When I was a young boy, my mom attended a yearly work conference in Orlando. One year, she decided to bring me along and told me we were going to visit a place called Magic Kingdom.
Up until that point, my amusement park experience began and ended with the dingy traveling carnivals that popped up in local church parking lots. You know the ones. They blasted loud rock music through worn-out speakers, smelled like cigarette smoke and stale beer, and somehow every ride looked like it had already lived a long, hard life before arriving in town.
Then everything changed.
More than 35 years later, I can still remember the feeling as the monorail rounded the bend and Cinderella Castle came into view. I'd never seen anything like it. Everything felt bigger, cleaner, happier, and somehow impossible. I remember the pride of finally filling my autograph book with every character's signature, and the hug Minnie Mouse gave me at breakfast. I also remember getting hand, foot, and mouth disease afterward. True story. Looking back, I'd say it was still worth it.
That trip sparked something that never really went away.
As I got older, my love for theme parks only grew. Universal Studios became just as special to me as Disney. I eventually worked up the courage to ride Kongfrontation, even though it scared me to death, and by the end of the trip I'd ridden it fifteen times. Jaws left such an impression on me that it kicked off a years-long fascination with sharks and marine biology.
One of my favorite memories from those early trips wasn't even a ride. It was the Islands of Adventure Preview Center, a nondescript building tucked next to Kongfrontation that was filled with concept art, scale models, and plans for a brand-new theme park that was still two years away from opening. I wandered through it over and over again, imagining what it would be like. Two years doesn't seem very long now, but as a kid it felt like forever.
From that point on, I never wanted to vacation anywhere else. Mount Rushmore? Maybe another time. Niagara Falls? It'll still be there. I wanted Disney. I wanted Universal. Every trip gave me something new to discover, and every visit somehow made me more excited for the next one.
Years later, I had the chance to take my nieces for their first visit. Watching them experience those parks for the first time reminded me of what I'd felt as a kid, but it also showed me something new. Some of the joy came from the rides, but a lot of it came from watching someone else discover them for the first time.
Then my oldest son was born in 2018, and I started counting down the years until I could finally take him. When we visited just after his third birthday, it was everything I'd hoped it would be. Seeing him light up when he met the characters, hearing him talk nonstop about the rides afterward, and watching him experience places that had meant so much to me made those parks feel brand new again. Today, my younger son is just as big a Disney fan, and our family vacations revolve around the places that first captured my imagination all those years ago.
Somewhere along the way, my fascination shifted beyond the rides themselves. I became obsessed with understanding how the parks worked. Everything from the animatronics to the ride vehicles, to the flow of the crowds.
Why were wait times so different from one day to the next? Which rides were the most reliable? How did weather affect crowds? Were there patterns hiding in the data that could actually help people have a better vacation?
I spent countless hours digging through crowd data, ride downtime, historical trends, and park operations, looking for answers. The more I learned, the more I realized there wasn't a website that presented this information the way I wished it existed. There were great news sites. Great planning sites. Great crowd calendars. But I wanted something that combined all of those things while digging even deeper into the numbers.
So I decided to build it.
Looking Ahead
CrowdLevels.com is still very much a work in progress, but that's part of the fun. You'll probably find bugs. Some pages are definitely works in progress. Features will move around as they're improved. New parks, new tools, and new ways of looking at data are constantly being added. I'm building this site the way I wish someone else already had, and I'm excited to see where it goes.
I have a long list of ideas that I'm still keeping under wraps. Better planning tools. Deeper crowd analysis. More original reporting. Weekly dives into interesting data. New parks. New calculators.
If you've found your way here, I hope you'll stick around. Explore the site, kick the tires, and let me know what works and what doesn't. Most of all, if you enjoy what we're building, I'd be incredibly grateful if you'd share CrowdLevels.com with your family, your friends, and the other theme park fans in your life.
Every visitor helps.
I'm glad you're along for the ride.