Whether your passion is the battle of the bands or the Battle of Hastings, what are probably Britain’s hottest cultural tickets are about to go on sale – and to be in with a shout of going, there are insider tips that will get you a good spot in the queue.

General admission tickets to the Glastonbury festival next June go on sale online at 9am on Sunday, while the next tranche of tickets to view the Bayeux tapestry at the British Museum will be released to members on Tuesday 6 October before a public on-sale on 21 October.

If you are planning to try your luck, get your fastest finger ready and check out our tips for how to increase your chances of bagging tickets for the most in-demand events.

Join the club

Membership of an organisation or venue often includes priority booking, giving you early access to tickets. However, the cost will be beyond many people’s budgets.

The next member priority booking window for the Bayeux tapestry – for slots from 1 January to 31 March 2027 – opens on Tuesday 6 October at noon. That is for members who joined up to 16 September. If you join now, you can book before the public in January for April to July 2027 dates. However, standard individual membership starts at £82.

Sometimes you don’t have to pay to get priority booking for hot-ticket events. Some theatres (such as those run by the LW Theatres group) and gig promoters (such as Live Nation) offer presale access to people who sign up for email alerts or newsletters.

Assemble your squad

Planning to try for Glastonbury tickets? One person can book up to six per transaction, and this year, when the sale begins, everyone who is already on the glastonbury.seetickets.com page will be assigned a place in a queue to access the booking process.

The six-ticket limit means that if there are a lot of you who want to go, the best way to maximise your chances is to split into one or more groups of six. They need to all be logged on before 9am.

The festival says you only get five minutes on the booking page, and there’s a lot of information to input.

If and when one of the six people gets through, they will need the registration details, including postcodes, of everyone in their party in order to book tickets. (Registration for this year is now closed.) Everyone should check their registration details are still correct ahead of the sale.

So, before things kick off, get a spreadsheet going with everyone’s details on it that everyone can access, and set up a group chat on WhatsApp or wherever so you can message each other instantly. To speed up the checkout process, everyone should consider having their debit or credit card details saved in their browser.

For the Glastonbury general admission sale, you pay a £100 deposit a person now, so everyone needs to have enough cash in their account, or a big enough credit limit on their card, to pay for all the tickets. They must have their mobile phone charged and ready to approve the payment by entering a code if necessary.

Multiple devices and browsers?

In theory you can increase your chances of getting a good spot in the queue for in-demand tickets by using multiple web browsers or several devices. However, ticket websites often warn there is a risk you will be identified as an automated bot and blocked from making a purchase.

The ticketing company AXS is known to be particularly strict about this sort of thing.

Crucially, it appears that for this year, Glastonbury ticket hunters must enter their registration number before entering the queue. They then get a unique queue ID linked to that. So it appears that means one queue spot only per person, and means the end of being able to use multiple devices and/or browsers for Glastonbury.

Be ready

If it says the tickets go on sale at 9am, don’t log on to the site at 8.58am. Go on at perhaps 8am or even earlier. It means you are in the website, just in case it starts to buckle later when everyone else tries to log on.

Some ticketing and venue websites will let you create an account and add your address and payment card details in advance. That will mean a quicker checkout if you get through.

Hold your nerve

So the tickets for that gig or show, etc went on sale at 9am but a few minutes later the website says it is sold out.

Don’t give up: keep refreshing the page for at least a few minutes. In that 9am scramble, some people’s purchases won’t have gone through. Perhaps there was a technical glitch or they took too long inputting their details and were “timed out”, or their bank card was rejected.

In such cases, their tickets will go back on sale – maybe immediately or a little while later.

Once you’re done, don’t hang around

You got through, and the tickets are in your basket. Pay for your tickets and get out quick. Don’t tempt fate by hanging around: sometimes websites crash when they are overloaded, causing people to lose the tickets in their basket.

Resale sites and ‘wait lists’

Did you end up missing out? Secondary ticketing websites such as Viagogo and StubHub are not popular with everyone.

However, there are more palatable options – notably Twickets, an “ethical” fan-to-fan marketplace enabling people to sell spare tickets at no more than face value (plus fees). Twickets is an app and website and is well worth checking regularly if you are hunting for tickets for a gig, show or sporting event.

Some venues such as the Royal Albert Hall in London use Twickets as their official ticket resale partner.

Meanwhile, you may be able to join a waiting list for tickets that have been returned by people who can no longer attend a sold-out event. Some theatres operate waiting lists, as does the gig tickets app Dice. On Dice, if something is sold out, it will usually say “Wait list” under the event information. Once you join this, you will be sent an email or push notification if tickets become available, and you will have a short window to buy them.

Get help from AI

According to Ticketmaster, music fans “are increasingly using AI assistants to discover live events, compare options and make purchasing decisions”.

If you have your eye on a gig or event that is sold out, a tool such as ChatGPT can now “work in the background” and check the relevant ticketing or venue website from time to time. So you could ask it to alert you if tickets become available or extra ones are released (or if prices fall below a specific amount).

For example, if it’s an arena or stadium event, extra “production seats” – also known as “production holds” – are often released nearer the time, when they have got the staging finalised. Similarly, theatres will sometimes only put certain seats (such as the front row) on sale once they have sorted out the staging and sightlines.