Do Higher Lightning Lane Prices Mean Higher Crowds?

When Disney introduced Genie+ and then Lightning Lane Single Pass and Multi Pass, one of the main features was “demand pricing”. In other words, Disney would adjust the pricing based upon how in-demand those products are predicted to be on a given day.

Recently in many WDW groups to which we belong, people have been asking whether they should pick their park days based upon LL pricing: “On Tuesday, a LLMP costs $29, but on Wednesday it only costs $27. Does that mean I should expect higher crowds on Tuesday?”

Logically, it would make sense that Tuesday might be more crowded. If LLMP costs more on Tuesday, then Disney expects demand for LL’s to be higher on Tuesday because they expect lines to be longer. Therefore, it might be better to delay one’s visit to Wednesday.

However, what does the real data say? Can you really predict crowd levels based on LL pricing? Read on to find out!

The Experiment

In order to see whether LL pricing can predict crowd levels, I looked at the historical LL pricing data and compared it to the average wait times guests experienced using historical data from thrill-data.com.

To keep things simple, I only looked at Magic Kingdom, the most popular park at Walt Disney World and the park with the highest demand for LL’s. In addition, I used the time period from 12/1/2024 through 1/31/2025. This cover a wide variety of crowd levels, including the very popular Christmas through New Year time frame.

So Can LLMP Prices Predict Crowd Levels?

Below is a scatter plot that compares the average wait time to the LLMP pricing for each day from 12/1 through 1/31. The further to the right the dot is, the longer the average wait time. The further to the top the dot is, the higher the LLMP price.

If LLMP cost was a perfect predictor of crowd levels, you’d expect days with a high cost to have high crowd levels (upper right of the plot). Meanwhile you’d expect days with a lower cost to have lower crowd levels (lower left of the plot). However that doesn’t seem to be entirely the case.

• On days when a LLMP cost the most ($37 or more), we did indeed higher average wait times. However, there were days which had average wait times that were just as high even though a LLMP was cheaper.
• On days when a LLMP cost the least ($29 or less), again we did see lower average wait times. But again, there was still a number of outliers when the average wait time was still higher than days where LLMP cost more.

Check out the average wait times on days when a LLMP cost $35. At that price level, you had with the highest average wait time (1/2), as well as the day with the lowest average wait time (12/19). The range of average wait times was so large that the fact that a LLMP cost $35 had pretty much no predictive value. I was a crapshoot!

For the stats nerds in the audience, the coefficient of correlation between LLMP cost and average wait time was 0.4 (0 being a poor predictor and 1 being a perfect predictor). That indicates that there is a weak correlation between the two stats. On average, you might see some higher wait times on days when a LLMP costs more. However, there is too many outliers to consider LLMP cost to be an accurate predictor.

Here some more stats which show just how unpredictable average wait times are:

So yes, the average wait time generally increased as the LLMP got more expensive. But the variation was so great that you cannot rely upon that to predict crowd levels with a high level of accuracy.

What About Lightning Lane Single Pass Pricing?

For extra credit, I also looked the price of Lightning Lane Single Pass for both TRON and Seven Dwarves Mine Train (7DMT) to see how well it predicted the average wait time of those rides specifically.

Let’s start with TRON:

As you can see, the relationship between the cost of a LLSP and the average wait time was also fairly weak, similar to LLMP for Magic Kingdom. Just because the price of a LLSP for TRON was high doesn’t mean that the average wait time will also be high. There is just too much variation, particularly at that $21 price level.

Seven Dwarves Mine Train shows even less of a correlation

Just check out the average wait times for when a LLSP for 7DMT cost $13. It was all over the place! There is no way to predict the average wait time when there is that much variation.

Wrap Up

The answer to the question posed in the title (“Do higher LL prices mean higher crowds?) is a resounding “NO”

While there does appear to be some correlation between the cost of a Lightning Lane Multi Pass and the average wait time at Magic Kingdom, it really isn’t a very strong relationship. There is just too much variation in the data to solely use it to predict crowd levels.

On face value, it seems like Disney’s model to predict crowd levels (and hence demand for LLMP) needs some improvement. However, I give Disney a little bit of a pass. They need to set LL pricing 21 days in advance. Demand can change quite a bit over those 21 days. Factors such as weather, unexpected ride closures, and even the LL pricing itself can alter demand in those last three weeks. So unpredictability is bound to be expected that far out.

So what does all this mean for you? While there is a chance that crowds might be higher when Lightning Lanes cost more, there is still so much uncertainty that I wouldn’t obsess over it. Other common sense factors, like time of year, holidays, school schedules, etc are probably better predictors of crowd levels.

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