Just How Low Were the Disney World Crowds in 2023? We’re Finding Out

It’s hard to fully gauge Disney Parks’ attendance year over year. Outside of Disneyland Paris, a Disney partnership with the government of France, the Walt Disney Company does not release attendance figures or earnings for each park but instead releases overall earnings for all parks.

For Walt Disney World in Central Florida, you must read the tea leaves and subtle clues or rely on first-person knowledge to better understand how many people went through the gates.

Related: Disney World Pricing Is Going To Start to Keep Some Families Away

Over the summer, the prevailing narrative was that Disney World was virtually empty. Social media was flooded with photos of a practically empty Main Street, U.S.A., in the Magic Kingdom and Hollywood Boulevard in Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

But then attendance started to pick up in the fall, and Walt Disney World was flooded during the holiday season. For the first time ever, Disney Genie Plus sold out at Animal Kingdom and Hollywood Studios, do so multiple times in the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

But after a release from the Orange County Comptroller, we are now getting a better understanding of just how low attendance was at Walt Disney World last year. November 2023 saw a four percent decrease in tourism tax dollars collected compared to November 2022.

This marks the eighth month of 2023, which was lower than its 2022 counterpart. Tax collection was down 5.2 percent in 2023 through November, or $3.2 million in tax revenue.

Comptroller Phil Diamond told Click Orlando:

2022 was an extraordinary year for Central Florida tourism after the pandemic. There was extraordinary demand to travel, and much of this came to Orange County. After that record year, it’s just not surprising that there would be a decline in Orange County tourism.

This decrease in tax revenue is not just for Disney World but also for Universal Orlando and SeaWorld, both of which are also located in Orange County.

The news isn’t necessarily all bad, though, as Diamond expects crowd levels to pick up in 2024 after a strong holiday season. Diamond says room night bookings for 2024 are pacing higher than last year at five percent, and advance airline ticket sales into Orlando were up in the first quarter of 2024 at 10 percent.

Orange County adds a six percent sales tax to all rooms booked in the county, including those at Disney World. With the meal plan and all-day Park Hopper returning today, Disney has fans excited for the New Year. Disney has also released several new discounts to entice Florida residents and Disney Plus subscribers to the Disney Parks.

But these numbers show that theme park attendance has leveled off after the 2022 post-COVID bump, and predicting crowds may be a little more manageable.

We will continue to update this story at Disney Fanatic.