Christopher BarrettGlastonbury Festival co-organiser Emily Eavis has confirmed that the number of tickets made available for this year’s event was reduced by “a few thousand” to avoid overcrowding.
Speaking on the BBC’s Sidetracked podcast, Eavis said the decision was made to not sell out the event to its full 210,000 capacity. The move follows crowd congestion around some performance areas at last year’s event, which led to access points being closed.
“Interestingly, people have moved slightly differently since Covid. So they tend to move more in a herd,” said Eavis. “So my main thing really this year is just to communicate that there are like 10 routes to anywhere.”
She said it would be interesting to see how the reduced ticket sales will affect the crowd dynamics on site: “Apart from telling people to use different routes and to use the whole site, it will be interesting to see if those few thousand less can make an impact at some of the busier times.”
The Glastonbury app is increasingly used to as a tool to accurately predict how busy particular areas of the event will be, said Eavis.
She also revealed that the Shangri-La area is to be expanded this year, with organisers having dedicated an additional field to the nightlife zone that was previously used for crew camping. More space has been made available for crew on land recently purchased on the edge of the Worthy Farm site.
She also said that while Glastonbury Festival is having a fallow year in 2026, the opportunity will be taken to plant 30,000 trees on the recently acquired land adjacent to the festival site.
This year’s festival will run from 25-30 June, with headliners including Olivia Rodrigo, The 1975 and Neil Young.