At the start of 2022, I decided to embark on a project for the new year. I created a spreadsheet to track every one of my park visits for the entire year. Being a local in Orlando, that resulted in a very long, very extensive spreadsheet, complete with every attraction I experience for the entire year as well.
No, that was not a typo. I started tracking this information at the start of 2022 and now that we are in 2024, I have two full years of Orlando local theme park attendance data. Now, while I consider myself to be the average theme park fan, I do have a job that requires me to visit the parks so my statistics may not exactly be reflective of the typical Central Florida resident.
Having the previous year’s information readily available, I would be lying if I said it didn’t at least slightly influence my visits in 2023. I did have a few goals in mind this time around, but I also didn’t let them completely dictate my plans. If I had to be at Magic Kingdom, I wasn’t also going to force myself to visit Animal Kingdom to balance things out. If I wanted to experience an attraction but found that it had a 90-minute wait, I skipped it, just as I normally would.
With all of that being said, I once again want to acknowledge that I am incredibly fortunate to be able to experience these parks on a regular basis and in no way do I take that for granted (as you may see from these numbers).
Let’s take a look at those results, shall we?
Total Park Visits
Since moving to Orlando in 2017, the question I get most often when seeing friends and family back in New Jersey is some variation of “how often do you visit the parks?” My typical answer used to be “about once a week,” until last year’s data told me it was closer to twice a week. Now with two years of data to study, we can start to see some trends.
In 2023, I entered the gates of a theme park 117 times. Of course, many of those visits involved entering multiple parks on the same day, but I still visited a theme park on 96 unique dates in 2023. In other words, I visited at least one theme park every 3.8 days.
Interestingly, my number of park visits was up from 115 in 2022 but my unique dates was down from 99 in that year. So, while I didn’t have as many days where I was able to visit one of the parks in 2023, I did a bit more park hopping.
As for the parks I visited most often, there are a number of factors to take into account. First is obviously location as it is a bit easier to visit some parks than other based on how far they are from my home. Second is new attractions and events. Some parks simply had bigger draws than others. And the third is convenience. Certain parks made it just a bit more difficult to visit this year, even if it did get just a tad easier.
With that being said, the park I visited most in 2023 was
Universal Studios Florida
And it wasn’t close. Like I said, I went into the year with some goals in mind, one of them being balancing out my visits to the Universal Parks vs. the Disney Parks. I did not achieve that goal.
Even without including my visits to Halloween Horror Nights, which I once again counted as its own unique park, I visited Universal Studios Florida 32 times in 2023. Which means I entered the gates of that park once every roughly 11.5 days. This number was also up from 28 visits to Universal Studios Florida in 2022.
As for the reasoning, location has a lot to do with it as Universal Orlando is considerably closer to my home than Walt Disney World is. There is also the factor of various events occurring in this park, like Universal Mardi Gras and Universal Holiday Celebration.
Once again, the biggest surprise here was the game between Universal Studios Florida and the rest of the parks. My second most visited was actually Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando (but we’ll discuss that a bit more later) followed by EPCOT, which came in at 17 visits. Islands of Adventure was next, followed by the other three Walt Disney World Parks and then Universal’s Volcano Bay. So, if I add up the visits for each resort, it would be 67 visits to Universal Orlando and 43 to Walt Disney World. That 24-visit gap is up considerably from just 12 last year, during which I visited Universal Orlando just 56 times and Walt Disney World 44. Of course, these numbers do not take into account visits to places like Disney Springs, Universal CityWalk or any of the resort hotels.
Here is my complete list of parks visited in 2023:
Oddly enough, I visited EPCOT and Islands of Adventure the exact same number of times (17 and 14) in each of the past two years. I also got the chance to visit several California parks, including my first visit ever to SeaWorld San Diego.
Attractions
As a local, I find most of my park visits do not include actually experiencing an attraction. I enjoy the vibe of the park but don’t necessarily feel the need to wait to jump on my favorite ride. If the wait time is short, that’s when I take advantage.
However, last year I learned that I actually do experience attractions more often than I thought, and that was the case again this year. Only 55 of my 117 park visits (47%) resulted in no attractions being experienced. Coincidentally, that was the exact same number of no-attraction days as in 2022. I also experienced roughly 1.62 attractions per visit in 2023, almost exactly on the 1.7 mark from 2022, for a total of 190 attractions experienced.
The same factors applied last year as the year prior. New attractions of course incentivized me to wait longer then I normally would, driving the overall number up a bit. There were also several park visits with out-of-town visitors, during which I would obviously be much more willing to wait for attractions.
Also, I want to clarify that for this study, I classified attractions as anything that required me to enter an existing queue. Nighttime spectaculars and some other shows that could easily be entered at any time, were excluded (I’m looking at you, Journey of Water, Inspired by Moana).
With that being said, my most experienced attraction of 2023 was…
Men in Black: Alien Attack
It was not a new attraction that topped the list this year. Despite the fact that 2023 saw the opening of TRON Lightcycle / Run at Magic Kingdom and Illumination’s Villain-Con Minion Blast at Universal Studios Florida, it was an old favorite the won out. There are a couple of factors that come to mind when thinking of why Men In Black: Alien Attack would be my most experienced attraction in a given year. The first is simple: it rarely has a long wait. Throw in the fact that there’s a single rider line and I often times walk right on. Second, due to the competitive nature of the attraction, rideability is one of its best qualities.
Here are my top 12 most experienced attractions in 2023:
Don’t worry, the number 12 wasn’t arbitrary. Those are just all of the attractions I experienced at least twice in 2023. After topping the last last year, EPCOT’s Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind finished second this year. It might have had more rides if I had not accomplished hearing all six of the attraction’s randomized songs so early in the year.
Five rides on TRON Lightcycle / Run might seem low but when you take into account the use of virtual queue and the number of times I visited Magic Kingdom after it opened, I actually experienced it quite often. And Illumination’s Villain-Con Minion Blast opened late in the year and saw fairly elevated wait times more often than not, so three is a pretty fair number.
The park in which I experienced the most attractions in 2023 (excluding Halloween Horror Nights) was Universal Studios Florida at 21. However, when you take into account the number of park visits, my attractions per visit (APV) at Universal Studios Florida was only .65. My highest APV for any park with at least three visits was 1.36 for Magic Kingdom, which was carried by TRON and the PeopleMover.
Some interesting findings from 2023 vs. 2022 include the fact that my APV for Universal’s Islands of Adventure was down significantly. While Islands topped the list in 2022 with 25 attractions and a 1.78 APV in 2022, this past year those numbers were down to just 3 and .2, which was the lowest of any park. Longer wait times and fewer visits with out-of-town guests played a factor there. Also, coincidentally, I experienced the exact same number of attractions (21) in Universal Studios Florida in both years. I also experienced 66 unique attractions in 2023, which was down considerably from 95 the year prior.
Obviously, I did not get a chance to experience all of my favorite attractions in 2023. Some of the notable attractions I did not experience even once in the past year include Space Mountain, Millennium Falcon: Smugglers Run, Slinky Dog Dash, Toy Story Mania, Avatar: Flight of Passage, Kilimanjaro Safaris, The Incredible Hulk Coaster, Harry Potter and the Forbidden Journey and Hagrid’s Magical Creature Motorbike Adventure. Their inclusion on that list means it has been at least two full years since I’ve experienced Avatar: Flight of Passage and Kilimanjaro Safaris. I’ll be planning to end that streak in 2024.
The most attractions I experienced in a single day (Halloween Horror Nights excluded) came at EPCOT in June, when I experienced 8 different attractions.
Halloween Events
Now these number are going to be considerably different from 2022 to 2023. And the big reason for that is simple: Express Pass. After both The Last of Us and Stranger Things were announced as houses for Halloween Horror Nights last year, we knew we were going to be dealing with some pretty busy nights and decided to splurge for the first time ever on Express with our Frequent Fear Plus passes. And boy were we glad we did.
The Express Pass greatly impacted all of the numbers, from number of visits to total attractions. In 19 visits to Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Orlando, I experienced an APV of nearly 5.5 for 104 total attractions. Those numbers were up significantly from 13 visits with a 3.5 APV for
Here are the numbers on my HHN Orlando runs:
Blood Moon: Dark Offerings, a surprise favorite of last year’s event, topped the list with 14 runs. I also counted Halloween Nightmare Fuel: Revenge Dream, the show on the Fear Factor Live stage, as an attraction for the first time, due to the fact that we did have to queue up for it for both of our visits.
2022’s list was topped by Universal Monsters: Legends Collide with just 8 runs. That would leave it just one run higher than my least experienced houses in 2023. That also means that not a single house reached double digits in 2022, while 7 of the 10 houses reached that marker in 2023. Express Pass really makes a difference at Halloween Horror Nights, especially when you’re dealing with the big IP at the event. I experienced The Last of Us and Stranger Things a combined 20 times while 2022’s biggest IPs – The Weeknd and Halloween – only racked up a total of 9 runs. And while I did visit six more times in 2023 than in 2022, a major reason for that was the ability to visit for just a couple of hours and still experience a few of the houses with minimal wait times.
Halloween Horror Nights was not the only Halloween event we attended. We also got out to Howl-O-Scream Orlando for the third straight year and experienced five different houses, even getting to do a Scream Cam for one of them!
Some More Numbers
And just because I’m a statistics nerd (in case you haven’t already figured that out), I wanted to end with some other interesting stats and facts from my past year of park visits.
First park of the year: Animal Kingdom
First attraction of the year: Walt Disney World Railroad
Final park of the year: Universal Studios Florida
Final attraction of the year: Men in Black: Alien Attack
Most park visits in a month: 16 (September)
Fewest park visits in a month: 7 (March and July)
Most unique park visit days in a month: 16 (September)
Longest stretch of days without a park visit: 12 (November)
Most attractions in a month: 59 (September)
Fewest attractions in a month: 3 (March)
Most attractions in a single day: 14 (Universal Studios Florida and Halloween Horror Nights)
Most attractions in a single park in a single day: 12 (Halloween Horror Nights)
Obviously, experiencing the parks as often as I have in the past year is a lot of fun, but I also enjoyed tracking my experiences. I guess we’ll have to see how different these numbers will be in 2023.