How this site works

Editorial standards

Most Disney planning sites do not publish anything like this. We think that is exactly why it is worth doing: if we are asking you to trust what we say about a $6,000 holiday, you are entitled to know how we know it.

When someone was last there, where we have been

Not when it was published, and not when a word was last changed — the date a human physically stood in the place being described.

We are honest about the gap. Most pages do not carry that date yet, and the ones that do not say so in place of it rather than staying quiet — every resort page says we have not timed it, and every ship page says we have not sailed it. Where a page has no first-hand visit behind it, it is built from published sources and says which.

The site flags pages automatically as their verification window lapses, so a date cannot quietly go stale. Photographic proof alongside each date is what we are building towards; when a page carries it, you will see it on the page.

Every number carries a date and a source

Prices, hours, height requirements and policies change constantly at Walt Disney World. An undated price is the most common way a planning site quietly becomes wrong, so ours are stored with the date they were checked and the place they came from. If we cannot date it, we do not publish it.

We say when something is not worth it

Every resort page has a section headed who this is wrong for, and the software will not publish the page without it. The same goes for whether a restaurant or a Lightning Lane is worth the money. A site that likes everything is not reviewing anything.

Where the wait times come from

We poll two independent sources every five minutes and record both. So far that is 1,743,914 observations across 249 attractions. Where the two sources disagree we show you the disagreement rather than quietly picking one.

Data comes from Queue-Times.com and ThemeParks.wiki, both free and both credited on every page that uses them.

We publish our historical wait data free. The best data in this category currently sits behind a subscription, which means search engines cannot index it and nobody can cite it. We think that is the wrong way round.

What we do not do

• No display advertising. Not now, and not planned.
• We do not republish other sites’ writing. We read the news like everyone else, then go and look at the thing ourselves.
• No AI-written articles passed off as first-hand. Transcripts from Melissa’s own videos are raw material for a written guide, never the guide itself.
• No manufactured urgency and no curiosity-gap headlines.

When we get it wrong

We will fix it and say what changed, on the page, with the date. Corrections are not embarrassing; undisclosed corrections are. Email hello@whistlewhileyouwork.com and tell us.

Independence

Whistle While You Work is an independent fan site. It is not owned, operated, sponsored, authorised or endorsed by The Walt Disney Company. Where a link earns us a commission, that is disclosed on the page it appears on — not only in a policy nobody reads.

The counts on this page come straight from the database and are recounted at most once an hour, so they can trail the live figure by up to an hour. They are not typed in.