Disney World's Holiday Weekend Crowds Are Confusing

Typically, holidays bring HEAVY crowds to Disney World.

If you’ve ever been to Disney World on Christmas, Thanksgiving, or New Year’s Eve, you probably witnessed this phenomenon firsthand. However, you might not expect that holiday weekends also often bring hoards of guests to the parks, and with many students having today off of school…what do things look like in Central Florida?

Today (Monday, October 10th) is Columbus Day and Indigenous People’s Day, which means that many students and employees across America have the day off. Any time there’s a long weekend, guests tend to flock to Disney World to cram in a few days of fun, so we’re taking a look at the crowds.

Starting at EPCOT, we dealt with some HEAVY crowds today! Things were poppin’ inside Creations Shop, and the World Showcase was fairly difficult to navigate with packed walkways. Just take a look at this line to get into the Mexico Pavilion!

We’ve seen a queue form outside the pyramid when things were busy in the past, but the length of this line caught us a bit off guard.

Next door in the Norway Pavilion, the line was pretty long for Frozen Ever After as well. When we walked by, the wait time was posted at 105 minutes. This is typically one of the longer waits in the park due to the popularity of the ride, but 100+ minutes is still a pretty big chunk of time.

Even though we saw heavy crowds at EPCOT, Magic Kingdom was a different story! Throughout our time here, we noticed lots of open space in the main walking areas, and things were generally not as busy as we’d expect for a holiday weekend.

Keep in mind that it’s also a Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party day in Magic Kingdom. On these days, the park closes at 6PM, so it tends to be less busy anyway.

We’ll continue to watch the crowds this week, as many Americans have fall break in October. Stay tuned for updates and any details you need to know, including all the latest wait times for the rides.

And if you’re planning a trip this fall and through the end of the year, there are some great offerings coming soon! We’re wrapping up the Halloween season in the next few weeks and heading into the holidays, so there’s going to be a lot to check out.