The holiday season is always a popular time to visit Walt Disney World, and as schools are letting out for the winter break, we’re seeing the crowds at the resort bump up. This has led to some fairly brutal wait times on the most popular attractions, and even some of the not-as-popular ones.
Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure at Epcot is a fairly new ride, so you might expect to have long waits. Yet according to analyst Thrill Data, the ride’s wait time averages a little over an hour, which makes the 100-minute wait time that the ride is seeing this week significantly high. The same goes for Frozen Ever After, which has seen wait times jump an average of 25% this week alone. That's it with the 105-minute wait in the image below.
Even some of the more popular rides, like Avatar: Flight of Passage, have a wait time average of just over an hour, but currently we’re seeing a wait time that is closer to two hours. And that’s nothing compared to Slinky Dog Dash in Toy Story Land, which saw a three-hour wait on Thursday. Perhaps the lower height requirement is making the line even longer.
While not unexpected, it’s a reminder that while the holiday season is a wonderful time to visit Disney World, everybody knows that, and so a lot of people do. Of course, when you have kids in school, your options for visiting theme parks can be quite limited, so there sometimes isn’t a lot of choice about when you can go. It’s do it now or not at all.
To be fair, these aren’t anywhere close to the longest lines at Disney World. Back before the days of virtual queues, when new attractions at Disney World opened, we would routinely see lines of 300 minutes, perhaps longer. Today, the two major new E-ticket attractions that might have lines that long, Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind and the even newer Tron: Lightcycle Run, use a virtual queue system. There is no standby line at all, so lines simply can’t get that wild.
The last of this year's Mickey's Very Merry Christmas Party events is on December 22. The official holiday season at Walt Disney World runs through the first week of January. Once that’s over, we’ll likely see crowds shrink down to a manageable level. Having said that, the “slow season” that we used to see early in the year hasn’t materialized in the last few years. There really isn’t a slow period at Disney World anymore, just times that are slightly less busy than others.
Last year, Disney World's reservation system was booked almost completely full even a month before Christmas. That's not the case this year, so things aren't quite as bad as they could be. The good news is that, except for Annual Pass holders, the reservation system ends at the end of this year at Disney World.
