Round The World Tickets
Seeing a concert while traveling is worth considering
When you are planning your RTW route you might be considering either going to a city when a festival is taking place, or possibly making sure you are visiting a city when there isn’t a festival going on, but you probably aren’t thinking about planning your route partly around random concerts. As someone who’s done the concert thing quite a few times in my travels, I’ll tell you that it can be a blast and probably isn’t as complicated as you might expect.
Finding out who’s playing where and when
Of course, the first thing you need to do is find out where an artist you like (enough) is playing and when. Years ago that was very difficult, but today it’s a snap. Not many people seem to know about the concert trade publication called Pollstar, and they don’t really market themselves to consumers, but still they do a great job keeping track of nearly every tour in the world. Simply go to Pollstar.com and you can check itineraries of artists or schedules for cities for everything up to one year in advance. Most concerts don’t get scheduled until 3 or 4 months before they happen, so you can’t expect the site to predict events that aren’t yet confirmed, but if you keep checking you’ll see everything.
Seeing a major artist in another city (especially one where English isn’t the first language) can be a real novelty, but if you get lucky to go out of your way a bit you might be able to catch some band you really like that’s doing a small club tour of a far-off country or region. You aren’t likely to catch your favorite obscure band in Bangkok, but you might catch them in Buenos Aires or Athens or Melbourne.
Buying tickets
Also thanks to the internet, you can usually buy advanced concert tickets to most shows online for a small “convenience charge.” Sure, some shows sell out right away, but in many countries they do mostly festival seating and people don’t buy tickets until the day of the show. Every situation might be a bit different, although if there are artists you are really fond of it’s pretty easy to stay on top of things.
What if a concert is sold out?
You might be screwed if tickets to your show are sold out, but not necessarily. First off, most major cities have a craigslist now, and tickets to concerts are pretty popular on all of them, often sold by people who can’t attend and just want their money back. More good news (sort of) comes with the fact that there are ticket resellers or scalpers at most any event that’s sold out. They work about the same way in most places. You’ll often see amateurs who bought too many tickets for their group or had a late cancellation, and you’ll see the pros who go around saying they need tickets because they want to buy more cheap tickets from amateurs even though they have several for sale already themselves. You might have to pay a lot, or you might not. But if you see an artist you fancy is out touring the world during the same time you are, catching a show might be very possible and extremely memorable.
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