Today is the first Glastonbury Festival ticket day - which means a familiar sense of excitement and dread for anyone who's regularly tried and failed to get entry to the festival before.
Ticket plus coach travel will go on sale at 6pm GMT on Thursday 3 November, before the broader, larger batch of general admissions tickets go live at 9am on Sunday.
After three strange years of Covid cancellations and tickets transferred from way back in 2019, the race this year is likely to be particularly intense - even if adult entry now costs £355 + £5 booking fee.
If you're going for a ticket tonight, then you'll only need to immediately pay £50 plus whatever the coach fair is.
All of the tickets are sold exclusively at glastonbury.seetickets.com.
Before the site goes live and the mad scrabble begins this evening, Nick Baker, telecoms expert at Uswitch.com, has offered some advice for how to maximise your chances of getting a ticket.
Preparation is key
"Prior to tickets going live, make sure you have registered for the festival and that it’s been approved. You may not be able to purchase tickets without this approval, so it's worth finding out now," Nick says.
"Note down in your calendar the exact date and time that tickets will be available for purchase, and if you’re really eager, consider setting alarms up to 10 minutes before tickets go on sale, providing you with time to prepare."
Those who have bagged tickets in the past have also recommended that you decide in advance the types of tickets you want to purchase and agree with your friends that those are the tickets you are getting, and have all the details you need - including names, postcodes and registration numbers - ready.
This way you won’t waste any time at checkout. Be careful to enter your details accurately, if you don’t - it could lead to complications.
If you are buying coach tickets, work out which cities you'd be willing to travel from.
Many a person has scooped up the only remaining coach ticket available to them, only to end up getting a train halfway across the country, the wrong way, to get on board - something you have to do to get hold of the ticket.
You can buy up to six tickets at a time, so it's worth grouping up with five other people to maximise your chances.
In recent years Glastonbury ticket buying has become a serious operation with near military precision for many people, with Google spreadsheets shared among extended friendship groups and a complicated consequence tree decided beforehand if one group of six is lucky.
It's a grim process that jars with the origins of a festival which sold entry and a pint of milk for £1 in 1970, but its the reality potential festival goers now face.
Buffering zone
"The last thing you want when in the midst of booking festival tickets is for your internet connection to drop out mid-checkout, as this could risk losing all your progress and put you back to the end of the queue," Nick says.
"Before you start the buying process, check your internet connection is up to scratch by running a speed test. If your internet is not performing as well as it should, it might be worth contacting your provider to see if there’s an issue."
Internet connection seems to be a huge part of getting through, so it's worth seeking out the fastest one you have access to - probably meaning stay off your phone and connect to the home broadband.
Word is city traders have great success snatching tickets each year by staying in the office and linking up to their ultra-fast fibre broadband, a crucial tool of an industry where every millisecond counts.
Don’t refresh
"Once online and ready to go, avoid refreshing the page, as this may cause you to lose your place in the queue," Nick says.
"See Tickets will automatically refresh for you when you are given the opportunity to pick your tickets. Similarly, avoid opening multiple tabs for the same ticket retailer, as this may lead the ticket system to believe that you’re a ‘bot’ and therefore prevent you from accessing the website and purchasing tickets altogether."
Never give up
The ticket retailer will be its busiest as soon as tickets go on sale, and significant site traffic can sometimes cause online complications and page crashes.
"Even if an event appears to be sold out on the ticket website, this is not always the case. Occasionally high site traffic can result in tickets appearing falsely unavailable," Nick says.
"If this happens, be sure to continue checking and looking for tickets over the following few hours. Additional tickets may appear and this could be your chance to secure them."
There are multiple resale opportunities, so if you miss out this week, all is not lost.
Don’t fall victim to scams
"Aside from See Tickets, no other site or agency will be allocated Glastonbury tickets, so be wary of making a purchase through another retailer," Nick says.
"All tickets for the festival are individually personalised to the named ticket holder and are strictly non-transferable, which is to attempt to stop resellers.
"Security checks are carried out on arrival, and only the specified ticket holder will be admitted to the festival. If you miss out on tickets when they go on sale, any cancellations will be made available for resale at face value via the festival’s authorised ticket agency only."
