WDW crowds for January 2009

In the thread about POP Century the Jim Hill media article there says they've had attendance in the 30ks. I was curious about these numbers myself. They said that people were GOING they just weren't spending as much money.

We've seen a really big jump in search traffic as well since the start of the year. We're not sure if it's because we're rating better, or if people are really doing a lot of WDW planning research.

It's also coming up on MLK day, which is very probably the reason for the surge. People probably have this Monday off and are jacking up attendance!

Before every single trip I've taken, I've paid more attention to people's crowd reports than I usually do and have gotten freaked out.

Probably the 4+3 deal is drawing folks (plus they mentioned something about free dining for the international visitors...), and MLK is going to make it significantly more crowded, but it seems that you guys will be going during the sweet spot: MLK rush is OVER and President's Day (Feb 16th) hasn't ramped up yet.

I bet you'll find it to be better than the crowd blogs predict...

I think it's really often a roll of the dice. There are so many factors that can affect things it's really hard to predict.

On many trips, I've expected the first half to be calm and the second half to be bad and had the exact opposite experience. I'm sort of anti-crowd, so I tend to stress about it a lot too. On those trips I'll be like "if this is the CALM part, the last half is going to be awful" and then it turns out to be vacant.

No insight here, but I was speaking with my Disney TA yesterday and asked her if she was getting a lot of work from the 4/3 deal. She said yes and no, she's seen a lot of cancellations because of the economy.

I'm not sure what costs I would cut if I went. We don't buy a lot of "souveniers," and I'm not giving up my dining! I'd rather just not go!