Glastonbury 2024: The best tips to buy tickets
21 April 2024, 20:00
As tickets for Glastonbury 2024 go on sale this weekend, let Radio X's top tips help you nab those elusive spaces.
Every year, thousands of music-lovers whip themselves into a frenzy in an attempt to purchase tickets to the greatest music event in the world: Glastonbury Festival.
After being held for the first time in two years in 2022 and returning in 2023, the Somerset festival will be back between 26th and 30th June 2024.
The last chance to buy tickets for the festival will be Sunday 19th April 2024 at 9am BST for general admission.
Buying tickets is an undertaking, which fills even the most seasoned veterans of the Somerset festival with dread- especially because they always seem to be gone in a matter of minutes!
However, it doesn't need to be a totally lost cause...
Because we feel everyone should get the chance to sample the mud and the madness at Worthy Farm, we’ve put together a list of tips to help you nab yourself some tickets to the biggest party on earth!
How hard is it to get Glastonbury tickets?
Getting a Glasto ticket is reasonably difficult, with an estimated 2.5 million people trying for just over 200,000 tickets each year. However, we've got some tips to make sure that you put your best foot forward and give yourself the best possible chance of claiming a spot at the world-famous festival.
Get our top tips and tricks for getting a Glastonbury 2024 ticket here:
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Make sure you're registered
Nobody can buy a ticket without having a unique registration number which comes with your photo ID, so if you haven't registered already, we're afraid you've already fallen at the first hurdle and you won't be able to buy tickets for this year's festival.
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Know your dates
Fans have the chance to buy tickets to Glastonbury four times a year.
First - there's a coach and general ticket sale in Autumn the year before the festival and then you can try your luck in the Spring resales.These are the dates and times you NEED to know:
- General Admission tickets – Sunday 21st April, 9am (BST).
- Accommodation options – Sunday 21st April, 11am (BST).
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Take it very seriously
Sure, there are more important things in the world. But in those 30 to 45 minutes before the words “Tickets Unavailable” start appearing, you should act as if it’s the last hour before your dissertation is due or as if you're a few minutes away from walking into the interview for your dream job.
Talk to your friends, make a strategic plan, and most importantly…
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Don't be hungover!
As with most years, general admission tickets go on sale on a Sunday morning. That means there’s a good chance you were toasting the weekend the night before.
Get to bed early, then get up early – fresh as a daisy. Just think about all the time you’ll have at Glasto to be hungover... IF you get tickets.
And if you go for coach tickets, don't go for a swift half in the pub first. You need 100% focus and attention.
Will you be basking in the Glastonbury sunshine this year? Picture: Jamaway / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo -
Form a syndicate
You should be able to enter six registration details in total when you try for tickets. However, this will go down to four tickets in the resale for general admission and two for the coach tickets. BUT EVERYONE CAN STILL TRY.
That means you can have a solid force of 5, 3 or 4 other units other than yourself constantly eyeing up that browser. They don’t even need to be people you plan on camping with. Everyone on earth has a colleague who’s said “Ha, yeah man I’m totally going to try and get Glasto tickets this year! I hear Taylor Swift's going to headline!”
Now... you may not particularly want to hang out with this person, but you can use them to your advantage.
Or better still - you can always enlist very good friends who have already got tickets to help! All they need are your registration number and postcode.
Create a google doc, have all your names, postcodes and registration numbers in a spreadsheet and get VERY familiar with it.
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Copy and paste in details DO NOT type them
Once you’ve got your elite crew of razor sharp buddies together, make sure you prepare yourselves. And this means no typos so: EXCHANGE DETAILS PROPERLY!
To buy tickets, all you need is everyone's full name, Glastonbury registration number and postcode.
Make sure you copy and paste them in. DO NOT rely on handwritten notes or typed text messages.
Set up a Facebook group or Whatsapp thread to communicate during the sale so no two people are trying with the same details at the same time and DEAR LORD double check for typos.
The last thing you want is to get through and fill in your details only to see: "Sorry, that reference number is not registered."
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Triple check your card details
If you're lucky enough to make it through, you automatically become the lead booker and therefore you'll need to have your card details at hand.
If you are buying tickets in the Autumn sale, you will now need £75 for each successful ticket you book.
Make sure you enter these details EXACTLY as you see them because if you don't you could fall foul of being frozen out of the system.
In past years, a wrong letter or number could mean everyone's registration details are frozen for UP TO 10 MINUTES.
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Check Your Email
Once you've made the booking, be sure to check your email in the hours after you have made the purchase. And be sure to check your junk folders.
If you haven't received an email within three hours, ticket holders are urged to contact the team at See Tickets via their Customer Service Portal.
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Use a work computer (if it's out of hours)
No matter how great you think your home fibre optic connection is, it’s probably not as good as your Internet at work. Plus, just think, Sunday morning? Who’s going to be around? (Unless you work in hospitality or at a church).
All that delicious, powerful internet will be solely yours.
Disclaimer: Radio X takes no responsibility for you getting fired for misusing work property.
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Attack from all angles
Often your tablet has a slicker internet connection because it isn't crammed with as much rubbish as the laptop you bought back 2006.
So there's no harm in trying that.
DISCLAIMER:
Glastonbury explicitly asks people not to use multiple devices, saying: "running multiple devices simultaneously to attempt to access the website is a waste of valuable resources, and doesn’t reflect the ethos of the Festival."
It might not reflect the ethos of Glastonbury, Festival but they've not said it doesn't work, so make of it what you will.
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REFRESH! REFRESH! But not too much...
If you get through to the ticket page stage where the message appears “you’re currently in a queue, this page will keep refreshing automatically” then you’re halfway there.
BUT before that, just keep banging it.
TIP: double check which keystroke does a "hard refresh" on your browser in advance. Each browser is different. A hard refresh clears cookies, meaning you're seeing a brand new version of the page, rather than one that's held in your browser locally.
Glastonbury returns to Worthy Farm between 22nd and 26th June 2022. Picture: Alamy Stock Photo -
Have a BACK SPACE in your back pocket
Up until this point you've been in refresh mode, but once you get onto the booking page you have to be VERY careful what you do next.
Sometimes the booking page freezes or "hangs" and in this instance Glastonbury has advised to "try pressing back once and then continue your booking from that point."
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Know when to close your browser and start again
Now, we wouldn't recommend you EVER just close your browser when you're in the process of getting onto the Glastonbury booking page, but according to organisers on their info page from 2020:
"Please don’t continue to refresh the page more than 10 minutes after entering your details as your access to the page will have expired. You will need to close the browser and start again to gain fresh access to the booking page."
That means... don't just stand there looking at your booking screen after 10 minutes. Every second counts, so as painful as it feels to do it... cut your losses and start again.
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Set See Tickets As Your Homepage
Every year, Glastonbury partners up with seetickets.com to sell the tickets.
Instead of mucking about trying to just get onto the site at 6pm or 9am, set https://glastonbury.seetickets.com as your home page.
So when you open a webpage, BOOM Glastonbury is there. But do bear in mind…
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Have multiple browsers if you must NOT multiple tabs
Now, your brain will be saying “JUST OPEN MORE TABS!” when panic sets in. Resist.
Unless you’re trying to purchase tickets on a NASA supercomputer, then chances are your laptop can only process so much information at once. Plus, if you have 30 tabs open you can't keep track of them anyway.
If you want more than one view of the page, use multiple browsers NOT tabs, as tabs tend to share the same information and could lead to booking clashes.
The Glastonbury website advises in its basic ticket information: "Attempting to book tickets online using multiple browser tabs can confuse the ticket sales process and cause your transaction to fail.
"We strongly advise that you use just one browser tab when trying to book tickets, in order to avoid possible problems with your transaction."
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Have enough money in your account… Obviously
Don’t worry, we’re not criticising your intelligence or capabilities with managing your finances. But in this age where we all have eight different accounts and credit cards, sometimes it’s easy to lose track. Be prepared to have whatever funds you need ready for all the people you're buying for.
Glastonbury 2024 tickets will cost £355 + £5 booking fee, of which a £75 deposit (plus coach fare if booking a ticket + coach travel option) is payable when booking in November, with the full balance payable in the first week of April 2024
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Don't Give Up
Look, Glastonbury does sell out quickly. It’s true.
But have faith - keep going until the page tells you to stop. In fact... There have been some cases where would-be festival punters have had the sold out message on their browser, only to backspace and find they were allowed into the system again. We're not saying this will definitely happen, but it's always worth still going until Glastonbury officially announce that tickets have sold out from their official X (formerly Twitter) account
So remain focused. Keep calm and carry on and DO NOT STOP until you see that final message from the festival themselves.
GOOD LUCK EVERYONE!
