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.
There was no specific goal in mind, no hypothesis to prove or disprove. I consider myself to be the average theme park fan living in Orlando (aside from the fact that I do have a job that requires me to visit the parks) and I was simply curious as to what these numbers might look like at year’s end. That being said, I would be lying if I said the results didn’t surprise me at least a little bit.
Before we get into it, I also 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?” May answer is always the same: “about once a week.” That of course has always just been a guess. Until now.
In 2022, I entered the gates of a theme park 115 times. Of course, many of those visits involved entering multiple parks on the same day, but I still visited a theme park on 99 unique dates in 2022. So really my answer should be closer to twice a week.
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, which we’ll get into a bit more.
With that being said, the park I visited most in 2022 was…
Universal Studios Florida
Even without counting visits for Halloween Horror Nights, which I treated as a unique park, I walked through the gates of Universal Studios Florida 28 times this year. Again, proximity has something to do with that, as well as events like Mardi Gras or the holiday celebration, but it was also just much easier to visit Universal without having to make a reservation for a specific park.
It didn’t necessarily surprise me that Universal Studios was my most visited park in 2022, but I was surprised by the gap between first and second. My second most visited park was EPCOT, which I stepped into 17 times this year. Third was Islands of Adventure and fourth was actually Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Florida, which I attended 13 times (we’ll dive a little deeper later). So, if I was so inclined as to include HHN in my Universal Studios count, that would be 41 visits to Universal Studios with my second most visited park being EPCOT at 17. That gap is one of the most surprising numbers to me.
Here is my complete list of parks visited in 2022:
Totalling up park visits based on resorts, I visited Universal Orlando Resort parks a total of 56 times. I entered a Walt Disney World park 44 times. These numbers do not take into a account visits to locations like Disney Springs, Universal CityWalk or any of the resort hotels. Universal Orlando parks also accounted for 13 of those 16 days with multiple parks in one visit, largely due to the convenience of being able to walk between both parks. If I were to count only unique days, the count would only be 43-42 in favor of Universal Orlando (one multi-park day involved visits to both Universal Studios and Disney’s Animal Kingdom). So when looking at the resorts as a whole, those numbers do even out quite a bit.
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, the results of my tracking shared some different evidence. As it turns out, only 55 of my 115 park visits in 2022 resulted in zero attractions. I actually experienced roughly 1.7 attractions per park visit, totalling 192 attractions. A couple of factors come to mind when looking at these numbers. First, was the introduction of a new attraction, for which I attended an event that allowed me to experience it eight times in a single visit (more on that later). Second, is visits with out-of-town guests. Those are the exception to the rule. When family and friends are visiting, we’re going to try and experience all the attractions they want, which obviously impacts the numbers.
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.
With that being said, my most experienced attraction of 2022 was…
Guardians of the Galaxy: Cosmic Rewind
As I mentioned above, the number for this attraction are greatly skewed by my opportunity to experience it eight times in a single day. Still, I experienced this new attraction a total of 15 times in 2022. Even removing those initial eight rides, Cosmic Rewind would still be my most experienced attraction, with seven rides compared to the six from the second most prominent attraction on the list, the PeopleMover. And yet, even with all of those rides, I still haven’t experienced all six songs.
Here are my top 12 most experienced attractions in 2022:
Don’t worry, the number 12 wasn’t arbitrary. Those are just all of the attractions I experienced at least three times in 2022. Despite the 15 rides on Cosmic Rewind, the park in which I experienced the most attractions (Halloween Horror Nights excluded) was Islands of Adventure. I experienced 25 attractions at Islands, compared to 22 at EPCOT and 21 at Universal Studios Florida. However, Disneyland Park was the park in which I experienced the most unique attractions, at 15. The reasoning behind that is fairly obvious: I don’t get to visit as often so I made the most of my trip.
Removing California parks, Halloween Horror Nights and parks which I only visited once in 2022, Islands of Adventure also saw the highest attractions per visit rate, at 1.78. A number that really surprised me though was the flip side of that statistic. I experienced just .2 attractions per visit to Disney’s Animal Kingdom. Some simple math will tell you that was just one attraction in my five visits to the park. That attraction was the reimagined Finding Nemo: The Big Blue… and Beyond!. That means some of the notable attractions I did not experience even once in 2022 include Avatar Flight of Passage, Expedition Everest, Dinosaur and Kilimanjaro Safaris. Other big attractions on that list are Jungle Cruise, Pirates of the Caribbean, Splash Mountain, Frozen Ever After and Remy’s Ratatouille Adventure. I did, however, experience 95 unique attractions in the past year.
The most attractions I experienced in a single day, again excluding Disneyland and Halloween Horror Nights, was nine at Islands of Adventure. Disneyland would top that by just one attraction because, again, I was trying to do as much as possible with my limited time.
Halloween Events
I really needed to separate Halloween events, specifically Halloween Horror Nights, because they would otherwise greatly skew the numbers. As I said, I attended Halloween Horror Nights at Universal Studios Florida 13 times, making it my fourth most visited park of 2022. Add to that a visit to HHN in Hollywood and Howl-O-Scream at SeaWorld Orlando, and these really needed to be their own category.
In 13 visits to Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando, I experienced an average of roughly 3.5 houses per visit for a total of 46 house runs. Compare that to the 1.78 at Islands of Adventure, which I visited just one more time, and you can see why I had to separate HHN from Universal Studios. I also experienced each attraction once in Hollywood and four houses one time each at Howl-O-Scream.
Here are the numbers on my HHN Orlando runs:
Stay and Scream had a lot to do with these numbers as the Springfield area was my go-to. That would allow guests to experience Universal Monsters, Descendants of Destruction, The Weeknd and Bugs more easily than other houses. Wait times also unfortunately kept me from doing Halloween and Dead Man’s Pier far more.
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 from my past year of park visits.
First park of the year: Universal Studios Florida
First attraction of the year: Revenge of the Mummy
Final park of the year: Universal Studios Florida
Final attraction of the year: Living with the Land
Most park visits in a month: 17 (October)
Fewest park visits in a month: 5 (March and April)
Most unique park visit days in a month: 14 (October)
Longest stretch of days without a park visit: 28 (March-April)
Most attractions in a month: 65 (September)
Fewest attractions in a month: 1 (March, April, December)
Most attractions in a single day: 13 (Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure, Halloween Horror Nights)
Most attractions in a single park in a single day: 10 (Disneyland)
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.