Wait-time data: what’s real
Research checked Nov 7, 2026
Short answer
- Disney has no official public or partner API for wait times, park hours, show schedules, Lightning Lane returns, dining availability or My Disney Experience data. No developer program, documentation or data licence was found on Disney's sites, and Disney's terms of use forbid automated access and commercial use without written permission. Disney Terms of Use §2B(viii),(x), §3H
- What exists is an unofficial ecosystem: the My Disney Experience app talks to undocumented Disney endpoints (e.g.
api.wdpro.disney.go.com/facility-service/..., using a public mobile-client token), and third-party services read those feeds and republish them as clean, free JSON APIs. parkhoppr source showing the endpoint pattern mousetools: "unofficial… wrapper for Disney's undocumented API" - Live test worked. At about 11:08–11:12 PM EST on Nov 7, 2026, four separate free APIs all returned Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance (Hollywood Studios) = 30-minute standby wait, during the ticketed Disney Jollywood Nights event. Samples are in live-data/samples/.
1. Official Disney position
| Item | Finding | Evidence |
|---|---|---|
| Public developer API / partner feed | None found. Disney Trackers, a third-party site, also states "Disney's booking system does not offer a public API" and that availability pages use bot protection. | — |
| Licence to use Disney Products | Personal, noncommercial use only. | — |
| Commercial use | Prohibited without express written permission: "use the Disney Products for any commercial or business-related use or build a business utilizing the Disney Products". | — |
| Scraping / automation | — | — |
| AI use | No reproducing or transforming Disney Products for training, testing or validating any AI tool. | — |
| Branding / implied association | No use "in a manner that suggests an association with our products, services or brands"; no marketing/branding use of Disney IP unless licensed. | — |
| Terms version | "Last Updated: May 24, 2024"; New York law; arbitration with class-action waiver. | — |
| robots.txt | Disallows /search/, /reservations/, /store/checkout/, dated /calendars/… pages (park and resort hours calendars) and ?price URLs. robots.txt is a crawler instruction, not permission; the terms still govern. | disneyworld robots.txt (saved copy in samples) |
| Official way to see live data | The My Disney Experience app and the Disney World website, for personal use. | — |
2. Third-party options developers use
All free tiers below were reachable with no key on Nov 7, 2026. None is affiliated with or endorsed by Disney.
Comparison
| Service | Covers (WDW) | Freshness | Cost / auth | Attribution / key terms | Live test |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
ThemeParks.wiki (api.themeparks.wiki/v1) | Live standby, single rider, Lightning Lane return windows (RETURN_TIME) and Single Pass prices (PAID_RETURN_TIME), status, operating hours incl. Early Entry and ticketed events, showtimes, restaurants, some forecasts; 30-day schedule with Multi/Premier/Single prices; history (7 days keyless, 30 days free key). Water parks included. 199 parks worldwide. | Collected on a cadence, cached 60 s; terms say no point polling faster than every 5 min. | Free: 300 REST req/min, 1 websocket. Pro $29/mo, Business $199/mo (99.5% SLA), Enterprise from $500/mo. Key optional (x-api-key). | "Powered by ThemeParks.wiki" visible linked credit required for any product showing data to users, including AI assistants. Commercial use allowed. No redistribution (no re-API, feeds, bulk export, embeddable widgets). No agreement with Disney; "whether your own use also needs a park's or operator's permission is for you to check". No warranty; one-person UK operation. | ✅ Works |
Queue-Times (queue-times.com) | Live standby + open/closed only, grouped by land. No LL, hours or shows. 80+ parks; database back to 2014 (web only). | "Updated every 5 minutes." | Free, no key. | Must display "Powered by Queue-Times.com" linking to queue-times.com "somewhere prominent". Patreon support requested. No separate API terms page found (only privacy). | ✅ Works |
Parky API (api.parkypass.com/v1, launched Oct 5, 2026) | Live waits, single rider, LL type/state/return window/price, hours (60 days), showtimes + character meets, crowd forecast (30 days) + observed crowd index, ride reliability/outages (since Sep 28, 2026), 7-day wait history, best times to ride, weather/lightning risk, ticket prices, park reservation availability, hotel availability/rates, event nights, WDW bus predictions. REST + WebSocket + SSE + MCP server. WDW, Disneyland, Universal only. | Says it checks every 5 s; cache-control: max-age=5. | Free: 30/min, 1,000/day keyless; 120/min, 20,000/day with free key; paid Pro/Business tiers (prices not on docs page). | "Live data from parkypass.com" visible link on every page showing the data (not only in an iframe). Free on commercial sites. Don’t resell raw data or present it as your own feed; respect cache times. Keys revocable. Run by a former WDW resort concierge per its own site. Very new; its speed comparisons against rivals are self-published. | ✅ Works |
Rope Drop News Open Data (ropedropnews.com) | Live waits/status per park, rides down now, water-park status, live Single Pass prices; hourly CSVs (90-day reliability, best times, crowd calendar, LL price history, WDW construction permits). | Live JSON ~1 min; CSV ~hourly. | Free, no key. | CC BY 4.0; credit "Data from Rope Drop News (https://ropedropnews.com), CC BY 4.0". Claims data is "first-party and original", but the waits are clearly Disney's posted numbers; the CC licence cannot grant rights Rope Drop News doesn't hold. | ✅ Works |
RopeDrop Planner (ropedropplanner.com/api) | Live waits, LL return/state/price, boarding groups, showtimes, ride facts (height, duration), predictions, analytics (55M+ records claimed). | "Updated every 5 minutes." | Free, no key; 120/min on wait-times. | Commercial/heavy users must email before production use. No formal licence found. | ✅ Works, but returned every WDW entity regardless of park_id, and included stale rows (e.g. "Frozen Holiday Surprise" last updated 2025-12-29 still marked OPERATING). |
| TouringPlans | Its old free API (attractions, dining, hotel facts, menus as JSON; never waits/crowds) is no longer supported (help article updated Oct 16, 2026, recommends ThemeParks.wiki). Crowd calendars and wait data stay behind its paid subscription; its website terms ban robots and commercial use without permission. Historic CSV wait datasets for data science (2018 blog) — current availability unverified. | — | Subscription for site data. | Website terms: personal, non-commercial; no robots/spiders "for any purpose". | — |
ThemeParks npm library (themeparks) | v9.0.0 (Oct 31, 2026) is the official SDK for the ThemeParks.wiki API, not a separate data source; MIT. Python SDK and open-source collector parksapi (MIT, pushed Nov 6, 2026) also exist. Older v5/v6 versions historically called park APIs directly — unverified for today. | Same as ThemeParks.wiki | Free | Inherits ThemeParks.wiki terms | n/a (SDK) |
| mousetools (PyPI 6.2.0) and similar wrappers | Call Disney's undocumented API directly from your own server. | Real time | Free | Direct use conflicts with Disney's terms (automated access, commercial use). Not recommended for a commercial guide. | Not tested by design |
| WDWNT | No public wait-time API found; GitHub has an internal "tip-board" app that calls other APIs and an old radio-show API (2018). | — | — | — | n/a |
Example: the same ride, four sources (Nov 7, 2026, EST)
| Source | Rise of the Resistance | Timestamp in response (converted to EST) |
|---|---|---|
| ThemeParks.wiki | 30 min, OPERATING, Single Pass $25 (state FINISHED) | lastUpdated 11:08:43 PM |
| Parky | 30 min, single rider available, Single Pass $25 | changed 11:08:41 PM; checked 11:12:45 PM |
| Queue-Times | 30 min, open | last_updated 11:10:15 PM |
| Rope Drop News | 30 min, LL $25.00 | captured ~11:12 PM |
| RopeDrop Planner | 25 min | last_updated 10:52:41 PM (stale) |
Other HS waits at the same moment (ThemeParks.wiki): Slinky Dog Dash 30, Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring The Muppets 30, Toy Story Mania! 20, Millennium Falcon 15, Tower of Terror 13. tpw-hs-live.json
Other data pulled in the test
- Lightning Lane prices by date (ThemeParks.wiki schedule, MK): Nov 7 Multi Pass $42, Seven Dwarfs $18, TRON $25 (TRON unavailable); Prices before tax. tpw-mk-schedule.json parky-mk-ll-2026-11-08.json
- Hours (ThemeParks.wiki): MK Nov 7 Early Entry 8:30–9:00 AM, open 9 AM–11 PM; Nov 8 Early Entry 7:30–8 AM, open 8 AM–6 PM, then a Special Ticketed Event 7 PM–midnight.
- Crowd forecast (Parky, MK): Nov 7 level 8; Nov 8 and 9 level 3 ("Ticketed party tonight; closes early"). This is Parky's model, not Disney data.
- Buses (Parky, Pop Century): next predicted departures to Disney Springs and Hollywood Studios 11:21 PM EST, Magic Kingdom 11:28 PM EST — late-night predictions, likely the last runs.
- Disney facility IDs come through as
externalIdin ThemeParks.wiki (e.g. Seven Dwarfs16767284, TRON411504498), useful for joining sources.
3. Reliability observations from the test
- After hours, ThemeParks.wiki returns
waitTime: null+CLOSED; Queue-Times returnswait_time: 0+is_open: false, so 0 does not mean walk-on. - Queue-Times listed Festival of the Lion King and Finding Nemo as
is_open: trueat 11:10 PM while Animal Kingdom was closed — likely stale show status (unverified). Some Queue-Times rows hadlast_updateddays old (Jungle Cruise Nov 3) and still listed Halloween-party meet-and-greets. - Naming lags: Queue-Times still has "Rock 'n' Roller Coaster Starring Aerosmith Single Rider" next to the Muppets version.
- Rope Drop News marked Hollywood Studios
isOpen: falsewhile rides were operating for the ticketed event — party hours are handled inconsistently. - All of these depend on Disney's undocumented feeds. Disney can change or block them at any time; every provider says so in some form (ThemeParks.wiki: data "can be stale, wrong, or missing" even with its SLA). Posted waits are Disney's posted estimates, not measured actual waits.
- Not available from any source: dining reservation availability (only Parky's consumer app advertises table alerts; not in its API), personal MDE data (plans, tickets, LL bookings), or virtual-queue joining. Those need a guest login and would breach Disney's terms if automated.
4. Legal and ethical caveats for a commercial guide
- Don’t touch Disney directly. Scraping Disney sites or calling the MDE endpoints from our own code conflicts with Disney's terms (§2B(viii), §2B(x)), whatever robots.txt says. Use a third-party API instead.
- Third-party APIs move the technical risk off us, but not all the legal risk. ThemeParks.wiki says plainly it has no agreement with Disney and that checking whether a park's permission is needed is up to us. Wait times are arguably facts (not copyrightable in the US), but contract and "hot news"-style claims plus Disney's trademark rights stay open questions → lawyer review before launch.
- Attribution is mandatory on the free tiers ("Powered by ThemeParks.wiki", "Powered by Queue-Times.com", "Live data from parkypass.com", or the CC BY line for Rope Drop News), and it has to be visible and linked wherever the data appears, including AI-assistant answers (ThemeParks.wiki, explicitly). Paid ThemeParks.wiki plans ($29+/mo) remove the credit requirement.
- No redistribution. A guide that shows data to readers is fine. Offering our own feed, widgets/iframes for other sites, or bulk exports is not (ThemeParks.wiki, Parky).
- Disney trademarks. Use ride and park names for identification only. No Disney logos, characters or art, and nothing that suggests Disney endorses the guide. Add a disclaimer like "Not affiliated with or endorsed by Disney; times are Disney's posted estimates and may be wrong." (Terms §2B(vii), §3H)
- Accuracy and safety. Every provider disclaims accuracy.
- Provider risk. ThemeParks.wiki is run by one person; Parky and Rope Drop News launched in fall 2026. Build so the guide can switch sources and still work without live data.
- AI / ML. ThemeParks.wiki lets you train models that power your own product, but not models or datasets that reproduce the feed. Disney's terms forbid using Disney Products to train or test AI tools.
Recommended stack (for later, not built)
- Main source: ThemeParks.wiki: widest coverage, documented OpenAPI, official SDKs, explicit commercial-use terms, paid plan available to drop the credit and get an SLA.
- Add-on for WDW extras: Parky for buses, crowd forecasts, reliability, hotel/ticket availability (attribution on every page).
- Backup / cross-check: Queue-Times (waits only).
- Keep Disney's own app as the source of truth readers are told to check.
Sources (all accessed 2026-11-07)
Disney Terms of Use · Disney World robots.txt · ThemeParks.wiki API page · ThemeParks.wiki Terms · ThemeParks.wiki OpenAPI docs · ThemeParks.wiki tiers JSON · ThemeParks GitHub org / parksapi · themeparks npm · Queue-Times API · Parky API docs · Rope Drop News Open Data · RopeDrop Planner developers · TouringPlans API help article · TouringPlans legacy API page · TouringPlans terms · TouringPlans 2018 datasets blog · mousetools · parkhoppr · WDWNT GitHub · Disney Trackers about