past month. Hollywood Studios was equally busy, but wait times are lower because of ride capacity that was added a couple of weeks ago.
Many Walt Disney World computer systems experienced issues today, including My Disney Experience and park tapstiles. It’s safe to assume this was related to an Amazon Web Services outage in the eastern part of the U.S.
We received exactly 200 actual wait times today from our Lines app Liners – thank you all. Let’s do the numbers!
Animal Kingdom Wait Times
The average posted wait for Avatar Flight of Passage hit two hours today. That 120 minutes may seem like a lot, but at #99 it’s barely in the top 100 days of the past year for FoP (and that counts days lost to the shutdown). In good news, the actual wait times we measured at Expedition Everest and Kilimanjaro Safari were only half of the posted wait times.
Magic Kingdom Wait Times
Not only was the Magic Kingdom busy today, but the posted wait times were pretty close to actual waits in line we measured throughout the park. There’s something to be said for truth in advertising. One bright spot at the Magic Kingdom was that the average wait to get into Country Bear Jamboree – the world’s best ursine-based animatronic stage show with country and western music – was only 5 minutes.
Hollywood Studios Wait Times
The big thing we saw at the Studios today was that the posted wait time at Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run was underestimated by a fairly wide amount. Smugglers Run’s average wait time today was 45 minutes. We received 8 actual wait times today, and the actual wait averaged 149% of the posted wait time – so that average posted of 45 minutes was an actual of almost 70 minutes.
Rise of the Resistance was running really well until the AWS outage just after 1 p.m., and that resulted in an hour-long delay in calling boarding groups. Things resumed around 2:15 p.m. and seemed to run well for a bit before calling boarding groups slowed down from around 3 p.m. to just before 5 p.m. Things look better as I’m writing this, though, so hopefully everyone who got a boarding group will get a chance to ride the best attraction Disney’s done in decades.
EPCOT Wait Times
Sure, EPCOT was crowded, but the Mexico pavilion’s Gran Fiesta Tour only had an average wait of 9 minutes. My guess is that everyone was celebrating the birthday of La Cava’s tequila ambassador, Hilda, with margaritas and shots.
The post Crowds Ahoy! Walt Disney World Wait Times for Wednesday, November 25, 2020 appeared first on TouringPlans.com Blog.