It’s the most stressful time of year once more: that’s right, the resale for the biggest musical event of the summer, Glastonbury.
In 2023, tickets for the festival sold out in just an hour. With that in mind, it’s more important than ever to be organised and prepared to increase your odds of securing the goods.
With coach sale set to take place at 6pm tonight, and the general resale on Sunday November 17 at 9am, here’s what to know about maximising your chances of visiting Worthy Farm this summer.
Set an alarm
Scatter-brained? Busy at work? Glastonbury ticket resales wait for no man, so a good idea for the otherwise-occupied might well be to set an alarm for an hour, half an hour and ten minutes beforehand – enough notice to set up your devices in time for the sale to open.
With that in mind, make sure to be ready and waiting on the site for the minute the tickets go on sale. This is especially important given Glastonbury’s new ticket-selling policy this year: those who log in late will be sent to the back of the queue to get tickets, which (knowing how popular the festival is) is almost a guarantee of missing out. You snooze, you lose.
Decide what you want
To coach or not to coach, that’s the question. Coach tickets can be helpful, providing both transport and festival access in one convenient package, but they do sell out faster than regular Glastonbury tickets – this year, it was in 25 minutes. If you do pick coach, then where from – London, Bristol, Newcastle? And what day – Wednesday or Thursday?
To avoid confusion on the day itself, decide in advance what option to aim for, and what the best second and third choices are should your priority pick sell out. And if coach tickets prove difficult to get, there’s always the main resale a few days later.
Hit up the right website
Scammers abound, especially for festivals as wildly popular as Glastonbury. But there’s only one website where tickets can be bought: here.
Get your friends involved
There’s strength in numbers, and that holds even more true when it comes to ticket sales. Gather all the friends you can and pop them in front of their computers, ready to spam the refresh button. After all, the chances of you getting a ticket solo are small. But with six people trying simultaneously for Glastonbury glory? The odds are much better: 500 times better, in fact.
Break out the plastic
It seems obvious, but – do you have enough money to buy tickets? For the general sale, which has already taken place, you need to put down a £75 deposit, and pay the rest by the April payment deadline.
That obviously doesn’t apply for the resale: the entire £370 ticket needs to be paid upfront. So check that bank balance, or at least make sure there’s a credit card to hand with a generous max amount on. There’s nothing worse than getting to checkout and having an order bounce because the bank balance is empty.
Get organised
The key to success at resale is being organised. That means making a spreadsheet with everybody’s names, post codes and registration numbers on – plus a backup credit card number if a friend is feeling especially generous.
If the number of wannabe attendees is larger than the 6-person sale limit, decide the makeup of each group and assign who’ll be trying to get tickets for which one. Having all the information in one place will make things much easier and the process of applying much faster when you finally do get through to the purchasing page and can copy and paste the info across. Or that’s the idea, anyway.
Get the tech ready
Rule one of the resale: make sure your internet is fast. That means divide and conquer. Everybody should be in their own houses for this, ideally one person to a router.
Make sure any devices are as closer to said router as possible (or at least in the part of the house with the best WiFi), and scavenge as many as possible: phones, laptops, old phones, your mate’s FitBit if necessary. Make sure they’re fully charged before the big day, and then sit back and let the magic happen. The more devices are active, the higher the chances that one will make it past the dreaded loading page.
Avoid multiple tabs
Tempting as it might seem (more tabs equals better chances, right?) Glastonbury’s official advice is to avoid opening multiple tabs on one browser during the sale. It confuses the sales website and could cause payments to fail. So don’t risk it: one page per device.
It’s not over until it’s over
The tweet that everybody dreads seeing: ‘all available tickets have now been allocated.’ But that just means that the orders for the remaining tickets are being processed, and it’s a fair bet that at least some will bounce for some reason or another. For that reason, it’s a good bet to keep trying – at least, until the ‘Sold Out’ sign appears on the ticket landing page. At that point, it’s well and truly over… until next year, that is.
