Back in February, we were excited to introduce our readers to our developer, George Reason, and announce the arrival of our new Crowd Calendar. We closed the announcement promising it was just the beginning of enhancements coming to Orlando Informer in 2016.

Today, fueled by your overwhelming positive feedback we received about our smarter crowd calendar, we’re excited to share our latest feature: predictive ride wait times on all ride pages in our OI Universal Center.

What is predictive ride wait times?

In a nutshell, we’ve added a clean and easy to read graph onto each of our dedicated ride pages in our OI Universal Center. These graphs allow you to input any date within the next 12 months and view our specific estimated waits for the attraction broken up in 15 minute intervals.

Date summary: After selecting a date, a short summary of the expected wait times at the specific attraction will appear under the graph. These summaries quickly detail the time when we expect the line to be the lowest and the time we expect the line to be the highest. Weather is also shown in the summary…

Weather integration: Just like our recently redesigned crowd calendar, our predictive ride wait times are backed by up to 15 weather sources, aggregated together statistically to provide the most accurate forecast possible for Universal Orlando. This exhaustive weather data is used to continuously track inclement weather that will impact the outdoor attractions. Our predicted wait times are automatically adjusted in real time to account for ride closures due to inclement weather. A warning and estimated time of impact will display under our graphs when we think a storm will cause outdoor attractions to close.

Fully responsive: We put a lot of energy into designing a graph that is easy to use whether you’re viewing it on your desktop or phone. The graphs are unapologetically simple, only showing what is absolutely useful for you.

Always learning: While the front of house is simple, the back of house is anything but. Thousands of data points are being computed while we monitor for inclement weather every day of the year. Our algorithms are designed so that our predictions continuously improve themselves. Our predictions are automatically updated every 15 minutes with our backend and frontend working harmoniously together to actively become more powerful and ultimately more useful.

Free is best

We’re happy to share that, as always, the 200+ pages of information found within our OI Universal Center (including predictive ride wait times) is completely free.

Predictive ride wait times join a long list of other information that can be found on our attraction pages including information on restrictions, two-sentence summaries, information on how scary each attraction may be for younger guests, fun facts, HD photo galleries, and thousands of real guest reviews.

Beta launching today

We’ve begun to roll out predictive ride wait times, on all of our ride pages, to all readers visiting our site. We expect this process to be complete within the next 24 hours. You can see one of the first pages with the feature enabled here.

Please note: The new Orlando Informer crowd calendar is currently in beta. While we work diligently to provide you with the most accurate information possible, the policies and procedures of other businesses may change at any time without notice. Therefore, Orlando Informer makes no warranties regarding the accuracy or completeness of these projections and posted information.

If you want to hear more about this new addition, George joins us on Episode 41 of the Orlando Informer Podcast to discuss this new feature.

We’d love to hear your feedback on our new predictive ride wait times on our Facebook group or via email: contact@orlandoinformer.com.

On behalf of George and our entire team, we hope you enjoy this new addition to our arsenal of vacation planning tools. Please continue to check back throughout the year for additional major exciting features.