Visiting Disney’s Animal Kingdom right now feels a little bit like a trip back in time…
I’m not necessarily referring to the obvious indicators of the season we live in—like ubiquitous masks over guest faces, character cavalcades, or omnipresent plexiglass. Much has remained the same inside this incredible park since before the lockdowns of 2020.
The thing that feels so different at Disney’s Animal Kingdom is the room to breathe…
Before the opening of the World of Pandora in 2017, Animal Kingdom stood as a unique sanctuary at Walt Disney World. Despite being Disney’s most beautiful park, this singular paradise struggled to draw crowds at times. While Florida locals and seasoned Disney guests appreciated it, I can’t even count the number of conversations I had with casual visitors who just couldn’t fathom why they should visit it. Throughout most of the resort’s history, guests have largely underestimated Disney’s Animal Kingdom as an elaborate zoo, and that kept crowds at medial levels. On top of this, the park was only open during daytime hours.
The opening of the World of Pandora turned the park overnight into one of Disney’s biggest draws (until it was finally toppled by the opening of Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance in late 2019). After that, it became increasingly difficult to visit Disney’s Animal Kingdom without having to navigate significant crowds and lengthy waits.
Post-reopening, Disney’s Animal Kingdom has taken a strange step back to its former quietness. The park is still immensely popular—it remains the home of several of the resort’s top attractions. However, lower guest capacity has restored a sense of serenity to its streets. None of Disney’s parks were designed with a global pandemic in mind, but of all Walt Disney World, Disney’s Animal Kingdom might be the best park to visit during this unusual season.
Our most recent visit took place on Thursday, January 21st—an ideal example of a weekday visit with low crowds. If you plan on visiting on a weekend in the near future, you can expect a slight increase in crowds (with highest crowds on holiday weekends like President’s Day). Here’s what we found…
1. You’re going to want to get up early
Let’s start with one of the few drawbacks—if you want a full day at Disney’s Animal Kingdom right now, you may need to set that alarm a little earlier than normal…
This season at Walt Disney World has offered some rather luxuriant hours for guests who like to sleep in—for example, Disney’s Hollywood Studios was opening at 10 AM for much of last year, and Epcot is currently opening at 11 AM to accommodate for later hours. The departure of Extra Magic Hours has further reduced early morning stress for late-risers.
Disney’s Animal Kingdom is currently opening at the brisk hour of 8 AM, with the park closing well before sunset at 5 PM.
This was one of the first areas where our visit to Disney’s Animal Kingdom felt like a blast from the past—before the opening of the World of Pandora, daytime-only hours were commonplace in the park. While the early opening time isn’t an impossible feat for families staying nearby, local visitors commuting from outside Orlando may have to wake up pretty early to make opening gate.
Lately, we’ve taken a pretty nonchalant attitude towards trying to make opening gate at other parks since capacity has been so low—indeed, at Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you’re likely to find the longest lines of the day within an hour or two of opening.
With Disney’s Animal Kingdom, however, it might actually be worth making the effort to arrive early, purely because of the park’s unusual hours. With the park closing so early in the evening, you may end up feeling like you didn’t get to experience the whole thing if you arrive too late. It’s also a particularly attractive park to choose if you plan on park hopping (more on that later).
2. Lots of room for social distancing
Video: YouTube, @MyKingdomForAMouse (Jett Farrell-Vega)
This park is massive, and wow, it makes a difference during this pandemic.
Of all Disney’s parks, Disney’s Animal Kingdom is the one with the most space for guests to spread out. This has proven a major point of difficulty at other parks, particularly Epcot with its many bottlenecks and labyrinth of construction walls. We visited on a relatively low capacity day, but Disney’s Animal Kingdom largely felt empty—something we haven’t seen much of since before Pandora opened.
The broad avenues and sprawling size of Disney’s Animal Kingdom make it much easier for guests to social distance. While we did run into the usual issue where some guests are just bad at this (God bless ‘em, but I still can’t grasp why some folks magnetize towards the nearest person even if there’s twenty feet of available space), it wasn’t a major point of stress. With few exceptions, this park definitely wins as our favorite so far to stay socially distanced.
3. Crowding at some exhibits can prove problematic
We found two exceptions to the easy-social-distancing scenario. The first was when Dinosaur broke down early in the day (around 11:50 AM), which caused a mass exodus of guests departing that queue all at once. This dispersed pretty quickly.
The other exception was one we saw take place several times, and it marked one of the only frustrations we had with this particular visit: guests crowding small exhibit spaces can prove frustrating.
Some of this is par for the course at Disney’s Animal Kingdom—animal displays tend to draw a lot of people to the same few spots. Some of the viewing areas throughout the park (particularly on walking trails) are particularly small, and crowds can gum up all available space quickly.
The problem comes when you throw social distancing into the mix—as with all things, some guests are more courteous than others. While most guests were perfectly polite, on a few occasions we had difficulty viewing exhibits like fruit bats, gorillas, and tigers without other guests ignoring social distancing to find a spot to get close.
Another problem came in the form of families camping out in prime viewing spots with tight confines (like the tiger viewing windows on the Maharajah Jungle Trek). A cast member finally had to intervene when the area grew too congested with parties piling in for a look. On two different occasions on that particular tour (which overall was fantastic), we had to surrender and step back when oblivious guests insisted on shuffling close, preventing us from getting more than a few seconds glimpse at the animals before having to change positions. Needless to say, this sort of thing is bad behavior on the best of days but a definite no-no during the season we’re in.
4. Super friendly cast members save the day
Video: YouTube, @MyKingdomForAMouse (Jett Farrell-Vega)
The good news is that Disney is on point with the cast members in this park. There were cast members everywhere we went on this visit, and they were insanely friendly.
On the same walk through the Maharajah Jungle Trek where we ran into some guest crowding, extra-magical cast members were available to save the day. We’ve been coming to that particular trail for years, and I have never seen so many cast members present. While it seems likely they are largely there to enforce mask use and social distancing, all of the cast members were familiar with the animals and shared fun facts about each Animal Kingdom-denizen. They were friendly and eager to answer questions, and when social distancing did occasionally become an issue, cast members were quick to intervene.
This was the vibe we sensed throughout the entire park—the hospitality of the cast members was fantastic. At the end of the day, they even lined the roads with Mickey hands and animal paw gloves, waving to departing guests with warm smiles. It’s the type of thing you sort of grow numb to at Disney, but the kindness of the cast members really stood out. Give that team a raise!
5. Ultra-low waits are still a thing
Banishing Fastpass+ might be the best thing possible for Disney’s Animal Kingdom—at least on weekdays, this park is still seeing historically low wait times, even as we head into the new year.
This park was becoming really weird for long waits before the pandemic hit—Avatar Flight of Passage regularly drew queues higher than 70 minutes, even on quiet days. Even the placid Na’vi River Journey usually clocked in with queues of at least 50-60 minutes.
During our visit, the two attractions with the longest waits were Na’vi River Journey and Dinosaur, both with highs around 45 minutes max. The queue times we recorded for Dinosaur are a little wacky because the ride suffered an extended shutdown early in the day—normally, it’s been having pretty short wait times in the morning. Na’vi River Journey admittedly surprised us—frankly, it’s an attraction I don’t think is worth a wait longer than 25 minutes. The long queue time makes sense, however, when you take into account that this ride is one of the few at Walt Disney World that hasn’t had plexiglass dividers installed. It’s already a somewhat low-capacity ride, so wait times rarely drop below 30 minutes. In our case, that 30 minute wait actually turned out to be closer to 40.
This is an amazing time to catch unusually short waits for Avatar Flight of Passage—so long as you don’t mind the lack of social distancing on the ride itself. While the ride may have experienced an early surge of visitors at the beginning of the day, from about 11:00 AM on, the queue for this insanely popular attraction fluctuated from 25 minutes all the way down to a mere 10 minute wait. That is impressive for a ride people used to wait four hours for!
The two real gems we saw were the wait times for Kilimanjaro Safaris and Expedition Everest—neither attraction had more than a 10 minute wait all day, and Expedition Everest remained for most of the day at the sweet spot where guests can marathon ride if they choose (by the way, the weird eagle at the top of the track is back!). It’s Tough to Be a Bug also maintained low waits throughout the day (if you like a peppering of psychological torture with your Disney magic). Kali River Rapids remains under refurbishment for now.
Here’s a few specific snapshots of wait times we saw…
11:40 AM
- Na’vi River Journey – 40 minutes (dropped to 35 by 12 PM)
- Avatar Flight of Passage – 25 minutes (dropped to 20 by 12 PM)
- Kilimanjaro Safaris, It’s Tough to Be a Bug, Expedition Everest – 10 Minutes
- Dinosaur – 5 minutes (before ride shutdown)
12:45 PM
- Na’vi River Journey – 45 minutes
- Kilimanjaro Safaris, It’s Tough to Be a Bug, Expedition Everest, Avatar Flight of Passage (Whhhhaaat?!) – 10 Minutes
1:40 PM
- Na’vi River Journey – 40 minutes
- Avatar Flight of Passage – 25 minutes
- Kilimanjaro Safaris, It’s Tough to Be a Bug, Expedition Everest – 10 Minutes
3:10 PM
- Na’vi River Journey – 35 minutes
- Kilimanjaro Safaris, It’s Tough to Be a Bug, Avatar Flight of Passage – 10 Minutes
- Expedition Everest – 5 minutes
3:30 PM / 4:15 PM
- Dinosaur – 45 minutes (after reopening)
- Na’vi River Journey – 30 minutes
- Avatar Flight of Passage – 15 minutes
- Kilimanjaro Safaris, It’s Tough to Be a Bug– 10 Minutes
- Expedition Everest – 5 minutes
6. Not a good time to visit Gorilla Falls Trail
The Gorilla Falls Trail (formerly the Pangani Forest Exploration Trail) is the most popular walking trail at Disney’s Animal Kingdom thanks to its proximity to Kilimanjaro Safaris and its popular exhibits. Normally, this is a must-visit attraction, but if you’ll be visiting in January or February, you may want to think twice.
The Gorilla Falls Trail is currently being offered only in a modified form that loops back on itself before reaching the aviary (our beloved weaver birds!). The reason for this is apparently the bridge to the aviary was in urgent need of construction—the trail will remain under partial refurbishment for at least the next 6-8 weeks.
I’m a sucker for the aviaries at Disney’s Animal Kingdom, so this was enough for us to turn back pretty quickly once we realized our favorite part of the trail wasn’t available. The modified path makes for a somewhat cramped experience, and in some spots, social distancing is a challenge (though lots of cast members are present to keep an eye on things). If your heart is set on seeing gorillas, apes, and zebras, go ahead and brave it, but if not, you might as well just skip it. If you’ve never tried the Maharajah Jungle Trek in Asia (near Kali River Rapids), we highly recommend that trail as an alternative. Some would argue it’s the better of the two!
7. A really good time to visit Tiffins
We gushed about Tiffins before the pandemic, and we’ll continue to do so—this place is still fantastic.
On other excursions throughout Walt Disney World since the parks reopened, we noticed that reservations at sit down restaurants have proven harder to come by than before due to limited capacity. While this has proven the case at Disney’s resorts and some locations at other parks, Tiffins did not seem to be affected by this phenomenon. We were able to get a last minute reservation easily with lots of choices to pick from.
For those unfamiliar, Tiffins is the park’s only signature restaurant, themed after the adventures of the Disney Imagineers who built Disney’s Animal Kingdom. The restaurant features an eclectic menu of African and Asian-inspired cuisine, with a number of dishes you won’t find anywhere else in Walt Disney World. There is plenty to rave about on the menu, but the unassuming Gobi Manchurian (a spicy fried cauliflower) remains one of the best things we’ve had at The Most Magical Place on Earth—and that’s coming from someone who doesn’t normally do cauliflower.
The menu has undergone some slight modifications (we were sad to see the Crispy Sadza missing), but there was still plenty to pick from. I thoroughly enjoyed the North African-spiced Tofu, and my husband had the Whole-fried Sustainable Fish (snapper). As usual, the cast members were amazing, and our server was extremely knowledgeable and friendly.
If Tiffins is a bit much for what you’re looking for, you can enjoy a simpler experience at Nomad Lounge outside, offering a number of libations along with Nomad bowls, sliders, Tiffins bread service, churros, and coffee/tea press pots.
8. The return of park hopping!
Ohhh, how we missed you…
I understand some guests prefer to stick to one Disney park a day, but for those of us who love park hopping, this season has been weird. It’s broken my brain more than once realizing I can’t just walk back and forth between Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Epcot. For Passholders in particular, the lack of park hopping throughout the fall months has been a major bummer.
Fortunately, park hopping is back both for Passholders and guests who purchase a park hopping add on to their tickets. The new system is a little bit different than the old free-for-all version—guests still need a Disney Parks Pass reservation for whatever park you will be starting your day at. You must visit that park first no matter when you arrive. After 2:00 PM, you can hop to any other Disney park you choose—even visiting all four if you wish.
The return of park hopping is important for visitors to Disney’s Animal Kingdom—its early opening and closing times make it the best park to start at if you want to park hop. You can get a pretty long day in at this park before 2 PM hits, then easily head to any of Disney’s other parks. Disney’s Hollywood Studios and Epcot remain the two easiest parks to hop between thanks to their proximity and multiple transportation options. Magic Kingdom can still be a slight pain to get to no matter which route you choose—the Transportation & Ticket Center are a required stop if you’ll be parking a car there, and while Disney’s busses can get you closer by dropping you at the front gate, expect delays as the busses have been running slower since the parks reopened.
Whichever park you decide to hop to, pay attention to closing times. If you push your stay at Disney’s Animal Kingdom all the way to 5pm, you’ll only have two hours left to enjoy Magic Kingdom or Disney’s Hollywood Studios. Epcot offers a bit more flexibility with its 8pm closing time. Just be aware that if you hop to Disney’s Hollywood Studios, you will not be able to get a Star Wars: Rise of the Resistance boarding pass—you have to have a reservation to that park to access those, and they’ll already all be gone by 2 PM.
Enjoy this article? Keep reading to hear why some guests hate this controversial Disney’s Animal Kingdom attraction or explore 10 Crazy (and Adorable) Things You Totally Did as a Disney Kid…
