Open data
Our wait-time data is free
The best wait-time data in this category currently sits behind a subscription. That means search engines cannot index it, AI assistants cannot cite it, and researchers cannot check it. We think that is the wrong way round, so ours is open — no key, no signup, no rate limit worth mentioning.
We started collecting recently, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
TouringPlans has been logging since 2001. We started this month. What we have is growing by roughly 40,000 observations a day and it is free — but if you need twenty years of history today, we are not it yet. Ask us again in a year.
How much do our two sources disagree?
- Identical
- 83.7%
- Average gap
- 1.4min
- 10 min or more apart
- 6.3%
Across 176,163 readings where both Queue-Times and ThemeParks.wiki reported the same ride at the same minute, they gave the identical number 83.7% of the time and were within ten minutes of each other 93.7% of the time. The worst disagreement we have recorded is 90 minutes.
A further 106,459 readings had only one source reporting; those are excluded here rather than folded in, because a single source cannot agree with anything. This is not a forecast accuracy rate — we do not forecast, so we do not have one. It is how solid the number on your screen is, and you can check it against the open API.
The API
No authentication. CORS is open. Please cache; please do not poll hard.
Endpoints canonicalise to a trailing slash. Any normal HTTP client follows the redirect automatically; if you are using curl without -L, include the slash.
Current waits
GET https://whistlewhileyouwork.com/api/v1/waits/current/Every open attraction, with how many of our two sources agreed and by how much they differed. Nobody else publishes the disagreement.
Hourly pattern for one attraction
GET https://whistlewhileyouwork.com/api/v1/waits/{entity_id}/history/Average and peak wait by hour. Every response carries its own sample size, collection window, and a statistically_meaningful flag — because an average built on three days is not the same thing as one built on three years, and you should not have to guess which you are looking at.
Licence
CC BY 4.0. Use it commercially, build on it, republish it. Credit whistlewhileyouwork.com, and pass on the credit to Queue-Times.com and ThemeParks.wiki, whose free APIs this is built on.
Why give it away
Because a paywall makes data invisible. Locked away, it cannot be indexed, cited, or checked — which means it cannot build authority for the people who collected it. Open, it can. We would rather be the source everyone quotes than the source a few hundred people pay for.
Building something with this? We would like to know — hello@whistlewhileyouwork.com.