We recently wrote about when are the best times to go to Walt Disney World but that’s only one travel destination, of thousands upon thousands, in the U.S. Trying to find out how crowds are at a particular location, to help in planning a visit, can be an effort in futility if you don’t know where to look.
Well, we found out where to look, at least for a bunch of places in Southern California 😉
IsItPacked.com is a crowd forecasting and vacation planning website that can give you an idea of crowds in theme parks, national parks, vacation spots and zoos & aquariums.
They offer a Crowds Calendar that provides crowd forecasts and historical ratings of popular travel destinations, as well as real-time crowd updates and current conditions via a Live Crowd Tracker.
The website is based in Anaheim, CA and the site is very Southern California-centric, particularly for theme parks (they have the most information about Disneyland, Disney’s California Adventure, Knott’s Berry Farm, Six Flags Magic Mountain, Universal Studios Hollywood, Sea World San Diego and Legoland California). However, they also have select choices for national parks (Grand Canyon, Yosemite National Park), vacation spots (Las Vegas), etc.
The website appears to use crowdsourcing to determine how bad the waits are:
* Psst! It should be “all right,” not “alright” 😉
They also use select keywords via Twitter (i.e. #disneyland #knotts), which sometimes gives a general idea of crowds (but more often leads to non-theme park [and non-family-friendly – I didn’t include any of those] tweets):
There are also areas to ask questions about crowds:
Overall, I think the website has its place to help with learning about crowds, but its scope is much too limited to help a whole lot, unless you’re specifically looking for information about theme parks in Southern California. It has potential to be a good tool to help in travel planning if its scope was larger, but since the webmaster says they’ve been tracking crowds for more than a decade, and the furthest out they’ve ventured from Anaheim is Las Vegas, I question if the site will ever live up to its potential. Pity.
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This post first appeared on Your Mileage May Vary
