While visiting Magic Kingdom today, we experienced incredibly low crowds for a summer Saturday.
Magic Kingdom Experiencing Low Crowds
While the theme park reservation system has mostly gone away, Annual Passholders still need to make park reservations to enter one of the four theme parks at Walt Disney World. However, certain days are labeled as good-to-go days. These days usually fall during the week, and signify that Disney is expecting low crowd levels. Very rarely do these days fall on Saturdays, especially in the summer.
Yet, today was labeled as a good-to-go day at all four theme parks, including Magic Kingdom. Based on our research, this may be the first Saturday ever to earn that distinction at Magic Kingdom. After visiting the park we understand why.
From the front of the park to the back, Magic Kingdom was looking rather desolate. The area outside of Town Square Theater was mostly empty, with plenty of space for guests to walk and take pictures.
At the hub in front of Cinderella Castle, the artificial grass was relatively barren, as a few PhotoPass photographers hid out in the shade while others snapped photos of guests. Without crowds, many photographers had no lines to take photos in front of Cinderella Castle.
The Tomorrowland bridge was mostly empty, with very few people traversing it to either get to Tomorrowland or the hub. Normally, this area is crowded with people, but today, it looked like the offseason.
Buzz Lightyear’s Space Ranger Spin, was showing just a 15-minute wait when we took the above photograph around 11 a.m. The wait time has since gone up to 25 minutes, which is still significantly lower than usual. Other popular attractions such as Pirates of the Caribbean and Big Thunder Mountain Railroad have had wait times of fewer than 30 minutes all day.
The low wait times extend to the most popular attractions in the park as well. Only two rides, Space Mountain and Seven Dwarfs Mine Train, are showing wait times of 60 minutes. No attraction has a wait time longer than that, and the next three highest wait times are all for character meet and greets.
Magic Kingdom is undergoing some construction, which is preventing the park from operating as it usually does. The stage in front of Cinderella Castle is currently under construction and the incredibly popular Peter Pan’s Flight is closed for refurbishment. But even construction doesn’t fully explain why there are such low crowds on a summer Saturday.
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