One question everyone wants to know about the Disney World parks reopening is “how are the wait times?” First, I’d remind you this data is available via the Disney World My Disney Experience app, which you should become familiar with if you’re planning a trip anytime soon.

But looking at wait times a few times a day when you think of it isn’t going to do you much good. So, in this post, I’m going to look back at Animal Kingdom’s wait times for the first week of the reopening (July 11 through July 17). Along the way, I’ll discuss how these waits might impact your planning for the parks.

As I’ll get into more in the first section of this post, analysis based solely on posted wait times is flawed. If nothing else, we’re in a time where no one really knows what to expect from crowds the coming months. But enough introduction…

Why I Don’t Love Wait Time Analysis

This section was originally much longer, but honestly the rest of the post doesn’t merit 500+ words here. I just want to say that looking only at post wait times is imperfect. First, the posted wait times are often inaccurate. I saw one person this week say they waited 35 minutes for Mickey & Minnie’s Runaway Railway (at Hollywood Studios) when the posted wait was 90 minutes.

Moreover, touring strategy is usually not just about wait times. You don’t want to run back and forth across the park, you don’t want to ride some rides right after lunch, and you’ve usually got a bunch of other things (like shows) that you’re trying to fit into your day.

For that reason, we usually base our advice on actual days in the parks, supplemented by broader looks at wait time trends. Our one-day itinerary posts (here’s Animal Kingdom, for reference) focus on a single day, but include analysis of broader trends.

The downside of right now is that I can’t be in the parks to do the more complete analysis I’d like to for my readers. The upside (and I use that term only in the specific context of this post) is that there isn’t too much analysis to be done—wait times are just that low.

This will change over time, and we may or may not follow this up with similar posts.

About The Data

I’m using data compiled by Thrill-Data. Specifically, I’m using the posted wait times for the rides at Animal Kingdom that Thrill Data collected every five minutes. I’m focused only on the dates from July 11 through July 17 in this post.

Ride closures or gaps in the data, except for the day-long Expedition Everest closure on July 17, have been filled using the last available wait time. This is poor data science, to be clear, but I can say from seeing all the raw data it didn’t impact my conclusions (though specific data points would vary with the original figures).

Don’t Stress About Wait Times at Animal Kingdom

Park hopping at Walt Disney World currently isn’t allowed. There are eight rides and a handful of other activities at the park. Even in the busiest of times, only six rides—Avatar Flight of Passage, Na’vi River Journey, Kilimanjaro Safaris, Kali River Rapids, Expedition Everest, DINOSAUR—really needed planning, so we’re going to focus on those.

It’s hard to figure out the best way to convey just how short the wait times have been at Animal Kingdom. I’ll start with some interesting stats…

Every ride has spent most of every day with waits of 15 minutes or less, with one exception. The exception is that Expedition Everest sat at 20 minutes for most of July 12. Since that day, its maximum wait has been 15 minutes.

64% of the week, no rides had waits over 15 minutes. So if you entered the park at a random times this week, chances are you arrived when no rides had waits over 15 minutes. Additionally, only 2% of the week had four rides with waits over 15 minutes (0% for five rides, six rides). That is, 98% of the time there were at least three rides with waits 15 minutes or less.

Even popular rides aren’t getting long waits. Flight of Passage spent 90% of the week with a wait time of 15 minutes or less. Na’vi River Journey, which has averaged slightly longer waits because of the sanitation procedures, spent 80% of the week with a wait time of 15 minutes or less, and never went over 30 minutes.

In general, your touring strategy should involve grabbing 15-minute (or less) waits when you see them and making sure you’re leaving enough time at the end of the day for anything you’ve been putting off. Most of your time will be spent walking around seeing the zoological trails or the new character cavalcades.

I won’t be offended if you decide to stop reading here, because the rest of this is really just getting into the weeds, so to speak.

In the next few sections, I’m going to take a deeper look at the trends from the first week. These include some new takeaways for putting together the quickest possible morning.

There’s a New King of the Jungle

Part of the reason I love touring theme parks is because you never know quite what to expect. A ride might break down, a wait time might be way off—these are just fun little tweaks that make planning a challenge.

Heading into the reopening, I’ve been interested to see how the loss of FastPass+ and the new sanitation procedures impact wait patterns. The new procedures especially intrigue me—how will reduced ride capacities + new cleaning procedures impact rides.

Well, we’ve started to get our first glimpse of a weird shift. Navi River Journey now has longer average wait times than Flight of Passage. I’ll compare these two rides across four metrics for the first seven days: average wait time (entire week), average maximum wait time, average daily time spent above 15 minutes, average daily time spent above 30 minutes…

The only one of those metrics where Flight of Passage “beats” Navi River Journey is that it spent more time with waits over 30 minutes this week, but that’s pretty much entirely because it spent one morning (July 12) at 35 minutes.

Another way to look at it is by average wait times throughout the day. Here’s the 8AM to 6PM chart (averaged across the first seven days) for these two rides:

Before I get into why Navi waits are longer these days, I want to point your attention to the very left of that graph. You see that even though it has longer waits most of the day that hasn’t translated to more demand at rope drop. So you can easily walk right onto the ride with the longest waits right at 8AM.

How long will this last? That’s really hard to say. On the one hand, guests—particularly repeat visitors—should catch onto this over time. On the other hand, locals—the bulk of current visitors—probably just prefer to start with Flight of Passage because they prefer that ride.

Why are Navi waits oddly long?

At both Animal Kingdom and Magic Kingdom, we’ve seen boat rides trend toward longer waits than usual (ignoring the low crowd levels).

The reduced capacity seems to be hitting these rides harder than other rides, but cleaning procedures might play a bigger role. For the most part, Disney isn’t cleaning rides between every use, but they’re cleaning every vehicle after some number of uses. This impacts different ride systems in different ways.

At Flight of Passage, they can wipe down every seat by simply moving from one room to another and not loading that room for one ride cycle. If the ride was operating at full capacity, this would be noticeable. But if the ride is only using, say, 75% of the rooms at any given time, they can just rotate which 25% is being unused and clean it then.

At a boat ride like Na’vi River Journey, though, they either have to stop loading the entire ride so they can clean each boat, or they can very slowly load each boat, wiping before guests board. In any case, the boat ride sees significant delays.

One experience from BlogMickey captures the challenge of timing Na’vi River Journey. In that discussion, he mentions the cleaning cycle meant the ride wouldn’t board for 20 minutes.

Kilimanjaro Safaris vs. Avatar Flight of Passage

While I think the question of which ride to visit second is quite interesting, it’s purely academic at this point. Both Flight of Passage and Kilimanjaro Safaris spend significant parts of the afternoon with waits under 15 minutes. But hey, let’s think about it a little bit anyways.

If you exit Na’vi River Journey and Flight of Passage has a wait of 15 minutes or less, you might as well just ride it now. If nothing else, you might decide you love it so much you want to ride it again later in the day.

There’s no sense walking all the way over to Kilimanjaro Safaris while you’ve got a short wait right in Pandora, because the Safari wait might very well jump by the time you get there. But, if Flight of Passage has a wait over 15 minutes, you can probably just head to Kilimanjaro Safaris.

If both Kilimanjaro Safaris and Flight of Passage have long waits once you’re off Na’vi River Journey, you’ve got a decision to make.

One obvious option is to just skip them both. After all, you could probably go ride DINOSAUR, Expedition Everest, and Kali River Rapids with 5-minute waits and then come back to Flight of Passage or Kilimanjaro Safaris.

But personally, I’d probably just head to Kilimanjaro Safaris in this situation. Kilimanjaro Safaris is one of two rides—the other is Kali River Rapids—where when you ride might impact your experience. Kali River Rapids is a water ride, usually best to ride between 12PM and 4PM (but these days we hear you aren’t get too wet, anyways).

Kilimanjaro Safaris has the opposite preference. You want to avoid 12PM to 4PM—the hottest hours of the day—because the animals are less active in the heat.

Generally, we prefer to ride Kilimanjaro Safaris in the morning, but late afternoon is a viable option. While you shouldn’t delay a ride until too late—don’t want it to break down and then the park closes—Kilimanjaro Safaris very rarely has issues that temporarily close it. Still, I’d target getting in line no later than an hour before the park closes.

Kali River Rapids

As noted above, you’ll probably want to ride Kali River Rapids during the hottest hours of 12PM to 4PM. I’ve often gotten off Kali fairly dry, and it’s not like getting wet in 80-degree 8AM or 6PM is going to leave you cold, but 12PM to 4PM is still peak time.

Here’s a look at the average waits (5 minute intervals) for Kali the first seven days:

The peaks in the Kali River Rapids average waits for the first week come at 10:05AM, 12:05PM, 2:05PM, and 4:05PM. But the peak wait for the week was only 35 minutes (note: since the above chart is averages, that peak wait doesn’t explicitly appear).

The wait also dropped to 5 minutes at least once each day between 12PM and 4PM, so this “peak” time frame is still constrained by the reality that the park isn’t very crowded.

Expedition Everest & DINOSAUR

Neither of these rides has had waits over 30 minutes in the first week. They both spent a small amount of time with waits over 15 minutes, and have mostly been at 5-15 minutes.

Historically, Expedition Everest is the higher priority, and what little useful data we have from this week suggests that will still be the case going forward. At this point, just ride these whenever.

TriceraTop Spin, It’s Tough To Be A Bug, Wildlife Express

TriceraTop Spin is an aerial carousel (Dumbo-style ride) in Dino-Rama. It has had and will likely continue to have waits in the 0-10 minute range. Just visit it after you ride DINOSAUR.

It’s Tough to be a Bug is a 3D show that runs more or less every ten minutes. It’s central in the park, so just visit it whenever.

Wildlife Express is the train to Rafiki’s Planet Watch, which is where conservation station and The Animation Experience are. The train runs probably every five minutes and takes about that. If you wanted to ride it round-trip, it would take about 15 minutes anytime in your day.

What Does The Future Hold?

I love Animal Kingdom, but it’s never been a truly challenging park to experience. At the height of crowds, a good FastPass+ and rope drop strategy would leave you plenty of time to fill with stage shows and streetmosphere.

We might see stage shows return soon, but streetmosphere seems likely to be gone for a while.

Crowds will increase from this week eventually, but when? October? December? Spring Break 2021?

When they do increase, not much will really change. Flight of Passage might eventually regain it’s status at the longest wait in the park, but Animal Kingdom touring strategy has long been Pandora -> Kilimanjaro Safaris -> Everything Else. That won’t change.

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