Optimizing the Magic: A Data-Driven Approach for Enhancing Ride Experiences at Disney World
Abby Dumke Furman University 2024 abby.dumke@furman.edu
A trip to Disney World is a dream vacation for many worldwide. With four theme parks and two water parks filled with attractions, shows, restaurants, and shops, planning this magical experience can be challenging, especially considering the high costs associated with "the most magical place on earth". Disney World mandates reservations for theme park admissions and table-service dining, making it essential to carefully plan these reservations to maximize what Disney has to offer. With average monthly wait times ranging from 30 to over 45 minutes and individual ride wait times varying from 5 to over 100 minutes, strategic timing is crucial (ThrillData). Selecting not only the right time to visit Disney World but also the time of day for specific rides is key to enhancing your overall experience.
The My Disney Experience app displays real-time wait times for rides at all theme parks, but lacks data on average wait times per ride. Given the various factors that influence vacation planning, such as wait times and reservations, I believe that the creation of a data visualization tool that would allow users to compare monthly hourly average wait times for individual rides, would be great for planning purposes.
I will consider these questions throughout my project:
I propose the creation of a data visualization tool that enables users to compare wait times based on individual rides. I want to gather data from the past year (February 2023- January 2024) and get the monthly hourly average wait times per ride. With this data, I want to make a visualization tool where I can select a specific month, then select specific rides, and compare the queue time. I believe that this could be extremely helpful when making reservations. For example, if I wanted to make meal reservations at a table service restaurant, I can go on this data tool, select the month I will be traveling, click the rides I want to go on, and if there is a specific time where all of the rides I want to go on are very high, I will make meal plans then. Or another example, if I am going to multiple parks in one day, I can go on this data tool, select the month I will be traveling, click the rides from different parks I want to go on, and see if there is a longer wait time for those rides at a specific time of day.
I think that having a tool like this could potentially ease the planning and maximize one’s trip to Disney World. I know that there will be a definite change in time of year (monthly averages), but I am hoping to find trends based on time of day. Ideally, I would like to include all rides at Disney World; however, since there are so many attractions, it might be challenging to include all of them. I will start by gathering data for the most popular rides at each park, and if I have time I can get the data for more rides.
https://touringplans.com/ https://www.thrill-data.com/ Both of these sites have daily wait time data for each attraction at all parks, and the Touring Plan site also has forecasted wait times for any given day. From the datasets on either site, I can create a new data set with monthly hourly averages. The data is constantly being updated with current and past wait times for all rides.
While there are currently platforms where you can look at past wait times for different rides and average wait times, there are no tools where you can select a month and only look at monthly hourly average wait times for individual rides. Additionally, most of the sites that are available are hard to read and hard to navigate. The Thrill Data site does have a monthly hourly wait time view, but there is no average on listed, rather it shows all wait times in the past 30 days and you can only look at one ride at a time.
I want to gather the hourly wait times per ride and get a monthly average for each hour for ease of reading the graph. From that, I will use that data to create my visualization dashboard where you first click a desired month and then a graph will appear with a select/deselect option for rides on the right side.
This project's success will be measured by whether my proposed questions can be answered. As mentioned in the background, there is data to back up that there are specific months to go to Florida based on average wait times. I am hoping that this project can identify the best month and even hour of day to go on a ride.
The final software of my project can be publicly available for everyone, and I am willing to make my final report public on some server. I do not think that I need to live demo my project on a computer at Furman Engaged, but can do so if need be.