What's New
Latest updates and improvements
The first day's figures showed the box below a park's ride board, the box on the homepage and the box on the crowd calendar hub were almost never scrolled into view. They have been removed. A box that is never seen earns nothing and makes the others pay less, so this is a tidy-up in both directions.
A park's crowd calendar page now carries an ad after the month grid and month links, a guide carries one after the article, the homepage carries one between the calendar and the day sections, and a park page's sidebar carries one between the seven-day forecast and the plan links. All the same fixed boxes as before: reserved before they load, never over the content, and never for Plus members.
While a park is shut its ride board is a different list from the one it shows when open, and the ad row after the sixth ride was only in the open-hours list. It now sits in whichever list is the board, and never in both.
Every page now carries one standard ad in a fixed box between its content and the footer, except the sign-in pages and the Plus page. It is the same kind of box as the others: space reserved before it loads, nothing on top of the content, nothing that follows you down the page, and none of it for Plus members.
Three more ad positions: the parks directory carries one after the first country group and one after the third, a park page carries one as a full-width row after the sixth ride in its list, and the crowd calendar hub carries one between the park-by-park grid and the popular calendars. Each has its space reserved before it loads, so nothing shifts, and none of them appear for Plus members.
Park Queue Times was approved for Google AdSense today, and the first ads are now showing: one below the ride board on a park page, one under a crowd calendar month, and one under a ride's history chart. Each has its space reserved before it loads, so nothing on the page jumps. Plus members see none of them, which is part of what Plus is for.
Visitors in the UK and EEA were briefly shown two cookie banners at once: Google's consent box, which the ad rules require, and our own. Now they see one. Google's box wears the site's font, colours and dark theme, the footer's Privacy and cookie settings link reopens it, and its answer sets your preferences here too, so our banner never needs to ask again. The floating shield Google pinned to the corner of every page is gone, since the footer link does its job. Outside the EEA nothing changes.
Park Queue Times was approved for Google AdSense today. Visitors in the UK and EEA now see Google's own consent box before any personalised ad is shown, and for its first few hours it appeared in the browser's fallback font with its icons missing because the site's security policy blocked its stylesheet and fonts. That is allowed through now.
The Premier Access page now shows each ride as a card with its photo, its state right now, the price and when it usually sells out, with the last week's sell-outs marked underneath. Every card opens a page for that ride: today as a timeline, the sell-out time on every captured day as a chart, the price by day, and for Plus the weekday clock and an hour-by-hour availability grid. The standby ride page links across to it.
A new page under Disneyland Paris lists what Premier Access costs per ride right now, today's range and the time each ride usually sells out, read from the park's own feed every few minutes. Plus members get the sell-out clock by weekday and the price of every ride hour by hour.
Pick a park you follow and the dashboard names the ride sitting furthest under its usual wait for this hour, with the three best-value queues. Plus builds the whole day around it: a ride order for your date, live re-planning and alerts on every stop.
Tell the ride order how tall the smallest rider is and it leaves out every ride they cannot go on, listing them so you know why. Uses the minimum heights each park publishes; rides with no published height stay in and say so.
Rapid climb tells you when a queue jumps by your number inside twenty minutes, so you can do something else first. Weather turned watches the forecast for a saved date and tells you when it flips from dry to wet or back. Big wait drop now measures its fall over twenty minutes rather than one reading, so a queue that falls in steps still fires. Both new types are part of Plus.
Ride alerts take any number of minutes, not just four presets. The graph tool gives every signed-in account five slots, bar mode and a CSV download; month and year views and resort roll-ups stay with Plus. The daily games open their past days and practice modes to everyone. The Plus page, the upsell bar and the FAQ now describe exactly what Plus adds and nothing that was already free.
On the day of a saved plan, the dashboard goes live. Every ride in your order shows its queue right now beside the wait we planned for, refreshed every minute, and the next ride to walk to is called from the boards: the one furthest under what the day expected of it, not merely the shortest queue. Tick rides off as you go and the time you have saved counts up. Tap Watch my day and we set a queue alert on every ride left in the plan, well under its planned wait, delivered by push and email and ending itself at midnight. Plus, with the plan.
The Almanac page said the model was ahead at every park while its own scorecard showed the seasonal average winning at two of them; that sentence is now written from the table, so it says what the rows say. The About and FAQ pages still claimed queue times refresh every few seconds and that we track 86 parks; both now read from the same facts file as the rest of the site. And a park's reliability page printed two breakdown totals that looked like a contradiction: one was every breakdown in the window, the other left out the closing hour, when rides stopping is not rides failing. The second is now described as the subset it is, and all three figures carry thousands separators so they can be added up.
Twelve long-form guides, written from the wait times we record rather than from a press release: queue-first one day plans for Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, Magic Kingdom, Disneyland Paris and Europa-Park, how to read a crowd calendar, the UK theme park year month by month, why the first hour is worth more than any other, single rider lines, whether paid queue skips are worth it, what breakdowns and uptime mean, and a full account of how every number on the site is made. Each one links to the live pages behind it, so the advice and the data are never more than a tap apart. Find them under Guides in the menu.
A new /games section. Guess the Queue gives you five rides on five real days and asks how long the queue got, two points a minute. Guess the Ride is one blurred photograph and six guesses, with a clue for every miss. Higher or Lower is two rides and one question: which usually queues longer? Where in the World is a ride photo, a map and one pin, scored by how far off you land. Sort the Queue is five rides to put in order from shortest wait to longest. Pick the Quiet Day is next month's crowd calendar for one park with the numbers hidden. All six are free, need no account and turn over at midnight; anyone can replay the last thirty days or deal unlimited practice rounds. The seventh, Beat the Forecast, is Plus only: call a park's crowd level for a coming day and be scored against what we measure once it closes, and against our own model, on a monthly board.
The request has always been an email you send us yourself, which is deliberate - arriving from the address on the account is how we know it is really you, and it gives us a thread to reply to when it is done. The problem was that we only ever offered it as a mailto: link, and that only does anything if your device has a mail app registered to answer the click. Brave blocks those by default and plenty of computers where mail lives in a browser tab have nothing listening, so the button did nothing and said nothing. You can now pick where to open it - Gmail, Outlook, Yahoo or your mail app - and the first three are ordinary web links that open anywhere. Whichever you choose, the message is written out for you with your account details and your reason already in it, and your own address stays the sender. The screen afterwards is careful to say the request is not on its way until you actually press send, because nothing is submitted from our end.
The deletion request handed the whole job to a mailto link, which only does anything if the device has a mail app registered to answer it. On a desktop where mail lives in a browser tab there is often nothing listening, so the click did nothing at all and the window simply closed - which is a poor way to treat a request we are obliged to honour. The link is still there and still fills everything in, but using it now reveals the fallback in place rather than closing: our address and the finished message, each with a copy button, so the request can be sent by hand from whatever you actually read mail in. Both are built from the same text as the link, so they cannot drift apart.
Our scraping protection hides email addresses from harvesters by taking them out of the page and putting them back in your browser. The putting-back half had quietly stopped happening. Vue does not re-check attributes it was handed by the server when it takes over a page, so every contact link kept pointing at the placeholder the protection had left behind, and the script meant to repair them was being discarded along the way. If you tried to email us from the Enterprise panel, the developer pages, the FAQs or the account page, the button did nothing at all - and anywhere the address was written out as text, you were reading the words "[email protected]" instead of an address. Both are fixed: the repair now runs from inside the app, after the page has settled and again on every navigation, so it cannot be undone. Addresses are still absent from the HTML that scrapers read, which was the point of the protection, and a mail link carrying a subject and a message body now keeps both - the old repair mangled the separator between them.
Setting an alert has always offered a choice - tell me once, or tell me every time - with repeating alerts as part of Plus. The create form enforced that. The edit endpoint did not, and neither did any alert set before the rule existed, so a handful of free accounts were holding alerts that fired every single time the condition came round. A reopen alert on a water ride is the worst case: it fires when the park opens, then again after every weather closure, day after day. One of them had sent 197 emails. Editing an alert now runs exactly the same tier rules as creating one, the twenty-eight alerts still in that state have been paused rather than deleted, and each one now explains itself on the alerts page with a one-tap way to turn it into a one-off. Every alert row also shows whether it fires once or every time, which you previously could not see anywhere after creating it. Leaving is easier to do properly too: the delete-account request now asks what went wrong first and offers the fix when there is one, so an alert you could have muted in two taps stops costing us an account.
The history endpoint can now bucket by calendar month as well as by hour and day, and collapse every ride into a single series for the park. Ask for both and you get the question people were actually asking us - what was the average wait at this park in August 2026 - as one number, from one request, for the whole archive back to January 2024. Before this you had to pull every ride-day and re-weight them yourself, which is easy to get subtly wrong: averaging each ride's average is not the same figure as weighting every reading equally, and a ride that runs all day should not count the same as one that opened for an hour. We already stored the sum rather than a pre-divided average precisely so that any coarser bucket re-derives exactly, so the weighting now happens once, in one place, instead of differently for every person who asks. Park rows carry the number of rides that actually posted a wait, so a month where our coverage thinned reads as thin coverage rather than as a quiet month. Alongside it the plans have been made honest about what they license: Free, Repair and Archive cover building on the data and publishing what you conclude from it, and there is now a separate Enterprise licence for research, consultancy and anything supplied onward as a deliverable - quoted per project, delivered as a file cut to your parks rather than as an API. Archive is sold by the year now rather than by the month, because a month of the full archive is the full archive.
Your count says where you have been; your Top 10s say what you thought of it. Three ranked lists - parks, coasters and attractions, ten each - built from the same picker the graph tool uses, ordered with up and down rather than a drag you cannot do from a keyboard, and each entry can carry one line saying why. They sit on your public profile at /u/your-name, above the badges, with every entry linking through to that park or ride. Which rides count as coasters is your call, not ours: we do not hold a ride-type for every attraction in 87 parks, and we would rather let you decide than guess at it. Free, like the count - a list is worth more shared than sold.
The sign-in and create-account pages no longer say the same word four times before you can do anything: the "SIGN IN" label above the headline is gone, and the line under it now tells you what an account is for instead of repeating the button. On a desktop they open into two columns - what an account actually gets you on the left (alerts, Coaster Count, your parks, custom graphs, each with what the free tier includes), the form on the right - and the platform numbers run as a rule beneath both. On a phone it is one column in the same order, with the form first. A hairline "or" now separates signing in with Google from typing an email, the card carries the brand rule and a proper shadow, and the page sizes itself to the real height of the top bar, so nothing sits under a notch and nothing scrolls that should not.
Plus is now sold the way a park visit is planned: as a pass for a fixed run of days, paid once, that never renews. Six terms - Two Days (£16.99), Weekly (£19.99), 10 Days (£23.99), Monthly (£29.99), Yearly (£49.99) and Lifetime (£199) - and you pick the day it switches on, up to a year ahead, so a pass bought in March for an August trip does not spend itself before you travel. The Plus page has been rebuilt around it: the six passes with a per-day price, the start-date picker with a plain line saying exactly when it runs, what Plus includes shown rather than listed, the alerts, and the refund terms in full. Anyone on the old monthly or yearly subscription keeps it at that price.
A graph tool for the data nerds. Pick parks, rides or whole resorts, a date for each, and how to group it - the day itself, or the week, month or year it sits in - and draw them against each other as wait-through-the-day lines in each park's own clock, or as bars of the average. Clip the hours, add trend lines (each slot's average, its quietest and busiest day on record, the average of everything drawn), and read the statistics underneath: the average, the peak and when, and how the day compared with what is usual for that weekday. Every graph has a link you can share. Free gets two slots with day and week grouping; Plus adds five slots, month and year, bars, resorts and a CSV download.
Every park with enough history now has a cheat sheet, worked out from our own wait data rather than written: the quietest and busiest weekday and month, the shape of the day hour by hour with the quiet window and the peak marked, the three rides to go straight to from the gate, the rides whose queues collapse late in the day and are worth leaving, the walk-ons and single-rider lines to fill the gaps, and the rides that spend the most of the day not running. It sits in every park's tab bar beside Best rides. Plus members add a day-of sheet underneath: pick a date and get its crowd forecast, its hours and a ride order for that day, with a print-or-save-as-PDF button.
A standing alert on a park rather than a date. Every ten minutes we compare the park's live average wait, across every ride running, with what it usually is at that hour on that weekday over the last eight weeks. When it drops far enough under - you choose 20%, 30%, 40% or 50% - you're told, with both numbers. It fires once as the park turns quiet, then not again for four hours, so a park hovering around the line does not nag. Plus, on any park we track.
Three more alert types, on the two things no other site watches. Single rider opens tells you the moment a ride's single-rider line starts running - it appears on any ride the feed has reported a single-rider wait for. At Disneyland Paris, Premier Access on sale fires when a ride's return slots are bookable again after selling out, and Premier Access at a price fires when the price drops to the figure you set, with the next slot's time in the message. The alert form only offers each type on rides the data exists for. All three are Plus, taking the list to ten types.
Three new alert types, and the first that watch a park rather than a ride. Pick a park and a date, and Plus tells you the moment the published hours for that date change (or appear at all), the moment an early-entry or extra-hours window is published for it, or when our crowd forecast for it moves by more than the number of points you choose. They live under Park alerts on the Alerts page, with the same date picker the Plus page uses. That takes the alert list to seven types, four of them Plus, across every park we track.
When you save something in your account the result now appears as a small toast at the bottom of the screen and clears itself, instead of a banner pushing the page down. Anything that still needs your attention, like a section that failed to load, stays put with its retry button. The name filter for public addresses and display names has also been made much harder to sidestep: stretched letters (fucck), symbols standing in for letters (f@ck, f**k), accents and look-alike letters from other alphabets, and the usual alternative spellings are all read as the word they hide, while ordinary names that merely contain a rude sequence, like Scunthorpe or shiitake, are left alone.
The Plus link in the top bar is now a small pill with a round + badge in the Plus colours. A sheen crosses it every few seconds and the badge pulses as it passes, so you can find it at a glance; hover it and it lifts. It only plays for people who have not joined - members see the plain link, the same as the other four - and it stays still if your device asks for reduced motion.
Choosing a profile picture now opens a crop step before anything is uploaded, the way Google's does. Drag the picture to place it, pinch or scroll or use the slider to zoom, and rotate it a quarter turn at a time; the circle on screen is exactly what the round avatar will show. Only the square you settle on leaves your device, already cropped, so a 20MB phone photo becomes a few hundred kilobytes before it is sent. Phone photos arrive the right way up too, whichever way the camera was held.
Your Coaster Count page is now a profile, and it is public from the start: anyone with your link sees your parks, rides and badges, and you turn it private with one switch in Account. The Profile section has been rebuilt around an identity card - tap your picture to change it, and the name and address preview as you type, with a pill that says exactly what a stranger will see. Public addresses and display names now go through a filter: nothing offensive, nothing that claims to be site staff or a park, with leetspeak spellings caught too. And when something is refused, the field itself tells you - a red outline, a short shake and the reason underneath - instead of a bare notice at the top of the page.
You can now put a photo on your account. Upload one from the Profile section of your account page and it appears on your public count and in the rail beside every signed-in page; remove it and your initial comes back. Whatever you upload is cropped square and shrunk to a small web image before it is stored, which also throws away the hidden data a phone camera writes into a photo - where it was taken, which device - so none of that reaches a public page. Up to 4MB; JPEG, PNG, WebP, GIF or AVIF. Separately, a top-bar layout fault at exactly 900px wide has been fixed, and the profile page no longer shows an empty banner before you have logged a park.
Your public count now opens with a cover - the entrance photograph of the park you visited most recently, with your picture sitting over its edge - and the whole page sits at a reading width. The badges you have not earned yet now say how close you are, with a small bar and a count, so 'Five parks' reads 2 / 5 rather than just a padlock. And the people who run the site wear it: an admin, staff or developer account shows a small mark beside its name and a matching badge. Those marks only ever appear on accounts that actually hold the role.
The public page for your coaster count - parkqueuetimes.com/u/yourname - has been rebuilt. The parks you have visited are shown as places, with their entrance photographs, rather than a list of names; your rides are grouped under the park you rode them at; and the most recent one gets its own line. There are badges now, eight of them, and you can see the ones you have not earned yet as well as the ones you have - first park, first ride, five parks, ten rides, ten parks, fifty rides, early adopter, and Plus member. Plus members also wear the + beside their name. Nothing is counted that you did not log yourself, and the page stays private unless you switch it on in your account.
Signing in used to last a fortnight and then quietly stop, however often you visited - which meant the app on your home screen would ask for your password again in the middle of a trip. Now your sign-in renews itself every time you use the site, so as long as you drop in from time to time you stay signed in on that device indefinitely. The only things that sign you out are signing out yourself, changing your password, or leaving the site alone for well over a year.
What the account page got yesterday, every signed-in page has now. On a wider screen a rail sits to the left of whatever you are looking at - you, your plan, and the tools in their colours - and stays put while the page scrolls, so moving from your alerts to your count to planning a day is one click, not a trip back through a home page. Each page opens with its icon in its colour, the same one it wears in the top bar, so you always know which door you came through. On a phone the tools stay in the menu and the rail keeps just who you are.
Your account page was eight identical grey boxes in a column. It now opens with you - your initial, your name, your plan and how long you have been here - and on a wider screen that sits in a rail that stays put while you scroll, with a list of the sections underneath that lights up the one you are reading and jumps to any of the others. Each section wears its own colour and icon - a violet profile, a blue envelope, an amber bell, a teal palette, a green card - matching the tool icons in the top bar, so the page and the bar speak the same language. Nothing you could change before has moved or gone; it is the same settings, easier to find.
Each tool in the top bar now wears its own colour - an amber bell for alerts, a teal tick for your coaster count, a violet route for planning a day, a blue pin for your parks, a green line for trends - so you find the one you want by colour rather than by reading six identical grey squares. Hover over one and its icon moves once, briefly, in a way that says what it does: the bell rings, the pin drops, the chart rises, the settings gear turns. If your device asks for reduced motion, none of that plays.
If you had asked this site how many theme parks it tracks, it had four answers ready. The homepage said 78, because it was quietly counting only the parks with a crowd forecast for this month rather than the parks we actually watch. The about page and the FAQ said 86, from a fallback number typed into the code a while ago and never revisited. Elsewhere it was 87, and the build script guarding against a half-finished deploy thought 83. The real number is 87. Every one of those figures now comes from the same place, and the ones written as "80+" are worked out from it rather than typed, so they cannot drift apart again. The same was true of how often we say the queue times update. Most of the site, and our Google Play listing, said every few minutes. The about page, the FAQ and the description Google shows for every park page said every few seconds, which is really how often your browser re-asks us, not how often the park republishes its board - so the slower, honest figure is now the only one anywhere. The forecast had the same problem in a more misleading direction: the homepage advertised 365 days of forecast ahead, while the Almanac page measures the model's accuracy six weeks out and says so. Those are two different claims and they are now told apart properly - we publish a calendar up to nine months ahead, and we publish measured accuracy at six weeks. Finally, the Plus page listed a "7-day crowd calendar" as what free gets you. That was never true: the crowd calendar has never been locked, at any distance, and free now says so. Nothing about what the site does has changed here - only what it says about itself, which was wrong in ways that would have cost you nothing to believe and everything to check.
Your account used to be a hub of six links to six pages - settings here, billing there, appearance somewhere else. It is one page now: profile, email, password, how we contact you, appearance, your plan and invoices, and the way to delete your account, in that order, one scroll. The switch that makes your coaster count public has moved onto it too, next to your display name and address, so everything about you is in one place. The old links still work and land on the right section. Signed-in pages also keep the site's own top bar instead of swapping in a different set of links, so nothing changes shape when you go from a park page into a tool - the only difference is the row of tool icons on the right.
When you are signed in, the button that used to say Your dashboard has become a row of small icons: alerts, your coaster count, plan a day, your parks, and a gear for your account and settings. Each one takes you straight to that tool rather than to a home page you then have to navigate away from. The tools themselves have not changed, and every page you had is still there under the same address - this is the door, not the rooms. On a phone the bar keeps just the gear, and the tools sit in the menu with their names beside them.
The top menu now says API where it used to say Almanac, and it takes you straight to the developer documentation - the endpoints, the keys, and what the history plans cost. The API is something you can sign up for and build on, so it should not have been three clicks down in the footer. Almanac has not gone anywhere: it is still linked from the footer and from every crowd calendar, where people actually go looking for how the forecast is made.
There is now a plain page at /delete-account that tells you how to close your Park Queue Times account, what we erase, what we keep and for how long. It works whether or not you can still sign in, and it is linked from the footer on every page. Nothing about how deletion works has changed, it just was not written down anywhere you could reach without an account. Google Play asks for exactly this before an app can be listed, and we would rather it existed properly than as a line buried in a policy.
There is a new button at the top of every park page, Been here, and another on every ride page, Ridden it. Tap them and the site keeps count - how many parks you have visited and how many rides you have ridden, with the list of each on a new Coaster Count page in your dashboard. There is no form to fill in: you log a ride where you are already reading about it. If you want to show your count off, set an address for it - parkqueuetimes.com/u/yourname - and switch it to public, and anyone with the link can see it. It is off unless you turn it on, because a list of where you have been is yours to publish, not ours. Two numbers for now, parks and rides; a roller-coaster count needs us to know which rides are coasters, and we will add it once we do rather than guess.
Until today an alert could tell you two things: a queue had dropped under a number you picked, or a closed ride had reopened. There are now four. You can be told when a ride goes down, which is the half of the story we were only ever telling you the end of. And Plus members can set a big drop alert, which watches for the fall itself rather than a level - you do not have to guess a number the queue might never reach, you just say how far it has to fall. A show lets out, rain passes, and eighty minutes becomes twenty; that is the moment worth knowing about, and it is the one a fixed threshold usually misses. All four work at every park we track, not just the big ones, and they still reach you the same way - a push notification and an email, both free, on every account.
Plus has always been explained on one page, /plus, and offered inside your dashboard - which meant that if you arrived from a search for a park's queue times and never signed in, nothing on the site ever mentioned it existed. That was our mistake rather than yours. There is now a small bar along the bottom of park pages, ride pages and the crowd calendars that says what Plus adds in one line: no ads, instant push alerts when a queue drops below your number or a closed ride reopens, the weather-aware crowd forecasts, the quietest days months ahead, the optimised ride order, full ride history and unlimited favourites. It waits until you have scrolled or read for a moment rather than covering the page you came for, it never appears while the cookie, install or update notices are on screen, it stays away for a month once you close it, and it does not appear at all if you are already on Plus. Everything free stays free - the queue times, the crowd calendars and the park pages have not moved behind anything.
Paultons decides each morning how many tickets it will put on sale for a given date, and that number is not the size of the park - it is the size of the day the park is expecting. Through the summer it sat at 5,410; by the second week of September it was down to 1,530. We were working out how busy a day looked by dividing the tickets sold by that daily allowance, which quietly turned a shrinking allowance into a rising crowd level. Today is the clearest example: 3,740 tickets sold against an allowance of 4,150 read as 90% busy, on a day whose queues were averaging under eleven minutes - fewer tickets than an ordinary Monday in August, when the allowance was a quarter larger and the same day read 69%. On 3 September the page said 58% while the park was running seven-minute queues, one of its quietest days on record. Because Paultons' busiest day ever measured is a twenty-one minute average queue, this ticket figure was outrunning the queue-based number almost every day, so it was not nudging the crowd level - it was the crowd level. Sold tickets are now measured against a fixed capacity instead, so the same number of visitors means the same thing in September as it did in August. Across the ninety-one days we have measured since June, how closely the published percentage tracks the queues people actually stood in rises from 0.74 to 0.95. Today now reads 58%. The park's own daily allowance is still recorded on every date - it tells us real things about what Paultons expects - it just no longer decides the number on the page.
Six Flags St Louis, The Great Escape, Worlds of Fun, Michigan's Adventure and Valleyfair have all been sold out of the Six Flags estate and now run their own websites - St Louis is even trading under a new name, Mid America Adventure. The platform they left still answers when we ask it about them, but it no longer knows anything true: it reported St Louis and The Great Escape as having no opening times at all on every date, and insisted Worlds of Fun was closed every single day of a season it was visibly running. Worse, it went back and blanked days it had already published, so the trick we use elsewhere - reusing a park's own last known hours - had nothing left to reuse. Because we only record a park while its hours say it is open, all five were losing days. We now read each of them from their own calendars instead, which are better than the feed ever was: real times, the right timezone, and the waterpark listed separately rather than mixed in with the rides, which is the exact confusion that once let a hotel pool decide what time a park opened. The five parks still in Halloween season needed care - Fright Fest and Boo Fest are listed alongside the ordinary park day, and mistaking one of those for the whole day would have cut recording off five hours early on the busiest dates of the year. The Great Escape is the one we cannot finish: no source anywhere publishes its queue times, not Six Flags and not the boards we fall back on. Its hours are right now, but rather than fill its page with fifty rides marked "Closed" on an afternoon it is open, we show nothing there, because nothing is what we honestly know.
Worlds of Fun had shown nothing since 24 August. Its old app feed was retired in July and the platform that replaced it has answered "closed" for the park on every single date since, including the Fridays and Saturdays it was visibly running. We only record a park while its own opening hours say it is open, so a park the feed insists is shut records nothing at all, and there was no way in: the stand-in board we use for the rest of that chain is deliberately only consulted inside published hours, so that a board left frozen after closing time cannot invent an open day. The park's real Friday-to-Sunday hours were sitting in our own schedule the whole time, captured the last day the old feed worked. We now fall back to those when the feed offers nothing, which is the same schedule the recorder already trusts, so the live board and the history finally agree about when the park is open. Waits there are open-or-closed only, because the stand-in publishes no numbers for that park, and we would rather say nothing than print a queue we cannot stand behind. Separately, Mirabilandia labels its entire Halloween season with the event name in front of the times - "Halloween 10:30 - 22:00" - which none of our readers of that calendar could make sense of, so every one of those nights came through with no hours and would have recorded nothing from 26 September onwards. Twelve dates now carry their real hours, the ones running past midnight and across the clock change included.
Storm Chaser at Paultons Park stopped at 11:43 after a morning of twenty minute queues, and the board answered "Not running today" - a statement about the whole day, made about a ride people had been queueing for a minute earlier. The clock behind a closure is rebuilt on the server every few minutes, so in the first minutes after a ride shuts we have the fact that it is closed and nothing at all about when it happened, and the wording we fell back on filled that silence with a claim we could not make. It now says only what we know: not running right now. A ride that really has been shut all day is unaffected - that case has its own reading and its own words. The same closure clock was also freezing: the minute count is a number the server works out when it rebuilds that data, and we were printing it unchanged until the next rebuild, so a ride down for six minutes could sit on "Down for 1m" for several minutes at a time. We now count from the moment the closure began, which is published alongside it and never goes stale, so the figure keeps up on every refresh.
Parc Asterix's board showed nearly every ride twice over. One copy carried the live wait; the other sat underneath it reading "Not running today" and "Closed" no matter what the ride was actually doing, and it was the frozen copy that usually came first. The duplicates also disagreed about what the rides were called, because one set was in French and the other in English. What happened is that on the 3rd of September the park moved onto its own live feed - the same one its app uses, which is a better source and updates every few seconds - but the changeover created a brand new record for each of the 50 attractions instead of reusing the ones we already had. Everything we hold about a ride hangs off that record: 20 months of recorded waits going back to January 2024, its page, its address on the site, and its photograph. So the new records arrived with the live waits and nothing else, while the old ones kept the entire history and every picture and quietly stopped updating. That is why so many rides looked like they had no photo - the photos were all still there, attached to the copy that had gone dark. The 41 rides that exist in both have been put back together, so the live feed now flows into the records that already hold their history and their photographs, and nothing was lost. The English names have gone too. They were machine translations rather than the park's own names - OzIris was being published as "Osiris Convolvulis", Goudurix as "Justforkix", Tonnerre 2 Zeus as "Thunder 2 Zeus" - and since a ride's web address is built from its name, they had also moved every Parc Asterix ride page to a new address. The park's French names are back and the addresses with them. The move was not all cost: the park's own feed carries nine attractions the previous source never did, including four haunted houses, the Viking ice rink, Obelix's slide and the new Foret Sans Retour, and those are on the board now with photographs of their own. Parc Asterix is back to a complete set of 48 rides, each listed once, each with a picture.
A ride shut at Plopsaland De Panne read as a walk-on. Nachtwacht-Flyer was showing nought minutes and "quieter than usual" while Plopsaland's own app said it was temporarily closed, and the same was true of the Animal Farm and the Pedal Boats. The reason is that the feed we read wait times from lists every attraction with a number whether or not it is running, and carries no closed signal at all - so a shut ride arrived looking exactly like a ride nobody was queueing for. The closure is published, just somewhere else: each attraction's own entry says whether it is temporarily closed and lists the whole days it will be shut. We now read both, so a closed ride is marked closed instead of publishing a wait it never had. At Plopsaland Deutschland this also fixes nine of the Halloween attractions, four of which were reading as open with no queue while the other five were missing from the board entirely. One related change on the ride pages: the big number in the header is the last wait recorded today, and on a ride that had since closed it was still being shown under "Wait right now" beside a line reading "Closed now". It is hidden on a closed ride now, because the two of them together were worse than either alone. Separately, and on 26 parks rather than two: the small grey line under a ride's name on the live board is meant for the area of the park it stands in - "Peppa Pig World", "Rulantica" - or, when the ride is shut, for why. On 491 rides it was printing an internal identifier instead. Every ride at Plopsaland read "plopsaland"; Cedar Point's read "cedarpoint", Universal Studios Florida's "uor.usf", Canada's Wonderland's "park_40". The cause is that most parks hang their rides off a themed land, so the ride's parent IS the land we want to name - but plenty hang them straight off the park itself, and there the parent is the park's own id, which we then showed to readers as though it were a place. A parent that is the park is not a land, so those rides now say nothing at all rather than an identifier, and the 491 already stored have been cleared.
Just over half our parks are in the United States and Canada, and every one of them used to be described in British English: "queue times", "queues", "bank holidays and school half-terms". Americans search for wait times and stand in lines, so those pages were written in the wrong words for the people reading them - and titles, headings, descriptions and the FAQ have all been rewritten to use each park's own vocabulary. Both phrasings stay on every page, so whichever one you use you will find the park. Two questions we were regularly asked but never actually answered - how busy a park is today, and whether it will be busier tomorrow - are now answered outright, with that park's own forecast figure and a note of how the two days compare. The summary line at the top of every park page was also rebuilt: it used to say only "this park is closed right now" and stop there, which was unhelpful and, on a page you might open at any hour, often not even true. It now leads with the day's crowd forecast and what that park's waits typically run at, and the ride pages carry the same treatment.
Settings has a new toggle, Product news, and it controls the only kind of email we send that you did not ask for individually: the occasional note about a new feature or a change to the API. It is on by default and there will never be more than a few a year. Turning it off changes nothing else - password resets, email verification, billing receipts and any queue alerts you set up yourself all keep working, because those are messages you need in order to use the site or to leave it. Any such email also now carries a one-click unsubscribe link, both as a plain link at the bottom and in the headers that let Gmail and other mail apps put an Unsubscribe button at the top of the message, and that link works without signing in - an unsubscribe link that asks you to remember a password is not really an unsubscribe link. It has no expiry either, so it still works on an old message. If you had previously switched off the older email notifications setting, that choice is carried over rather than quietly reset: you will not start receiving these because we rebuilt the switch.
Two changes for anyone using the API. First, there is now a plain-English data licence in section 8 of our terms, linked from the plans on the developer page, and it says what people actually want to know before they build something: you may use the data commercially, store it, transform it, and use it as an input to your own forecasts, crowd models and recommendations, and you may publish and sell those. What you may not do is re-supply the data itself - mirroring it, republishing it as a dataset, or serving it through another API. The distinction is between building something with the data, which is encouraged, and becoming another source of it, which is not. The old wording was four lines long, required attribution from everybody including paying customers, and flatly contradicted what the plans page had been offering, so a paid subscriber and our own terms disagreed about whether a credit link was optional. They agree now: required on the free plan, optional on a paid one. Second, the daily request allowance on each plan is now actually enforced. It had only ever been a published number - the ten thousand a day on the free plan, and the larger allowances that come with Repair and Archive, were printed on the pricing table but nothing in the code was counting. They are counted now, per account rather than per key, so the figure on your dashboard and the figure the API enforces are the same one and creating a second key does not hand out a second allowance. Going over returns a clear error saying when the allowance resets rather than a vague failure, and every response now carries headers telling you how much of the day's allowance is left. In practice nobody is close: the heaviest use we have ever recorded on a single key was a little over five thousand requests in a day, against a free limit of ten thousand. The per-minute limit is unchanged for now and stays deliberately generous while we measure what real integrations actually peak at.
The Archive plan on the developer API, which gives you every ride's wait-time history back to January 2024 across all 86 parks, has gone from 29 pounds a month to 49 pounds a month, or 490 pounds a year, which is still two months free on the annual. Nothing else about it has changed and no other plan has changed: the free plan is exactly as it was, with live wait times, opening hours, crowd calendars, the last 48 hours of history and commercial use, and Repair is still 9 pounds a month for a rolling 90 days. The reason for the rise is that 29 pounds was simply the wrong number. We had already sold one buyer eleven parks of hourly history as a one-off file for 149 pounds, and five days later the Archive plan was offering all 86 parks, the whole series, kept up to date, for a fifth of that price - and because the plan allows 600 requests a minute, the entire archive can be downloaded in under five minutes, which made the sensible thing to do pay for one month, take everything and cancel. That is not a plan, it is a sale with extra steps. At 49 pounds the subscription and the one-off file are at least in the same conversation, and it is still less than the closest comparable data APIs charge for the same depth of history. Nobody was subscribed to Archive at the old price, so nobody has had a bill go up; the coverage endpoint, which tells you exactly which dates we hold for every ride in a park, remains free to call on any plan, so you can still see precisely what you would be buying before you spend anything.
The site has a new mark: an hourglass with a clock face set into its waist, which is a more direct way of saying what this place is for than the old flat hourglass was. It is now the same drawing everywhere - the bar at the top of every page, the footer, the tab icon, the icon you get if you add the site to your home screen, the picture on a shared link and the one at the top of our emails - rather than the several slightly different versions that had accumulated. Two versions of it exist and each is used where it belongs: a transparent mark that sits on whatever colour is behind it, for the page itself, and a version on a deep navy square for the places an operating system draws the icon for us, where a transparent image would otherwise be flattened onto black. The home-screen icon has been redrawn to Android's safe-zone rules, so it no longer risks having its edges cropped when the system rounds it into a circle. The site also serves a /favicon.ico for the first time, which is the file every browser and search crawler asks for before it reads a single line of the page. Along the way the icon files got a great deal smaller - the largest fell from 190 KB to 7 KB - because the artwork had a fine grain across its background that no one could see and every device was downloading.
Every page of the signed-in app has been redrawn to one design instead of thirteen slightly different ones. Each page had written its own header, its own loading placeholder, its own empty state and its own list, so no two of them quite agreed on spacing, the loading shape changed as you moved between pages, and the thing you came to a page to do - export, refresh, mark all read, create an alert - ended up as a small button stranded under the heading rather than beside it. Those are all one set of pieces now, and the page action sits at the top right where you would look for it. Content lives in cards, so a page with a little on it no longer reads as a page that failed to load, and short pages fill the screen instead of stopping halfway down with a strip of a different colour underneath. The headings are a step smaller too: a huge display line is right over a landing page and was the loudest thing on the screen above a list of four settings. Settings is two columns rather than a narrow strip down the middle, with the account deletion block on its own row and its button outlined rather than a red slab. Your parks now leads with how many you follow, how many are open, and the single longest queue across all of them. Notifications keeps Today, Yesterday and Earlier in one card. Your day gives the hour-by-hour curve two thirds of the row instead of a third, and its 'rides done' figure has the progress bar the two numbers behind it were always describing. The top bar no longer repeats the same six links the row underneath already shows. Along the way: the dashboard could print 'Quietest around , , .', Trends clipped Wednesday to 'Wednesd' and wrote 'the quietest day , averaging', Plan pushed its comparison bars halfway across the screen, and Appearance announced 'NaN years+ with Plus' if its colours failed to load. Four pages that were only ever a list of links now open with the state behind them: Account leads with your plan and its next renewal, how many alerts are running, how many notifications are unread and how many API requests you have made this month, each one the door to the page it summarises. Activity says how many records there are, how many sign-ins there have ever been and when the last one was - real totals from the server, not a count of the twenty rows on screen, which is what the old tiles did before they were removed. Suggestions names the park to go to and the one to avoid before the list of them. Appearance says how many colours you have unlocked and which one is next. The dashboard's own opening screen, before you have planned anything, now uses the whole width instead of a narrow column down the left: the ask on one side, what Plus adds on the other, and three things to do in the meantime under it. And the app shows one bar of navigation rather than two stacked rows of the same six links.
The key page listed your key, five figures and a usage chart in one flat column, with a large red Revoke button as the most prominent thing on it and nothing anywhere telling you what to do next. It is now laid out as cards: your key, then a ready-to-run first request in cURL, JavaScript or Python - press Reveal and your own key is filled into the sample, so Copy gives you a command that works - then usage. What your plan allows, the reference links and the revoke button have moved into a column down the side, and revoking is now quiet and out of the way instead of the biggest button on the screen. The usage panel opens with four figures rather than one: requests today against your daily allowance, the 30-day total, your success rate, and your average response time, which we had been measuring all along and never showing. Each endpoint, country and origin now carries a bar so you can see the split without doing the division, days with no traffic read as empty rather than as a very quiet day, and your plan's name is shown properly instead of in lower case.
The API page was one long column of eleven equal sections with the pricing table sitting in the middle of them, so there was no way to see the shape of the API without reading all of it. It now reads like the API references you already use: a contents column down the left that stays with you and marks the section you are in, and every endpoint written as its signature, then its arguments one by one, then a runnable request and the exact response beside it. The first request comes in cURL, JavaScript and Python on tabs. Several things the API has always done are documented for the first time: the machine-readable OpenAPI spec at /v1/openapi.json, which needs no key and can be handed straight to a code generator; the month filter on the schedule and crowd-calendar endpoints; the error code on every failure and the request id to quote when you report one; and how to page through a long history backfill. On a phone the contents collapse into a button that stays under the top bar, so you can jump between endpoints without scrolling back to the start.
Your billing page now lists both things you can subscribe to - Plus, and a Data API plan - each with its status, renewal date and one button that manages either. A Data API plan belongs to your account rather than to a key, so if you subscribe before creating your key, the key you make later uses the plan from its first request; the key page now says so, and greets you when you arrive back from checkout. Invoices for both plans appear in the same list.
A park's crowd predictor opened with five lines of prose before you reached the month itself - and most of it you had already read, because the same typical, quietest and busiest figures appear in the headline, in the best-day card and in the panel down the side. The page now keeps only what is not said anywhere else above the grid: how busy the park is today, tomorrow and this weekend. The explanation of what a percentage is worth in minutes is still there, folded behind 'What the % means', and opens with one click for anyone meeting the scale for the first time. On a laptop the calendar itself now starts about a hundred pixels higher.
Open a ride page and the last fourteen days, the usual pattern by hour, the weekday comparison and the reliability score are already there - they are baked into the page when the site is built, twice a day, instead of being fetched one day at a time after the page loads. A ride page used to make around twenty requests before a chart appeared; it now makes five, and the only one that has to wait for the network is today's own readings. Developers get something new too: the API now has plans. Free stays free - live waits, opening hours, crowd calendars, and the last 48 hours of ride history. Repair, at nine pounds a month, opens a rolling ninety days for apps that already collect live data and need to refill a gap after an outage. Archive, at twenty-nine, reads everything back to January 2024. The plans are on the developers page, and every plan's limits are shown against the others so you can pick in one look. One quieter change: the site's own history route now asks who is asking. Anyone can browse the last month, members the last year, Plus members everything - which is what the page has always said, and what the server now enforces.
The banner that asks you to refresh knows a new build is live because it compares the exact build stamped into the page you are looking at against the one on the server - which is the right way round, and it was working. What it then said out loud was wrong. It named the release number of the waiting build, and a release number covers several deploys: a handful of fixes ship, all of them under 7.18.3, and the banner announced that version 7.18.3 was available to someone whose own badge in the corner already read v7.18.3. The prompt now names a version only when it is genuinely a different one, and otherwise just says an update is available. Refreshing was always doing something - it was fetching newer code than you had - the message simply had no way to say so.
When a park tells us why a ride is down, we have been recording it all along - and then not showing it. The Smiler spent Monday closed for essential maintenance, and the page said only that it stopped once. Closures now carry the park's own words for the stop. There was a second problem underneath: a park often names the reason a few minutes after the ride goes down, and we were treating that as new information - one continuous closure was being counted as three separate stops, with the real reason buried in the middle one. A stop is now one stop, and it keeps the reason it was given.
Every past day on a crowd calendar carries a measured busyness score, and the way we worked it out had a hard ceiling built into it. One of the four things we measure is how much of the day a park spends in hour-long queues - and a family park that almost never reaches an hour scored nothing at all for it, permanently, which stopped its scale dead at 80%. Paultons Park has passed an hour once in 306 days, so eight separate days sat at exactly 80%, its busiest day of the year among them, all indistinguishable. Across the site 558 days at 76 parks were stuck on that same number. On top of that we compared each day against the busiest 5% of a park's history and treated everything above that as equal, so the very days a crowd calendar exists to identify - the record ones - were flattened into ties. Thorpe Park had eleven days sharing 100%, Alton Towers ten. And underneath both, a number arriving from the database as text was being joined onto another instead of added, which quietly zeroed that hour-long-queue measure for every park on the site. The whole thing has been rebuilt. A missing measurement is no longer scored as a quiet one, records are compared against a park's own upper range rather than clipped at it, and the scale now leaves room above: a park's busiest day on record reads in the nineties, because no park is ever literally full, and 100% is reserved for a day beyond anything it has managed - 17 days out of 23,330 now reach it. Nearly every park has one clear busiest day instead of a cluster of ties, and a frozen feed reporting the same figure every day is no longer mistaken for a permanently packed park.
Paultons often keeps rides going past its published close - what the park calls a run on - and it is decided on the morning, not published in advance. Today the park shut at 5:30pm, but Cyclonator, Drakon, Velociraptor and six others carried on until 6:15pm, while Boulder Dash, Buffalo Falls and three more stopped at 6pm. None of that appeared anywhere, and we were not even recording it: our own collection stopped at the published close, so the last three quarters of an hour of queues were thrown away every time it happened. The park page now says whether rides are running on tonight and how late, each ride carries its own closing time on the board rather than the park's, and the queues during a run on are recorded and kept - deliberately in their own place, so an unusually quiet extra 45 minutes never drags down the averages for a normal day.
Paultons Park was forecast at 99% of a peak day for Monday 24 August - busier than every weekend of the summer, on an ordinary Monday that is not even the bank holiday. It was wrong, and the reason is worth explaining. For parks that sell dated tickets we learn a line from "this many booked, this far ahead" to "this is how busy the day turned out", and Paultons had just taken a record 5,421 bookings, more than any day in the data the line was learned from. A straight line carried past the end of what it has seen simply keeps climbing, but the thing it is predicting does not: a park fills up and its queues stop getting longer. Across 318 measured days Paultons has never once passed 80%, and the line was already running about 8 points hot on its twelve busiest days. Every learned forecast now records the range it was actually taught on and refuses to answer outside it, so a record number of bookings can say "as busy as this park has ever been" - which is a fact we can stand behind - instead of inventing a figure above anything we have measured. Tomorrow now reads 80%, the same as today. The change applies to every park with ticket data, and in checking it we found it almost never has to step in, which is what a safeguard should look like.
Every ride page carries a board of its longest queues on record, each with the time of day it happened. For 423 attractions across 36 parks that time was an hour out through the summer, because the board was reading the clock in UTC rather than the park's own time: a LEGO® Windsor attraction's record was labelled 11:27am for a queue that peaked at 12:27pm. Two of the site's three record-keeping jobs already worked out the park's timezone properly and this one had been missed, so it now uses the same answer as the other two. Where the effect was worse than a wrong label - a park in America closing late in the evening had its day split in two by the UTC date, which lowered the record itself - those parks are rebuilt too, including Disneyland Park, Disney California Adventure and Shanghai Disneyland, which had no timezone recorded at all. Separately, the board and the day-by-day chart were both saying "peak" while counting differently. A record only counts if the queue actually held that long - twenty minutes on the board - so a ride that flickered to 455 minutes for six minutes holds a record of 410. Both numbers were right and nothing said so; the board now explains itself, and the brief spikes are still there to see on the day's own chart.
Legoland Windsor was counting its Magical Forest walk, the Insiders Clubhouse, DUPLO Playtown, Castaway Camp, the Creature Creation workshop and the Pirate Goldwash among its 43 rides - six of them polled more than ten thousand times each without ever once reporting as open, because they are places you wander into, not queues you join. Legoland New York was worse: it listed Miniland New York City, Miniland The Bronx, Miniland Midtown, Miniland Las Vegas and seven more model displays as separate rides. Legoland Deutschland was tracking its curling rinks, its gold panning and a high ropes course in the holiday village; Legoland Korea its Bricktopia Lounge. 61 removed across seven Legoland and Peppa Pig parks. Windsor now lists 34 rides, every one of them something you queue for and ride. Two 4D cinemas went with them, at Windsor and Korea - they are shows rather than rides, and easy to put back if you disagree. Deliberately left alone: Legoland Billund and Legoland Japan, where the feed reports so few waits that a real ride and a model display look identical from the data, so anything that might be a genuine ride stays.
Two thirds of Cedar Point's rides read "0 min", which looked like a park with no queues anywhere and was really a park that does not publish a number for its flat rides. Cedar Point sends waitTime: null for 42 of its 62 running rides - meaning "open, no figure given" - and an actual zero for none of them. We were turning that null into 0 and printing it in the same column, same size, same colour as Steel Vengeance's genuine 80. The Midway Carousel was not walk-on; we simply never knew. Those rides now say Open, which is the whole of what the park told us. The number is kept for the rides that have one. This was never a Cedar Point quirk: whole parks report status only - Michigan's Adventure, Valleyfair, Djurs Sommerland and most of the Six Flags estate - and every one of them was printing invented zeroes. The single-rider figure has always been handled this way, treating null as "no queue offered" rather than a walk-on; standby just never got the same care.
Cedar Point listed 86 attractions, and seventeen of them were Cedar Point Shores - the water park next door, behind its own gate and its own ticket. Wild Walleye, Portside Plunge and Lakeslide Landing were sitting in the same list as Millennium Force, none of them had ever reported a queue, and they were quietly telling you the park has eighty-six rides when sixty-six is the honest number. The same bundling turned up at six more parks once we looked: Knott's Soak City, Kings Island's and Kings Dominion's Soak Cities, Carowinds' Carolina Harbor, Great America's Boomerang Bay, Dorney's Wildwater Kingdom and Canada's Wonderland's Splash Works - 93 water-park attractions in all. Cedar Point also lost its Sky Ride West and Frontier railroad entries, which are the second boarding point of rides already listed once, and Monster, which the park removed. Every headline coaster is untouched: the check was run against a list of them afterwards to be sure. Worth saying what was deliberately NOT removed - Worlds Of Fun, Michigan's Adventure and Valleyfair look identical to this test, because their feeds report open and closed for everything and post a wait for nothing, so a blanket rule would have emptied them.
When a ride stops, we say how long it has been down - "Down for 25m". That length is recorded in seconds and rounded to whole minutes, so for the first minute after a breakdown it comes back as zero, and a zero was being read as "we have no idea about this ride". The list then fell through to its last resort and said "Not running today" - a statement about the entire day, printed against a coaster that had been running a minute earlier. It now says "Just closed", and turns into "Down for 1m", "Down for 2m" and so on by itself as the closure is recorded. The park's own reason, where it gives one, is still shown beside it. The same gap was there when the live feed noticed a closure before our own history had caught up: we now fall back to the moment the closure started, and then to the moment the queue dropped away, before giving up on dating it - and we no longer guess a length from a queue that has simply been sitting still, which could have put a confident "Down for 3h" on a ride we only knew was shut.
Paultons Park read "Crowds today: filling up, 52% of a peak day" on the park page while its crowd calendar, one click away, said 80% and busy for the same Sunday. Three separate things were behind it. The park page's crowd figures were read once when the site was last built and then never again, so it was quoting a forecast made days earlier - and once a park closes for the night we replace that day's forecast with what its queues actually did, which the calendar had picked up and the park page had not. The park page now reads those figures live in your browser, with the built-in copy still there for the first paint and for search engines. Second, the two pages were measuring against different scales: the park page's headline word came from a set of bands that put 52% in a different level than the colour of its own bar and the strip underneath it did, so the same number could be called "filling up" in one place and "average" in another. There is now one scale, and every crowd word, bar and tile on the site reads off it. Third, the calendar was marking today's figure with the asterisk that means "this is a prediction" even after the park had shut and the day had been measured. The asterisk now appears only on days that genuinely are still a guess.
On a watch, or a window shrunk to a sliver beside another one, each ride on a park's list was built from a photograph, a wait number and a bell that together came to more than the whole row was wide - so the column holding the ride's name and why it was shut was squeezed to nothing at all. Measured on a 205-pixel screen the row was 158 pixels across and that column was zero. The row now stacks instead of shrinking: the photograph steps aside, the name and the reason take the full width, and the wait drops onto its own line with the alert bell beside it. The reason a ride is not running is also allowed to run onto a second line rather than being cut off mid-word, which is what turned "Down for 2h 15m" into "Down for..." and lost the only number that line exists to give. Separately, where a park tells us WHY a ride is shut - "Technical difficulties", "Scheduled to open at 11:00am" - we were throwing it away whenever we could work out how long it had been down, showing only the duration. Both are shown now, and a ride's own page says the park's words next to "Closed now" instead of leaving you to guess. Older closures still carry no reason: the recorded history keeps the times a ride stopped and started, and nothing about why.
Paste a link to Park Queue Times into Discord, Slack or a message and it should show a card describing the page. Yesterday's release gave every page one - a real card with the park's name, the month drawn as bars, the figures behind it - and then the build deleted them on its way out. The step that renders the park and ride cards writes them to a staging folder and moves that folder into the finished site, and the move cleared out everything already sitting there first, which was the whole set of cards for the homepage, the parks list, the crowd calendars, Plus and the rest. The pages still pointed at them, so a shared link asked for a picture that was not there and showed nothing. The cards are now merged in alongside the ones already built, and the fixed pages keep theirs. Separately, the homepage headline was sitting underneath the top bar on any phone with a notch: the hero left a fixed 88 pixels of room for a bar that is 61 pixels tall on a computer but grows to about 120 on those phones once it clears the camera, so "KNOW" and the logo were printed on top of each other. The gap is now measured from the bar itself rather than guessed, so it holds on every screen.
Search results only show about 60 characters of a title, and ours ran to 96. On a comparison page that meant Google printed "Six Flags St Louis vs Universal Islands Of Adventure 2026: Which Is" and threw away the rest - so the words telling you the page answers which park is better never reached the screen. Half our descriptions ran past 160 characters and lost their last sentence too. Titles and descriptions are now written as a set of variants, longest first, and each page picks the longest that genuinely fits: a park with a short name keeps the full "Which Is Better?" wording, and one with a very long name drops a clause instead of being chopped mid-sentence. Rides we have no written description for used to open with the same sentence as every other one; they now open with what actually makes them different - where the ride ranks in the park and how its usual queue compares to the park average. And every park page now links all of its comparisons rather than the first four, so around 860 comparison pages that nothing linked to are reachable again. Comparison pages also stopped dodging their own questions: "Which is better, Alton Towers or Legoland Windsor?" used to answer "it depends on what you're after" on all 1,139 of them. It now answers with the actual figures - which park queues less, by how many minutes, which has more rides and which runs them more reliably.
The homepage arrived as 478 KB of HTML, and roughly a fifth of that was crowd forecasts you were never going to see. The calendar on it can only ever open on one of six parks, but the page was shipping all 81 parks' Augusts - each day carrying its weather and how confident we are in it - so a phone downloaded about a hundred kilobytes of forecast, and then spent longer than the download reading it, to draw a single month. Only the six parks the tabs offer carry the full detail now, and the page's dataset halved. Two stylesheets were being pasted into the top of every page on the site: the chrome the park pages wear and the sign-in screen's layout, neither of which the homepage has any use for, both of which had to finish loading before a single word could appear. They now travel with the pages that need them. The photograph on the phone in the alerts section - five screens down - was being fetched while the homepage was still painting, competing for a slow connection with the picture you were actually looking at; it now waits until you are nearly there. The hero photograph itself was re-compressed, taking 110 KB off the set with no visible difference behind the gradient that covers it. And a handful of small labels were failing legibility checks by a hair - the percentages in the calendar squares, the region under each park in the grid, the links at the foot of the page and the buttons on the cookie notice - all of which now meet the contrast standard properly. The calendar's squares were also announcing themselves to screen readers as a spreadsheet, which they are not.
The whole site has been redesigned. Every public page - the homepage, the parks directory, all five park templates, the crowd calendars, the comparison pages, sign-in and the 404 - now shares one visual language, one typeface and one set of colours, in place of the several that had accumulated. There is a new global crowd-calendar hub at /crowd-calendar listing all 86 parks by country, and it now has a permanent place in the top bar, which is where something responsible for more than half of all visits arriving from search probably should have been all along. Underneath the paint, a harder decision: we were publishing a page for all 3,251 rides we track, and Google was quietly refusing most of them - reporting hundreds as "soft 404s", which is its way of saying a page loaded fine and had nothing on it. It was right. A ride we have only watched for a week has no typical wait to tell you about, so the page was mostly furniture around an empty middle. A ride now gets its own page once we have enough recorded history to actually answer the question - two months and five hundred readings - which is about 1,800 of them. The rest still appear on their park's page with their live wait; they just no longer have a page of their own pretending to know more. Ride pages whose web address changed when we tidied up ride names now redirect to the new address instead of showing a not-found page. And a fault that had been silently costing everyone a little speed: the site was loading a typeface it no longer uses on every single page, while the one it does use had to be discovered halfway through loading - so on a slow connection the new design was drawing itself in the wrong font.
Every tile on the parks page decided "Open", "Opens later" or "Closed" when the page was BUILT, not when you read it - so a California park could sit there labelled closed at breakfast, hours before its gates open, and only correct itself if you happened to reload at the right moment. The label now waits for your own clock and your own timezone before it commits to an answer. The same page was also cutting itself off from live queue times: it asked our servers never to reuse a response, which meant every refresh travelled the full distance to the origin and a busy tab could trip its own rate limit, then retry into it and stay stuck behind "Live updates paused". Refreshes are served from the edge again, and a rate-limited request now waits for the next refresh instead of hammering.
You could see two Disneyland Railroad Main Street Stations on the Disneyland Paris page and no Fantasyland or Discoveryland station at all, which is a strange way for a railway with four stops to appear. Both halves turned out to be real. Disney's own API publishes the Main Street platform twice, under two IDs, with coordinates a metre and a half apart - so that one is theirs, and we now keep only the record holding the full history. The missing two were ours: Disney flags Fantasyland and Discoveryland stations "hide from the app", and we were honouring that flag even though Disney publishes a live status for both. A queue we can read is the definition of an attraction we track, so a live entry now overrides the app-listing preference, and all four stations are back - along with Mickey's PhilharMagic, hidden by the same rule. A third cleanup pass removed 85 more things that were never rides: Legoland's face-painting stalls, build workshops, bowling centre and midway games; the beaches, lagoons and wave pools of a dozen water parks; Shanghai Disneyland's merchandise vouchers and its Zootopia entrance and exit turnstiles; and duplicate boarding points where one train or chairlift was listed once per station. Thirteen rides the parks have quietly stopped publishing - among them Kumba, DINOSAUR and Parc Asterix's L'Oxygenarium - are now archived rather than shown as permanently shut, so their pages and their history survive with a note saying when the park stopped reporting them.
A second pass, on a different signature: attractions that DO report open and closed, but have never once posted a wait time in a park where four rides in five do. That is not a quiet ride, it is not a ride. Disneyland Paris was listing La Tanière du Dragon, Adventure Isle, the Pirate Galleon, Pirates' Beach and the Rustler Roundup shooting gallery among its 47 rides; Heide-Park had five separate entries all called PLAYGROUND; Knoebels was counting its mini golf, its arcade and its old-time photo booth; Plopsaland its ball pool and dancing fountains; Phantasialand was tracking ice skate hire. The test is deliberately relative to each park, because plenty of parks - Cedar Point, Djurs Sommerland - publish open and closed and nothing else, and there a zero wait means the feed is terse, not that the carousel is a playground. It also cleaned up genuine duplicates: Disneyland Paris showed two Disneyland Railroad Main Street Stations (Disney's own API publishes the same platform twice, 1.5 metres apart), Busch Gardens Tampa showed SheiKra twice after its ID changed in August, and Hollywood Studios still listed the Aerosmith Rock 'n' Roller Coaster next to the Muppets retheme that replaced it - that one is archived rather than deleted, so its history and its page survive.
Europa-Park's board carried 127 attractions and 77 of them had never once reported a queue - not in the two and a half years we have been recording. They were the park's saunas, ball pools, water playgrounds, panorama-train platforms and EP-Express stations, each printed as a ride reading "Usually running 0% of the day - Closed", which is not a fact about a ride but the absence of any fact at all. Reaching Silver Star meant scrolling past three screens of them. The same check across every other park found 217 more: Shanghai Disneyland was listing Priority Entrance passes and Selfie Spot with Mickey among its rides, Dollywood was counting Dolly's Tennessee Mountain Home and a chapel, Silver Dollar City a church and a school, Disneyland Paris its arcades and Sleeping Beauty Castle, and half a dozen parks the whole of their neighbouring water park. All 294 are gone from the boards, the land filters and the ride counts, so "50 rides tracked" now means fifty rides we can genuinely tell you something about. Nothing was removed on a guess: every one had zero readings across the entire dataset AND no live status, and rides that merely look quiet - or whose park's feed is currently broken - were deliberately left alone.
The parks directory was 86 identical cards: the same grey rows repeated down the page, with nothing on any of them that belonged to the park it named. It now leads each park with a photograph of its own entrance - 63 of them sourced from Wikimedia Commons, with the rest falling back to a photograph from inside the park - and prints two figures only that park can claim: the queue you typically stand in, and the ride you stand in it for. Alton Towers reads 12 minutes typical with Wicker Man at 48; Cedar Point reads 25 with Siren's Curse at 78. The page also moves onto the same design system as the homepage, so the colour of a park's crowd badge means exactly what it means everywhere else on the site, and there is a Near me control for sorting the whole directory by distance.
The "we'll tell you when the queue drops" form on the homepage was not wired to anything: the ride list came up empty, the minutes box would not take a number, and the button led nowhere. Pick a park and it now offers that park's busiest rides with their typical and worst waits beside each name, seeds a threshold well under the ride's normal queue so the alert can actually fire, and carries all three choices through to the ride page with the alert sheet already open and filled in. The two dropdowns are ours rather than the browser's, so they read in the page's own type and colours in both themes, keep the full keyboard behaviour a native menu has, and open upwards when there is no room below.
The "longest queues on record" list said to tap through to that day, but it dropped you on the park's crowd-calendar day instead of the ride you were reading about. A record now loads that date into the ride's own minute-by-minute chart on the same page, and the whole row is the target, not just the date. Long dates used to wrap onto a second line and push their row taller than its neighbours; the date and the time hold their own columns now, and each queue length is coloured by how long it was rather than all of them sitting in the same white. Downtime everywhere - a ride's closures and the park's day timeline - now reads as a length of time rather than a number to convert: 137m became 2h 17m. And on parks that run early entry, the day's closure timeline starts when the rides did: Disneyland Paris opens its gates at 8:30am for hotel guests, an hour that used to fall off the left edge of the chart. It is drawn shaded and in its own softer red, so early entry never gets mistaken for the published day.
The "longest queues on record" list said to tap through to that day, but it dropped you on the park's crowd-calendar day instead of the ride you were reading about. A record now loads that date into the ride's own minute-by-minute chart on the same page, and the whole row is the target, not just the date. Long dates used to wrap onto a second line and push their row taller than its neighbours; the date and the time hold their own columns now, so the list reads as one even rhythm, and each queue length is coloured by how long it was rather than all of them sitting in the same white.
A ride page used to open on a paragraph telling you its best hour before you had seen a single number. The day's queue chart and its figures now come first, and the best-time verdict sits underneath the hourly bars it is drawn from. The reliability card has its score back as a ring, with the last fourteen days of uptime one day per row - green where the ride barely stopped, red where it did - so a run of bad days shows as a shape rather than hiding inside one percentage. The day toolbar also had two sets of date arrows doing the same job; now it has one.
Some rides showed a plain coloured tile with their initials instead of a photo - including big ones like Remy's Ratatouille Adventure, Mickey & Minnie's Runaway Railway and Tomorrowland Speedway, which had only just been added. Every ride that its park publishes a photo of now has one, taken from the park's own site or app, and new rides get theirs automatically from now on rather than waiting for someone to notice.
Setting a ride alert used to mean guessing a number on a slider. Plus members now get suggested thresholds instead: we read thirty days of history for the rides at the parks you follow, work out the wait that queue actually drops to, and tell you how often it happens and how confident we are. Rides you already watch are skipped. One tap sets the alert.
Our crowd forecast was meant to weigh the weather for your date and never actually did - a fault carried over when the old system was rebuilt meant the weather step was skipped every single time, so a washout Tuesday scored the same as a clear one. It runs now. Wet and cold days score meaningfully quieter, hot clear days busier, and the forecast tells you what the weather did to the number. Dates too far out for a forecast say so rather than pretending.
The dashboard used to show the same numbers to everybody - how many parks were open, the longest queue in the country - none of which was about you. It's now a countdown to your next day at a park: how busy it's forecast to be, how the wait climbs hour by hour, and your rides in the order that queues least. On the day itself it switches to a live guide that tells you where to go next and keeps a running total of the queuing you've avoided. There's a new page for finding the quietest day in any month, and the whole thing now looks like the rest of the site.
The eleven pages still wearing the old design have been rebuilt: about, questions and answers, what's new, the widget builder, the developer API reference, the queue times explainer, the country hubs, shared trip plans, and the privacy, terms and cookie policies. The policies are now set as a numbered ledger rather than one very long card, so a section can be scanned or linked to directly. The cookie policy and the site footer finally carry the "manage cookie preferences" control they both told you to use. The shared-trip page was also missing its itinerary entirely - a naming slip meant the list of rides never rendered, on that page or in the trip planner.
Opening a park's best rides page from the park itself showed 'we don't have enough wait-time history to rank the rides yet', even at parks with forty ranked rides - the ranking only appeared if you reloaded the page. The page was reading its figures in a way that only worked on the server, so tapping through to it from inside the site found nothing. It now reads the same figures whichever way you arrive, and the written park-versus-park comparisons had the same fault with their typical-queue table.
Both comparison pages have moved into the site's new look, and the figures are laid out as one table instead of a card per park - so the two numbers you are comparing sit on the same line, with the better of them marked. Picking two parks now leads with a sentence saying which is quieter and by how many minutes, and the written head-to-heads open with a panel showing the gap, each park's average, the ride counts and the uptime. The busiest-ride and hourly charts carry a colour that matches each park's column. Two of the six popular pairings had been quietly dropping out of the list because their park names never matched, and the whole list is now in the page before any script runs.
Moving around the site with links or the back button used to empty pages out. The homepage came back saying it tracked 0 parks, a park page lost its crowd level and its next-seven-days strip, and ride pages lost their usual-wait figures - and the only way to get them back was a full page reload. The cause was that the crowd data is read from files when a page is built, and a page you reached by clicking a link was re-reading them in your browser, where it can't. Those figures are now published as a file the browser can read too, and once loaded they are kept for the rest of your visit rather than thrown away every time you leave a page.
Searching a park from the homepage used to drop you on its crowd calendar, so the one question the box looked built for - how long is the queue right now - was the one it could not answer. Picking a park now opens that park's page, with the live queues at the top and the crowd calendar one tap away. This applies however you get there: the suggestions that appear before you type, the arrow keys and Enter, the Go button, and tapping a result.
Today's date was already outlined on the crowd calendar, but the outline was drawn in a dark colour just outside the tile - so on the dark theme it sat on a dark background and you couldn't see it at all. The current day now carries a teal ring, its date in a solid pill, and the word 'Today' next to the crowd level, and on phones the row is ringed with 'Today' under the date. It also waits for your browser before marking anything, so a page served from an older build can no longer point at the wrong day.
If a ride broke down on the day you're looking at, the page now says so. The 'uptime and closures' list was silently dropping every stop because of the way the times were read, so a ride that was down for two and a half hours still said it 'ran without a recorded stop' - while the graph showed an unexplained blank. Stops are now listed with the time it went down, the time it came back and how long it was out. A stop that begins during a park's early-opening hour and carries into the normal day is reported as one stop rather than vanishing, which is what left that first hour looking like missing data.
A search audit found that several pages showed their numbers only after the page had finished loading in a browser - so anything reading the page without running it, including Google and the AI assistants, saw blank dashes where the figures should be. The park comparison pages now carry a full typical-queue table for both parks in the page itself, and the "choose this one if" lists are built from real figures rather than the same four sentences with a name swapped in. Ride pages that have no readings for today now describe what the ride usually does instead of printing a stale date. Every park's tab bar now includes Best Rides and Plan, so no section of a park is left unreachable, and ride pages link to more of their neighbours. The best-time pages have gained a season-by-season breakdown, an explanation of where the crowd figures come from, and three more answers in minutes rather than percentages. Footer links are now big enough to tap comfortably, and the cookie banner takes up less than half the space it did on a phone.
The site-wide guide to when to visit has been rebuilt in the new look - it was the last page still wearing the old one, so following "Best time to go" from the menu landed you somewhere that looked like a different site. It now opens with the answer in one sentence, then the week as a chart you can read at a glance, the quietest hours of the day, the quietest seasons, the dates worth avoiding, and six tactics that actually work. The list of every park at the bottom is no longer just links: each one now shows how busy that park is this month and the quietest day you can still go, read straight from its own crowd forecast. All of it in all five languages, in light and dark.
The button in the top corner used to say "Find your park" and went to the same place as "Parks & live times" right beside it. It now offers a free account - or your dashboard, if you're already signed in - with a quieter "Sign in" beside it on wider screens. On a phone the four main links had nowhere to live at all once the bar got narrow; there's now a menu button that opens them, closes when you pick one, and closes on Escape or a tap outside. The site still works without an account, and nothing has moved behind a sign-up.
Clicking the search box on the homepage now opens a list of the three most searched parks straight away, and typing narrows it to whatever matches - by park name or by region - with how busy each one is this month beside it. The panel had stopped appearing at all, so the box took your typing and offered nothing back. Both boxes on the page behave the same way now: arrow keys move through the list, Enter opens the highlighted park, and Escape closes it.
Every ride page has been rebuilt in the site's new look, and it now opens with the answer instead of a wall of cards: how long the queue usually is, the hour it's shortest, and how often the ride actually runs - in one sentence at the top. Below that, the day minute by minute against what the ride usually does, the pattern by hour and by weekday, its uptime and the times it stopped, the spread behind the average, the longest queues ever recorded, how it changes through the year, and which rides are quieter if it's queued out. The crowd calendar's month pages, the best rides list, the day planner and the my-day checklist have moved across to the same design, so every page under a park now looks like one site. Nothing about the numbers changed.
Times across the site are now written the way you'd say them. Park hours read "10am - 7pm" instead of "10:00 - 19:00", the hour labels under every queue chart say "3p" rather than a bare "15", and sentences like "it opens at 10" now say "it opens at 10am". This covers the park pages, the crowd calendar and its day pages, ride pages, the reliability and comparison pages, and the embeddable widget. Only the wording changed - the figures behind them are the same.
The page that explains how we forecast crowds has been rebuilt in the site's new look. It now opens with the answer: Almanac is 86.4% accurate six weeks ahead, across more than 80 parks. Underneath, a scorecard puts it side by side with the two simplest ways to guess a crowd (repeating last week, and a seasonal average) for every park we've measured, so you can see exactly where the forecast is strong and where it isn't. The version history shows how accuracy has moved with each edition since February 2026, and there's a plain-English list of what the model actually reads: live wait times, the school and holiday calendar, the weather, and its own past mistakes. Nothing about the numbers changed, only how clearly they're shown.
The homepage has been rebuilt around what you actually come for. The wait-time board in the hero is now real: it shows genuine live queue times from a park that's open right now (and says so honestly if none are). Below it, the page walks through everything the site does - crowd calendars, best-time-to-visit guides, drop alerts, day planning, ride stats and reliability, and the free developer API - each with a direct link into the real thing. The stats are real too: the parks and rides counters now show live platform numbers instead of rounded marketing figures. All of it works in light and dark themes and in all five languages.
Getting around a park is much simpler now. Every park has a consistent bar at the top (Live, Calendar, Best Time, Reliability, Compare) so you can jump straight to what you need, and each of those pages now leads with a clear answer: the best day to visit, the quietest months, or whether the park's rides run reliably. The live page gained a 7-day crowd forecast, and the crowd calendar keeps its detailed day grid while getting a tidier layout, a one-line 'best day' verdict and a slimmer colour key. We also added a site-wide search (press Ctrl or Cmd + K, or tap Search) that jumps to any park, calendar or best-time page in a couple of keystrokes. Rounding it off: more consistent colours, better text contrast, and improved keyboard and screen-reader support.
Some people saw the site (or live wait times) randomly refuse to load with a 'Forbidden' error, especially after switching away and back to the tab, until they reopened the app. The cause was our background 'new version available' check quietly running far more often than it needed to and tripping a daily request limit on our host. That check is now served directly and throttled, so it no longer hammers the limit - the site loads reliably when you return to it.
We did a thorough accuracy sweep and fixed several stats. A ride's Reliability score was misleadingly low (a ride that runs ~99% of the time was graded 'Poor' at 67%) and its '7-day uptime' chart was actually showing the oldest week - both now reflect real operating-hours uptime and the genuinely most recent seven days. The 'typical day' card and ride FAQs no longer suggest a quietest time before the park opens; the calendar's 'shortest waits' no longer lists walk-on rides as '0 min'; and the park comparison's 'peak wait' and 'rides tracked' figures now line up with reality. We also corrected a couple of date labels and a stale 'parks tracked' count.
Every so often - on any device, including the home-screen app - live wait times would stop loading and the page would sit there broken until you fully closed and reopened it. That happened when our server was very briefly unreachable: the one failed request left the page stuck. We've fixed it across the whole site. When live data can't be reached, you now keep seeing the last known times with a small 'reconnecting…' note and a Retry button, instead of a blank or broken screen - and the page quietly reconnects and refreshes itself the moment our server is back, with no need to reopen anything.
If you opened a password reset or email verification link straight from your inbox, the page sometimes just showed the plain 'enter your email' form and quietly ignored the link. We've fixed that: these links now read correctly however you open them, so a reset link takes you straight to the new-password screen and a verification link confirms your email on the spot. We also check the link before showing the form, so an expired or already-used reset link clearly says so up front instead of letting you type a new password that wouldn't save.
Each park page now ends with a complete A–Z index of its rides, each showing its typical wait, so you can jump straight to any ride's live times, busiest hours and reliability - even the smaller ones that were harder to reach before. Crowd calendars are now browsable month by month too (e.g. how busy a park will be in August or over October half term), and the best-time page now shows full monthly and day-of-week crowd breakdowns. Behind the scenes we gave park, ride and best-time pages clearer titles in search results (so it's easier to find us when you look up a park's crowd calendar or 'is [ride] open today'), added richer structured data, and fixed a handful of rides whose accented names stopped their pages loading.
If you left Park Queue Times open in the background and came back a little later, the on-screen clock would tick back to the right time but the queue times sometimes stayed frozen until the next refresh. We've fixed that: when you return to a park or comparison page, we now check how old the data really is and pull fresh wait times straight away if they're stale - so what you see is current the instant you look. This works even when your phone parks the page in memory, which is common on iPhone.
If you've added Park Queue Times to your home screen, you may have seen a “new version available” banner that kept coming back even when you were already up to date - especially on iPhone. We've reworked how the app detects updates: it now compares the live deployed version against the exact build you're running, so the banner only appears when there's genuinely something newer - and it tells you which version (like 7.0.1) is ready. Once you're on the latest, it stays quiet.
Developers can now build with our live theme park data - free. The new Park Queue Times API serves live wait times, opening hours, schedules and crowd predictions for every park we track, through a clean versioned API. Create your free key from the new API Keys page in your dashboard (you can view and copy it any time), check out the docs at /developers, and you're away - 60 requests a minute, 10,000 a day, at no cost. All we ask is a 'Powered by ParkQueueTimes.com' credit in your app or site. Your dashboard also shows live usage stats for your key: requests per day, response times, top endpoints and which countries your traffic comes from.
You can now set a wait-time alert straight from any ride's page - just tap the bell next to the live wait. If a ride is closed or broken down, a one-tap 'Notify me when it reopens' button appears so you can catch the exact moment it's back up. And you no longer need an account first: choose your alert, and we'll keep your choice while you sign in, then set it up automatically the moment you're back.
The homepage now opens like a title sequence: the headline melts into focus word by word, the park backdrop slowly settles into place, and the live queue board and crowd calendar glide in just behind it. As you scroll, each section now rises into view with the same soft focus-pull, so the whole page moves as one. And if your device prefers reduced motion, everything simply appears instantly - no animations attached.
We've completely rebuilt the Plus page so it actually shows you what Plus does. There's now a live 'command centre' that flips real wait times, predicts the quietest day and fires a queue-drop alert right in front of you, followed by an animated walkthrough of every feature - weather-powered crowd forecasts, the best days to visit months ahead, the smartest ride order, instant drop alerts and deep trend reports - each with its own interactive demo. The whole page rides one golden-hour sky from top to bottom, and the simple Free-vs-Plus plan picker you already know is still right where you'd expect it.
We fixed a routing issue that broke direct links to some pages - opening a shared trip link or refreshing certain dashboard pages could show a 404 error instead of the page. Those links now load correctly every time, and old bookmarks to our previous Pro page now land on the new Plus page as intended. We've also retired the little-used embeddable widget - old widget links now simply take you to the homepage, where live wait times are front and centre.
Plus members now get a colourful + next to the Park Queue Times logo - and you can choose its colour. Head to Appearance in your dashboard to pick from a set of free colours, with extra colours (and an animated Aurora) unlocking the longer you stay with Plus. A small thank-you for being part of Plus.
Our premium tier has a new name and a sharper focus: Plus. Everything that makes Park Queue Times great stays completely free, and Plus unlocks the full planning toolkit - weather-powered crowd predictions, the best days to visit months ahead, an optimised trip planner with the smartest ride order, smart queue-drop alerts, deep trend analysis and an ad-free experience. Plus is £3.99/month or £29.99/year (save 37%), with no fiddly free trial - just a straightforward 14-day money-back guarantee and cancel anytime. See everything included on the new Plus page.
Account deletion is now handled as a request that our team reviews, rather than an instant one-click wipe. From your account settings you can still start the process at any time - it opens a pre-filled email to our team, who will verify it's really you before permanently removing your profile, favourites, alerts and trips and cancelling any active subscription. This small extra step protects you against accidental or unauthorised deletions, and we still action genuine requests promptly (usually within 30 days).
We fixed and improved the month picker on the crowd calendar. Tapping the month and year at the top now opens and closes cleanly - previously clicking it a second time just reopened it instead of closing. You can now tap the year inside the picker to jump straight to a different year from a simple grid, rather than stepping through one year at a time with the arrows. And opening the picker no longer nudges the calendar grid downwards - it floats neatly over the days instead.
We've replaced the old Google reCAPTCHA on our sign-in and registration forms with Cloudflare Turnstile - a privacy-friendly human check that doesn't track you across the web and protects your account with far less of your data. We've also refreshed our Privacy Policy and Cookie Policy to spell out exactly which services we rely on (such as Cloudflare and Stripe) and what each one does. There's nothing you need to do - just a quieter, more private way to keep bots out.
When you open the Theme Parks list, it now automatically filters to the country you're browsing from - so a visitor in Germany lands on German parks, someone in the US sees US parks, and so on, instead of always defaulting to the UK. If we don't track any parks in your country, we simply show every park rather than an empty list. You can still change or clear the country filter at any time, and your choice is remembered as you browse.
We rebuilt the navigation bar from scratch. It's now a crisp floating glass bar with a refreshed Park Queue Times logo and clear, simple links: Parks (with a quick menu of popular parks), Live Queues, and Best Times to Visit. The language picker now shows proper country flags on every device instead of a plain country code, the whole bar adapts cleanly between light and dark mode with visible keyboard focus outlines, and the mobile menu has been completely redesigned as a smooth, easy-to-tap slide-in panel - so getting around on a phone is effortless.
We gave the crowd calendar a proper polish. Each day now has a clearer layout - the predicted busyness sits front and centre, the crowd level (Low, Average, Busy and so on) reads on its own line, and the opening hours are tucked neatly along the bottom. Best of all, the weather is finally easy to read: every day shows a colour-coded icon - a yellow sun for clear skies, a blue cloud for rain, slate for cloudy, violet for storms - next to the temperature, so you can tell the forecast at a glance instead of squinting at a faint grey symbol. The muddy coloured borders are gone, replaced with a soft tint that still tells you how busy each day is, and it all works just as smoothly on a phone as on a desktop.
Until now, every ride carried a little type label - "Dark ride", "Coaster", "Log flume" and so on - that we guessed purely from the ride's name. It got things wrong: George's Dinosaur Adventure at Paultons Park was tagged a "Dark ride" just because its name contains the word "Adventure". Since we have no reliable way to know a ride's true category, we've removed that guess everywhere it appeared: the badge beside the ride name, the placeholder for rides we don't have a photo of, the FAQ and "About" text, and the description search engines see. Rides without a photo now show a clean initials tile instead of a guessed type. The result: nothing on a ride page claims a category we can't actually verify.
Every ride page is now a proper data dashboard. Up top, live stat tiles show the wait right now, today's average and peak, how that compares to a normal day, uptime, closures, where the ride ranks for busyness in its park, and its busiest and quietest hours. Then the data: today's wait plotted minute-by-minute against the ride's typical pattern, a clear 'best time to ride' recommendation, a 'typical day' chart of average waits by hour, the busiest days of the week, a recent-days trend line, a wait-mix breakdown (short/medium/long queues), a 'compared to the park' leaderboard ranking every ride by busyness, how weather affects the crowds, a reliability score with a 7-day uptime trend, a Top 10 busiest days on record (tap any to jump to it), and the day's downtime history. It's packed with genuinely useful data, works in light and dark, and is fully mobile-friendly.
Ride cards used to fall back to a coloured gradient with an icon whenever we didn't have a photo - which, until now, was most of them. We've added genuine, on-brand photographs for nearly 3,000 rides across 80+ parks, sourced straight from each park's own website. So Cedar Point's Steel Vengeance, Blackpool's ICON, Phantasialand's Taron, Disney's Space Mountain and thousands more now show the actual ride instead of a placeholder. Attractions we still don't have a photo for keep the clean gradient fallback, so nothing ever looks broken.
Some visitors were getting stuck on an "Unable to Load Parks" error and could only recover by fully clearing their browser cache - something no one should ever have to do. The cause: our park-data API told browsers to hold each response for five minutes, so if a momentary hiccup ever slipped through, the browser kept replaying that broken copy instead of trying again. We now tell browsers to always re-check for fresh data (while our edge cache still keeps things fast), so a one-off blip recovers by itself on the very next load.
We completely rebuilt the homepage around one idea - arriving at the park at golden hour. The whole page is a single sky that ripens from a warm dusk at the top down into night as you scroll, with our hand-drawn ride skyline on the horizon. At its centre is a tactile split-flap "ride board": pick a park (Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, Europa-Park) and watch every row mechanically flip to that park's wait times. Below, the data story shows how queues build through the day and which days are quietest, and it closes on a free "admit one" ticket. It loads fast (no live data on the homepage), works beautifully in light and dark, and is fully keyboard- and screen-reader accessible.
Added an llms.txt summary, expanded our robots.txt to explicitly welcome answer-engine crawlers (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, Gemini, Apple Intelligence, Common Crawl, etc.), and shipped a fuller Organization + WebApplication JSON-LD block so AI assistants can introduce us correctly when they cite the site. If you ask an AI for live theme-park queue times, we should be one of the sources it can recommend by name and link.
Google was canonicalising ~450 unique ride pages onto each other (e.g. Knott's 'Calico Mine Ride' pointing to Energylandia's 'Viking Ride') because our TouristAttraction structured data only emitted client-side after the live API responded. At build time the HTML had no per-ride schema, so the prerendered pages looked near-identical. Now every ride page ships a unique TouristAttraction schema with its own name, classification and parent-park reference baked into the static HTML.
Old URLs like /parks/1/calendar/2-Feb-2026 - left over from the numeric-ID era - were falling through to the SPA shell and showing up as Soft 404s in Search Console. The redirect rule that should have caught them only matched the bare /parks/{id}/calendar form, not the dated suffix. Widened the .htaccess pattern so any /parks/{numeric-id}/* legacy URL now 301s to /parks.
On the mobile park page the view-mode toggle had an empty square between the grid and map icons - the list-view button was there but its icon glyph wasn't being included in the font subset we ship. Tracked it down to a regex that only picked up icons ending in -line or -fill, silently dropping standalone ones like ri-list-check. Subset font now includes every icon class we actually reference.
The Best Time to Visit page used to wait for all 12 months of crowd data to come back before showing anything, so on a slow day the spinner stuck around for 3+ seconds. Now months stream in as their fetch resolves - you see the first chart fill in almost immediately, and the rest paint as they arrive. Results are also cached for an hour so revisiting the page (or coming back from a ride detail) is instant.
The Parks listing used to flash a grey skeleton on first load while it fetched the park list, then swap to the real cards. The full set of 83 parks is now baked into the page HTML at build time, so the list is on screen before the JavaScript has even finished loading. Country flags and park logos are still lazy so we're not blowing up first-paint either.
Some users were seeing a 'Refused to apply style' console error and briefly unstyled content on first visit. Traced it to an older deploy where two different versions of the same JavaScript chunk got cached at the CDN edge and one of them referenced a CSS file that no longer existed. Bumped our service-worker cache so affected browsers flush their stale copies on next visit.
Fixed a long-standing soft-404 problem where any unknown URL was returning HTTP 200 with the SPA shell - Google was treating thousands of those as 'Crawled, currently not indexed'. Unknown URLs now return a real 404. Also added X-Robots-Tag noindex headers for /widget, /trip, /dashboard, /auth and the per-park my-day / calendar/days routes (these are SPA shells with no unique content), and added missing canonical tags to the privacy, terms, cookies and updates pages.
Tightened the keywords used to auto-detect each ride's type so generic words like 'Flight', 'Express' and 'Expedition' no longer misclassify rides (e.g. The Flight of the Pterosaur was being labelled a motion simulator, Prof. Blast's Expedition Express a park railway). Also added hand-written 'About' sections for both rides at Paultons Park.
When a park updates a ride's closure message partway through the day (e.g. 'Closed All Day' to 'Closed Until 1st of May'), the Downtime History timeline now splits into separate entries instead of sticking with the original reason. Each entry shows the time window it applied to, so you can see how the operator's messaging evolved.
Every ride page now has an 'About this ride' section. For the 53 rides we've hand-written, you get a curated description; for the rest, we generate a short paragraph based on the ride's type (coaster, dark ride, water ride, drop tower etc.) so each page has its own context. Helps the FAQ stay relevant per ride type too.
Each park page now shows three small stat cards just below the hero - whether the park is busier or quieter than last week, plus the quietest and busiest days from the past 7 days. Useful at a glance for picking a return visit.
Crowd calendar days now flag school-holiday windows so you can spot busier dates at a glance. UK parks show England + Scotland separately (their term dates differ); German parks show generic Germany dates; French parks show whichever of zones A/B/C are off. Hover or tap a badge for the full breakdown.
Each park now has a Plan Day page that recommends an order to hit the major rides. Coasters that build long queues by mid-morning go in the 'Hit first thing' bucket; rides whose queues drop late get pushed to the evening. Built from each ride's typical hour-by-hour wait pattern over the last 28 days.
Each park page now includes a chart showing the park's average wait time hour by hour across the last 28 days, with today's actual curve overlaid. Use it to spot the quieter windows in a typical day or check whether queues are running heavier than usual.
Weather cards now show the 'feels like' temperature (accounting for humidity and wind) alongside the daily high/low, plus the peak wind speed for the day. High winds often close exposed rollercoasters, so this is worth checking before you set off.
Rides with a single-rider queue now show a small SR badge on the ride card. Currently flagged across the major UK and US parks (Thorpe Park, Alton Towers, Disney, Universal, Cedar Point, Busch Gardens, Six Flags, and more). Missing a ride? Let us know.
Each park page now starts with a short About section describing the park, its notable rides, and practical visitor tips. This gives search engines more context to rank each page and helps new visitors get their bearings at a glance.
Added a homepage FAQ section targeting common queue-time questions for rich-snippet eligibility. Created a dedicated /queue-times landing page. Park pages now include 'Queue Times' in the H1 and render correctly during static generation. Added a popular-parks section with keyword-rich internal links, plus H1 fixes on /about and the parks list.
Added missing canonical tags to ride, calendar, best-time and reliability pages. Added BreadcrumbList structured data so park sub-pages can earn breadcrumb rich snippets. Blocked Google from crawling /_nuxt/ assets directory and the SearchAction template URL. Optimized homepage title to lead with 'Queue Times' and tightened meta descriptions.
You can now create an account or sign in using your Google account. Existing email/password users can link their Google account by signing in with the matching email - both methods will work afterwards.
For closed rides, the previous wait time (e.g. 'was 30m') now appears next to the 'Closed' label in the ride's wait-time color, making it easier to see how busy the ride was just before it shut down.
Added structured data signals (WebSite @id, Organization @id, application-name meta) to help Google display 'Park Queue Times' as the site name in search results instead of the raw domain.
Added canonical URLs and og:url tags across park, ride, and static pages. Enriched AmusementPark and TouristAttraction structured data with @id, image, and publisher links. Sitemap now includes lastmod dates, and images have explicit width/height to reduce layout shift.
Fixed a visual glitch where a black stripe would appear at the bottom of the page on mobile, especially during overscroll or when the Safari toolbar animated. The page background and theme color now match the dark theme on iOS.
Fixed a bug where park pages on iOS Safari could show 'The string did not match the expected pattern' or render with no rides and a missing park name. Invalid timezone values from the API are now handled gracefully, and load failures always show a clear retry prompt.
Fixed an issue where closed rides sometimes displayed their closure reason (e.g. 'Weather Delay') without the 'Down for X' duration. Duration now falls back to recent queue change data so it always appears when known.
Fixed a bug where clicking a date on ride and calendar pages could select the wrong day. This affected users in timezones ahead of UTC, such as BST.
Fixed an issue where ride images could fail to load and show broken placeholders. Images now display correctly on all park pages.
Fixed issues preventing pages from being indexed by Google. Best Time to Visit, Plan My Day, and Reliability pages are now fully pre-rendered. Sitemap is now dynamically generated with all park and ride pages.
Park pages now automatically retry when your connection drops, instead of showing 'Unable to Load Park'. Ride images also retry loading on slow connections instead of showing initials.
Dark mode is now the default theme for all new visitors. Previously, users with a light OS theme would see light mode on their first visit. You can still switch to light mode in the navbar.
The loading skeleton now matches the actual page layout with the park info card, search bar, filters, and ride cards - so the page feels faster and doesn't jump around when content loads.
Park maps now use OpenStreetMap instead of satellite imagery. New rides and attractions appear faster on the map since OpenStreetMap is community-maintained and updated more frequently.
Queue times now refresh instantly when you return to the site after locking your phone or switching tabs, instead of waiting for the old countdown timer to finish.
Explore parks with a new satellite map view. See every ride on the map with live queue times, tap for full ride details including descriptions, images, and restrictions. Available for all parks with coordinate data.
When you're at a park, tap the directions button on any ride to get a walking route with estimated time. Routes follow real pathways powered by OpenStreetMap.
Enable 'Near Me' to see how far you are from every ride while at the park. Sort rides by distance to find what's closest. Distances update as you move around the park.
Ride popups on the map now show official descriptions, images, height and age restrictions, and opening hours. Currently available for Paultons Park and Europa Park, with more parks coming soon.
Queue status badges now accurately track how long a ride has been rising, dropping, or unchanged. Timers properly reset after 30 minutes and at the start of each operating day. Rides without tracking data no longer show a misleading 'Unchanged' badge.
Fixed a bug where individual ride operating hours could display in the wrong timezone depending on your location. Hours now always show correctly in the park's local time.
The 'Down for' timer on closed rides no longer counts overnight hours. It now caps at the time since the park opened today, so you see how long the ride has actually been down during the current operating day.
The mobile menu has been redesigned as a sleek side panel with compact navigation, better scrolling, and safe area support for notched phones. Multi-park tabs now scroll horizontally instead of overflowing the page.
Each park now has a 'Best Time to Visit' page showing historical crowd levels by month and day of week. Find the quietest months and days to plan your visit, with data-driven recommendations.
Track your park day as it happens. Tick off rides as you complete them, see your total rides and estimated wait time, and get a shareable summary card at the end of the day. No account needed.
Ride cards now show 'Walk On' badges when waits are under 5 minutes, and 'Go Now' when a queue is dropping below 15 minutes. Spot the best opportunities at a glance.
Added hreflang tags for all 5 languages, dynamic social share images for park and ride pages, and improved service worker caching for offline resilience.
Embed live queue times on your own website with a simple iframe. The widget shows crowd level, average wait, and the top 5 longest queues for any park. Auto-refreshes every 60 seconds.
New per-park reliability page showing monthly uptime rankings. See which rides break down most vs least, with uptime percentages, downtime durations, and closure counts.
Compare 2-3 theme parks side by side with live stats including average wait times, ride counts, crowd levels, opening hours, and longest/shortest queues. Shareable via URL.
The site navigation has been completely redesigned with a floating island-style bar that feels more modern and spacious. The mobile menu is now full-screen with card-based navigation and a segmented theme toggle.
Ride pages now feature a cleaner two-column layout on desktop with redesigned Day Summary, Wait Breakdown, Reliability, Peak Records, and Downtime History cards. Three-digit wait times no longer overflow the hourly heatmap.
The park hero section has been rebuilt with a crowd gauge, cleaner stats layout, and smarter ride recommendations. The 'What should I ride next?' section now shows clear numbered suggestions, and the troubled rides section highlights actual issues more accurately.
The crowd calendar and daily analytics pages have been redesigned with cleaner layouts, accurate crowd levels based on real data, and auto-cycling ride highlights when multiple rides are tied for longest or shortest waits.
The homepage hero section now features animated background effects, a live queue preview on mobile, and a more impactful first impression so you can see exactly what PQT offers at a glance.
For parks that support it, each ride card now shows its own opening and closing hours right next to the area tag. Easily see which rides open later or close earlier than the rest of the park.
Resolved an issue where the crowd calendar wouldn't display crowd levels or schedule data on mobile devices in certain timezones.
The search bar in the navbar and mobile menu now correctly carries your query through to the parks page, so you can search from anywhere on the site.
The entire site is now available in English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, and German. Use the language selector in the navbar to switch - all text, labels, and dates update instantly.
Pages now load significantly faster, especially on mobile. We've self-hosted all fonts and icons, cut animation delays, and optimised caching - so the site feels snappier whether you're on Wi-Fi or 4G.
Blackpool Pleasure Beach is now live on Park Queue Times. Track real-time wait times for rides like Icon, The Big One, and Valhalla.
The homepage has been completely redesigned with a cleaner, more modern hero section. You'll find a new park search bar, feature highlights, popular park quick links, and a live queue demo - all optimised for mobile.
You can now search for a park directly from the homepage hero section or the navbar. Results are pre-filtered when you land on the parks page.
The ride recommendation engine now uses a popularity-aware algorithm. Instead of just surfacing the shortest queues, it highlights headliner rides with unusually low waits - so you'll see the best deals on rides that actually matter.
Park pages now show scrollable insight cards at the top with today's peak and quiet hours, the busiest ride, and how many attractions are walk-on right now.
Park cards on the homepage now show whether a park is Open, Closed, or Operating instead of a generic "Live" badge, so you can tell at a glance which parks are active.
The entire data ingestion pipeline has been rebuilt into dedicated service classes for queue times, rides, schedules, and more. This makes updates faster and more reliable across all parks.
Downtime tracking now properly scopes to today's data only, preventing inflated or stale downtime numbers from carrying over between days.
Overhauled the backend for significantly faster queue time updates. Ride data now processes in fewer database queries, and Pro endpoints like Insights, Trends, and Reports are cached intelligently so they load almost instantly on repeat visits.
Ride history pages for past dates now load much faster thanks to response caching and optimised database queries. Reliability scores and top queue records are also calculated more efficiently.
Weekly and Monthly reports, Insights, Trends, Recommendations, and Park Comparisons now use smart caching. Data refreshes every few minutes so you always get near-live results without the wait.
Pages now load significantly faster thanks to code splitting - only the page you're viewing is loaded, not the entire app. We've also added unique page titles and descriptions for every park and ride, making it easier to find us on Google.
Every park, ride, and calendar page now has breadcrumb navigation at the top so you can easily see where you are and jump back to parent pages. This also helps search engines understand the structure of the site.
Added skip-to-content link for keyboard users, better screen reader support for live queue time updates, and improved navigation across the site for assistive technologies.
Resolved an issue where ride downtime could show as "Down for 0m" even when a ride had been closed for much longer. Downtime is now calculated more accurately from timestamps.
Massive expansion! We've added SeaWorld Orlando, San Antonio & San Diego, Busch Gardens Tampa & Williamsburg, plus 18 Six Flags parks including Magic Mountain, Great Adventure, and Over Texas. Also added Plopsaland, Plopsaland Deutschland, and Energylandia.
You can now swipe between parks on mobile. We've also added crowd calendar utilities to help you pick the best day to visit.
All four Walt Disney World parks are here - Magic Kingdom, EPCOT, Hollywood Studios, and Animal Kingdom. Plus Universal Studios Florida, Islands of Adventure, Volcano Bay, Epic Universe, and Universal Studios Hollywood.
Park opening and closing times now use UTC for accurate comparisons across timezones. No more confusing time mismatches.
Added Disneyland Paris, Europa-Park, Phantasialand, Efteling, Parc Astérix, Heide Park, Movie Park Germany, Liseberg, Toverland, Gardaland, Mirabilandia, Bobbejaanland, Bellewaerde, Walibi Holland, Walibi Belgium, Walibi Rhône-Alpes, Parque de Atracciones Madrid, Parque Warner Madrid, Djurs Sommerland, Energylandia, LEGOLAND Japan, LEGOLAND Korea, Peppa Pig Florida, Peppa Pig Germany, Knoebels, Kennywood, Dollywood, and Silver Dollar City.
Easily switch between parks at the same destination with the new park toggle. Perfect for multi-park resorts.
Ride names now stay up to date automatically when parks rename attractions. We also track when data changes for better accuracy.
Pro users can now plan trips with weather forecasts built in. Get live guidance during your visit to optimise your day.
Get notified on your phone when queue times drop below your threshold. Never miss a short wait again.
Refined the dark mode experience with better contrast and readability across all pages.
View historical crowd levels on a calendar for any supported park. See which days are busiest and plan accordingly.
