Getting the most out of the Magic Kingdom
The Edmonton Journal
Fred Hazelton wants you to defeat Evil Emperor Zurg, ruler of Planet Z and arch-nemesis of Buzz Lightyear. But he doesn't want you to stand in line for hours, roasting in the Florida sun, waiting for the battle to begin.
He wants you to ride Cinderella's Golden Carousel, too. But he doesn't want you to suffer a two-hour wait for a two-minute spin.
Mr. Hazelton also recommends Splash Mountain. But he doesn't recommend getting stuck in a queue stretching to infinity (and beyond), where your preteen daughter will whine that she's bored, bored, bored, and your overtired toddler will initiate Operation Meltdown.
Hazelton, an Orléans resident with a math degree from the University of Waterloo, spends much of his time crunching numbers for Statistics Canada. But for 15 hours each week, the 35-year-old father of two turns his attention southward, to Orlando, Florida. Hazelton is the official statistician for the Unofficial Guide to Walt Disney World, a perennial bestseller. His expertise: predicting crowd levels. His mission: help visitors to the world's busiest recreational resort spend more time on their bums, less time on their feet.
"In the case of Disney World," he says, "the more you see and the less you wait, usually the happier you're going to be."
At age four, Hazelton visited Disney World for the first time. In 1998, while planning his first visit as an adult, he read an article about Unofficial Guide author Bob Sehlinger, who was looking for a Disney-loving statistician.
"Well," Hazelton thought. "That's me."
He contacted Sehlinger and was put in touch with Len Testa, an Unofficial Guide contributor. Testa, who has a Mickey Mouse tattoo on his right ankle and co-hosts a thrice-weekly Disney podcast, is the brains behind a computer algorithm that helps people get around Disney World with minimal delays. On a busy day, a Testa touring plan can save you more than four hours of standing in line. It was a two-hour wait for The Great Movie Ride, in 1994, that motivated Testa to begin work on his touring-plan software.
"I thought that there had to be a better way of doing this," says Testa, a 40-year-old software developer for American Express in Greensboro, North Carolina.
The project became his master's thesis at North Carolina A&T University. Of course, determining the best route between multiple destinations isn't a novel pursuit. It's a well known challenge among mathematicians, who call it the Time Dependent Traveling Salesman Problem. For some organizations, such as the package delivery company FedEx, efficient travel is a top priority. Testa's primary difficulty was incorporating unique theme park constraints like hours of operation and attraction wait times, among other things: "When you plan a family's day in Disney World, you have to consider lunch."
Testa completed his master's in computer science in 2000, and within three years his touring plans were part of the Unofficial Guide, but the plans aren't perfect.
A person wanting to complete 21 rides could do it many ways: 51,090,942,171,709,440,000 ways, to be exact. The Magic Kingdom, Disney's most popular theme park, has nearly 50 attractions. Evaluating all possible paths to determine the best wouldn't be practical, no matter how powerful the computer.
Testa's tours -- which come in many versions, from a plan for preteen girls who don't like roller coasters to one for seniors who want to minimize walking -- are optimal to within two per cent. That was good enough for Ed Waller, a Texas resident who in 2003 used a touring plan to do what many thought couldn't be done: visit every Magic Kingdom attraction in one day.
"I remember that day like I remember the birth of my daughter," Testa says. "It was validation."
Visitors to the Unofficial Guide's website (touringplans.com) can generate custom touring plans for any Disney park. Some 20,000 users have created plans, most of which are free on the website. But the software only works if Testa knows the approximate wait time at every attraction at any time on any day. Getting that data requires Hazelton's statistical know-how. And lots of legwork.
Testa, Hazelton and a team of volunteers spend several weeks a year collecting data at Disney World. When in Orlando, everyone repeats an assigned half-hour loop in one theme park until it closes, sometimes walking nearly 30 kilometres. Data is recorded in custom notebooks that won't smudge if it rains. (Testa tested them by standing under his sprinkler.)
On occasion, team members have to explain themselves to Disney security. A grown man walking around in circles, without a child, without trying any rides, eventually gets noticed. Testa was once noticed by security before even reaching the resort. Shortly after 9/11, he and several other researchers were pulled aside after boarding a plane with aerial maps of Disney World and no checked luggage. Such things are easier to explain, of course, when you're holding a Disney World travel guide with your name on the cover.
Once the data is collected, Hazelton uses it to predict wait times for future dates, though he must also consider many other factors that affect crowd sizes: the season, special events, extended hours. About 80 to 90 per cent of the time, his predictions are accurate to within eight minutes. Errors usually stem from unpredictable events like a ride breaking down.
"When we're wrong, it's because of something like the weather, which Fred can't yet control," Testa says. "But we're getting him to work on that."
In addition to feeding Testa's software, Hazelton maintains a crowd calendar on the Unofficial Guide's website that rates, from one to 10, how busy parks will be in upcoming months. It's helpful for planning, but a good touring plan is more important, says Hazelton, who worries that some people take the calendar too seriously. "Last Monday at 3 p.m., Disney released its May hours, and within 24 hours I received 50 messages asking me when I was going to update the crowd calendar."
Not everyone, however, is a fan of the research-oriented travel information produced by Hazelton and his colleagues. Some members of Internet forums, like waltdisneyboards.com, say the touring plans look good on paper, but fail on the ground. Others claim they are only effective for a couple of hours. Most dissenters simply oppose the concept of a rigidly planned vacation, like the man who, in a letter, told the Unofficial Guide authors that their book read "like an operations plan for an amphibious landing: Go here, do this, proceed to Step 15."
"To approach Disney World as a spontaneous place where you can just walk around is not recommended," Hazelton says. "Let's face it, it's the quintessential system."