Privacy Policy

Last updated: 27 October 2026

1. Information We Collect

We collect information that you provide directly to us, including:

  • Email address when you subscribe to our newsletter, together with the context of that sign-up: the page you were on, the artist, event, venue, city, festival or competition that page is about, its genre, the country your connection comes from, the website that sent you to us (the site's address only, not the page), any campaign tags in the link you arrived on, and the interests you optionally pick on the form. We do not store your IP address — only the two-letter country code — and we never store the full address of the page that referred you.
  • Email address and optional budget when you set a price alert or join a waitlist (double opt-in: nothing is sent until you confirm; every alert email has a one-click unsubscribe link; unconfirmed requests are deleted after 7 days; a hashed IP address is kept briefly to limit abuse). Once — and only once — you confirm, we also record which event, artist or search term the alert was for, so we know what to tell you about. The weekly round-up is a separate email you choose to add: by ticking its box on the alert form, by pressing "Yes, add me to the round-up" straight after signing up or on the confirmation page, or from the link in an alert email. It is never pre-ticked, it is never a condition of the alert, and it only starts once you have confirmed your address. Unsubscribing from the round-up leaves your alert running
  • Location data (city/country) via your IP address for personalized event recommendations
  • When you click a ticket link: a random click id, the event, the time, the page you came from, your country, your browser's user agent and your IP address, kept for 90 days to detect abuse of our links and to match the sales our partner reports to us. The click id and the event are sent to impact.com and StubHub International with the click; nothing else about you is.
  • When you press "Update prices now" on an event page: a salted hash of your IP address, kept for 2 hours, so that one person cannot trigger live price checks without limit. The check itself writes only the event's price and ticket count, which every visitor then sees.
  • When you use NeedATicket inside ChatGPT: daily usage counts that identify no person, described in full in section 6.
  • Browsing behavior through cookies and analytics

2. How We Use Your Information

We use the information we collect to:

  • Send you event updates and newsletters (with your consent)
  • Show you relevant events near your location
  • Improve our website and user experience
  • Track affiliate link performance
  • Detect abuse of our ticket links and of the live price check, and count how the ChatGPT app and other AI tools use the site

3. Cookies and Tracking Technologies

On your first visit a cookie banner asks you to Accept all, Reject, or Manage the individual categories. Nothing optional is loaded or stored until you choose. Your choice is remembered in a first-party cookie (cc_cookie) and you can change or withdraw it at any time with the Cookie Settings link in the footer of every page.

The banner offers exactly four categories, which is all we use:

  • Strictly Necessary (always on, cannot be disabled) — your cookie choice itself (cc_cookie) and Cloudflare's hosting and security cookies. We also use Cloudflare Web Analytics, which counts page views without cookies and without tracking you between sites.
  • Analytics (off until you accept) — Google Analytics 4 and Microsoft Clarity. See the note on Google Consent Mode below: GA4 is present on the page for everyone, but it stores nothing and sets no cookies unless you accept this category. Microsoft Clarity, which records anonymised sessions, is not loaded at all until you accept.
  • Marketing (off until you accept) — used solely for the Stay22 hotel maps and accommodation search on our venue, event and accommodation pages.
  • Advertising measurement (off until you accept) — if you arrived from a Google or Microsoft ad, this remembers which ad it was, in a first-party cookie on this site (nat_ad, kept for 90 days), so we can tell the ad platform when one of our links led to a ticket sale. It also lets the Google Ads tag set Google's advertising cookies, and loads Microsoft's advertising tag if we use it. Nothing is stored if you decline.

Our own advertising

We advertise this website in Google search results, to searchers in the UK, and may also advertise it on Microsoft's search network. We do not show third-party adverts on our pages, and we do not sell your personal data.

When you arrive from one of our ads, the address you land on carries an ad click identifier that the ad platform added (gclid, gbraid or wbraid for Google, msclkid for Microsoft). We only pass that identifier on to our server, and only ever report it back to the ad platform, if you have accepted Advertising measurement. In that case, when you press one of our ticket links, the identifier is added to the link and recorded on our server with that click, and it is also kept in the nat_ad cookie, so a ticket link you press on a later visit within 90 days carries it too. If you have not accepted Advertising measurement, the identifier is not passed on: we only note that the visit came from an ad (Google or Microsoft), with no identifier, and nothing is stored on your device. We check your choice at the moment you press a ticket link, so a change you make in Cookie Settings applies straight away, and withdrawing that consent deletes the cookie straight away.

If a ticket sale follows a click that carried an ad click identifier, we may send the ad platform that identifier with the time, value and currency of the sale, so it can count the sale against the ad. A sale that follows a click without an identifier is never reported to the ad platform. We do not send your name, email address or any other contact details.

Google Consent Mode

One Google tag on every page runs both Google Analytics 4 and Google Ads, and it loads in a denied state. In that state it sets no cookies and no advertising or user identifiers; it sends Google anonymous, cookieless signals that a page was viewed and, when you press one of our ticket links, that a click-through to a ticket seller happened. Google uses those signals to estimate traffic and ad results without identifying you.

The two Google products follow separate categories. If you accept Analytics, Google Analytics is switched to a granted state and its cookies (_ga, _ga_*) are then set. If you accept Advertising measurement, Google Ads is switched to a granted state (advertising storage, ad user data and ad personalisation) and may set Google's advertising cookies, and the click-through signal is then counted against the ad you came from. Whatever you reject stays denied for the rest of your visit and on every later visit, until you change it in Cookie Settings.

Stay22 hotel maps and cookies

Our accommodation partner Stay22 provides the hotel maps and the search on our accommodation page. Their content is not embedded until you accept marketing cookies: until then you see a placeholder with a button that tells you what pressing it will load. Pressing that button records your consent for the Marketing category, exactly as if you had accepted it in the cookie banner.

Once loaded, the Stay22 embed sets its own third-party cookies on the stay22.com domain (session22 and Cloudflare's __cf_bm bot-management cookie), and Stay22 in turn loads resources from its own suppliers — Hotjar and Sentry (their analytics and error monitoring), Stadia Maps (map tiles), Font Awesome (icons) and the image servers of the hotel providers it compares, such as Booking.com and Vrbo. Those requests are made by Stay22, under Stay22's privacy policy, and none of them happen unless you have accepted marketing cookies.

Affiliate links

Our ticket links go to StubHub International, our only ticket partner, and do not set cookies on this website. Attribution happens after you click, on StubHub's own site and under StubHub's own cookie notice. Rejecting optional cookies here does not stop you buying tickets and does not change the price you pay.

4. Affiliate Disclosure

NeedATicket.co.uk participates in affiliate marketing programs. This means we may earn a commission when you click a ticket link to StubHub International, our only ticket partner, and complete a purchase. We do not sell tickets ourselves.

Important Information:

  • No Additional Cost: You pay the same price whether you use our links or go directly to StubHub. The commission comes from StubHub, not from you.
  • Affiliate Networks: Ticket commissions are paid through impact.com, the affiliate network StubHub International uses. No other ticket seller pays us. The only other company that pays us is Stay22, for bookings made through the hotel map on some event pages.
  • Editorial Independence: Our affiliate relationships do not influence our event recommendations. We list events based on user interest and availability.
  • Transparency: All links that may generate a commission are clearly disclosed on our site with statements like "We may earn a commission when you purchase through links on our site."
  • FTC & ASA Compliance: We comply with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) guidelines in the US and Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) rules in the UK regarding affiliate disclosure.

The commissions we earn help us maintain this free service, keep our event database updated, and cover hosting and operational costs.

5. Third-Party Services

We use the following third-party services:

  • Cloudflare (necessary) — hosting, security and cookieless Web Analytics. Loads on every page.
  • Google Analytics 4 (analytics) — traffic measurement. Present on every page but, under Google Consent Mode, stores nothing and sets no cookies until you accept the Analytics category.
  • Google Ads (advertising measurement) — measures whether our Google search ads lead to ticket sales. Present on every page on the same Google tag as Google Analytics but, under Google Consent Mode, sets no cookies and sends only cookieless signals until you accept the Advertising measurement category. See Google Privacy Policy and how Google uses information from sites that use its services.
  • Microsoft Advertising (advertising measurement) — if we advertise on Microsoft's search network, its tag is not loaded until you accept the Advertising measurement category. Microsoft Privacy Statement
  • Microsoft Clarity (analytics) — behaviour analytics, including session recordings and heatmaps. Not loaded until you accept the Analytics category. Microsoft Privacy Statement
  • Stay22 (marketing) — hotel maps and accommodation search. Not loaded until you accept the Marketing category. Stay22 Privacy Policy
  • StubHub International (via impact.com) — our only ticket partner; affiliate links for ticket purchases. No cookies are set on this site; their notices apply once you click through.
  • Brevo — email newsletter and price-alert delivery, used only if you give us an email address. Your email address and the sign-up details listed in section 1 (page, artist/event/venue/city, genre, country, referring site, campaign tags and the interests you picked) are held both by us, in our own database, and by Brevo as contact attributes, so that the emails we send you are about things you actually asked about. Brevo Privacy Policy

Session Recording Disclosure:

If — and only if — you accept the Analytics category, we use Microsoft Clarity to understand how users interact with our website. Clarity records user sessions (mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling) to help us improve the user experience. Personal information such as passwords, credit card details, or any sensitive form data is automatically masked and not recorded. You can withdraw this at any time through our cookie settings.

6. Using NeedATicket inside ChatGPT, Claude and other AI assistants

NeedATicket is available as an app in ChatGPT. It offers one tool, a read-only search of the ticket prices this website already shows. This section is the complete account of the data that moves when you use it.

The same tool is available to Claude, and to any other assistant or app that connects to our server (see For developers). Everything in this section applies to those connections in exactly the same way, with that assistant's provider in place of OpenAI.

What ChatGPT sends us

The search words and filters ChatGPT chose from your question: an act, team, show or venue name; the town or city the event is in (never your own location); a first and last date; a top price per ticket; a sort order; whether to include events in other countries; and how many results to return. ChatGPT never sends us your name, email address, account, location or the rest of your conversation, and we never ask for them.

What we send back

For each matching event: its name, date and time, venue and city, the cheapest listed price per ticket before the seller's fees, when that price was last checked, whether it is unusually low against its usual price, and a link to the event's page on this website. The link carries two tags (utm_source=needaticket-app and utm_medium=chatgpt-plugin) that tell us the visit came from the app. It contains nothing about you.

What we record, why, and for how long

  • Your question: we keep no record of the question. The search words and filters are used to find matching events and then discarded; nothing about them is written to our database and no profile of you is built.
  • Usage counts: for each day we store how many times the app connected, read the tool's description and ran a search, the software that made the calls (its user agent, such as "openai-mcp"), which edition of the site answered (UK or US) and whether each call succeeded or failed. No IP address, no question and nothing that identifies a person is stored. Purpose: to know that the app works and how much it is used. Kept for 365 days.
  • If you follow a link from the app to this website: your visit is recorded as a referral from the ChatGPT app: the page you landed on, the address of the site that sent you (not the page), your country, your browser's user agent and the time. Purpose: to measure the channel. Kept for 365 days.
  • If you then click a ticket link: we record the outbound click: a random click id, the event, the time, the page you came from, your country, your browser's user agent and your IP address. Purpose: to detect abuse of our links and to match the ticket sales our partner reports to us. Kept for 90 days.
  • Hosting: Cloudflare, which hosts this website and the app, processes each request in order to deliver it, as it does for any visit (see section 5).

Who receives data

  • OpenAI holds your conversation with ChatGPT under the OpenAI Privacy Policy. We receive from it only the search words and filters described above.
  • Anthropic, if you use the tool through Claude, holds your conversation under the Anthropic Privacy Policy; as with OpenAI, we receive only the search words and filters.
  • Cloudflare processes requests as our host (section 5).
  • impact.com and StubHub International, our ticket partner, receive the click id and the event when you click a ticket link, so that a sale can be matched to the click. They receive nothing else about you from us; their own notices apply once you are on their site.
  • Nobody else. We do not sell this data and do not share it with anyone not named here.

Your controls

  • You can turn NeedATicket off, or disconnect it, in ChatGPT's or Claude's settings at any time.
  • The usage counts contain nothing that identifies you, so there is nothing in them to access or delete.
  • To have a referral or click record deleted, email us (section 8) with the approximate time and the event; we will delete it and confirm.
  • The rights in section 7 apply to everything described here.

7. Your Rights (GDPR)

If you are in the EU/UK, you have the right to:

  • Access your personal data
  • Correct inaccurate data
  • Request deletion of your data
  • Object to processing of your data
  • Withdraw consent at any time — for cookies, use Cookie Settings in the footer of any page

If you are unhappy with how we handle your data, you can complain to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) at ico.org.uk/make-a-complaint or on 0303 123 1113.

8. Contact Us

If you have questions about this Privacy Policy, please contact us at: our contact page

The business that runs NeedATicket is registered with the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), the UK data protection regulator, under registration number ZC280444.