Crowds Vanish at Disney Resort, Hurricane NOT Involved

Walt Disney World has just barely dodged a massive hurricane churning through the northwest coast of Florida. While this noticeably wreaked havoc on the theme park’s attendance for the week, Disney World is now looking at another beloved park and asking, “What’s your excuse?”

Hurricane Destroys Disney World Attendance

Hurricane Idalia struck Florida on Wednesday morning as a Category 4 storm. While Walt Disney World was originally projected to be in the path of this weather disaster, it instead trended north and saved the vacation destination from much of the worst weather. Guests visiting Disney World this week have reported extensively lower wait times and crowd sizes. This is due to vacationers changing or canceling their plans to come to Florida and locals hunkering in anticipation of the storm.

Disneyland Resort Deals With Hurricane

Notably, another Disney park location just dealt with a similar situation. Disneyland Resort in California saw the arrival of Hurricane Hilary on its shores recently, and the park closed down early as a result. However, crowds flooded back into the theme park just the day after the storm. Footage of Main Street, U.S.A. showed a gargantuan number of people visiting after Hurricane Hilary. However, this phenomenon was short-lived.

Disneyland Low Wait Times

Disneyland Resort fans on the r/Disneyland subreddit have been posting the incredibly low wait times the California location has been experiencing this week. Rides and attractions that normally see a spike in queue durations are incredibly low right now. One guest posted a picture of fewer than five-minute wait times around the California Adventure Park across the board. Radiator Springs Racers in Cars Land was an outlier at 45 minutes, which is still much lower than the attraction’s usual wait time.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Disneyland/comments/16505h5/headed_there_now_and_looked_at_wait_times_these/

While this might seem like a dream come true, there might be more to the story than just low crowds for no reason. Anaheim in California has been seeing some insane temperatures this week. The heat has been measured at up to 106 degrees in the past few days! While this is common in the Florida theme park, Disneyland is usually a little nicer to its visitors.

However, guests reported having productive days even while dealing with the heat. One person noted that their longest wait during their visit was 20 minutes for Rise of the Resistance. Everything else was basically a walk-on affair.

I was there yesterday and beyond the heat, it was an incredibly productive day. Longest we waited was 20 min for Rise, every other attraction was 5-10 min. We got there at 1030am and honestly we could have done more but we were exhausted by 5pm. Checked into our dining reservation 90 min early and left by 6ish.

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byu/Silojm from discussion
inDisneyland

As summer ends and kids return to school, the Disney theme parks will likely see a further drop in attendance. Tourism to the locations has been noticeably lower in the past few months, but no one could anticipate wait times this low. Now might be the perfect time to take that Disney vacation, and both coasts are viable options!