Festival camping, and the five rules that catch people out at the gate

Almost everything written about festival camping is a packing list. Packing lists are easy to write and they are not what goes wrong.

What goes wrong is administrative, it happens before you have left home or while you are standing at a gate, and it is written down on the festival's own website where nobody looks. Here are the ones we found by actually reading those pages.

1. Your camping ticket is not your entry ticket

They are separate purchases at every festival we read. You can own a ticket to the festival and have nowhere to sleep, and people find this out in March when the campsites have gone.

Sziget sells camping as its own ticket, across several campsites: Sziget Ville Premium, Camping of Nations and Caravan Camping. Glastonbury sells campervan and caravan pitches separately from admission, and after their November accommodation sale those sell out completely, with only a resale of cancellations in the spring.

2. At Sziget, every single person checks in separately, with their own ID

This is the one that will strand somebody's friend.

Sziget's own wording is blunt: one Festival Account equals one person equals one ID check in. Your friend has to check in their own ticket, using their own account. You cannot do it for the group, however organised you are.

Two more details worth carrying with you. For camping tickets the online check in is mandatory, not optional as it is for a day ticket. And if you have bought a pre pitched tent, a wooden cabin or a hut, online check in is not available at all, so you do that at the campsite reception when you arrive.

Anyone under 16 is checked in by staff on site, so do not sit at home trying to make the website do it.

3. At Glastonbury, a coach ticket locks you out of a campervan

Buried in their information page, and it would ruin a plan. If you buy a ticket with coach travel, you cannot then buy a campervan ticket, in either the accessible campsite or the general campervan fields. You also cannot buy a car park pass on a coach booking.

So the decision about how you travel is made at the moment you buy, not later.

4. Not every campervan counts as a campervan

Glastonbury only lets vehicles into the campervan fields if they have fitted sleeping, and washing or cooking facilities. A van with a mattress thrown in the back is not a campervan by that definition, and the field is not where you will be sleeping.

Campervan passes are also non transferable and printed with the name and address of the person who booked, so buying one off somebody is not a plan either.

The 2025 prices, for shape rather than as a quote: £200 for a standard pitch, £300 for a large one, with a car park pass at £55 plus £2.75 postage.

5. The unofficial campsite problem is real enough that Glastonbury wrote a warning

Their words, not ours: there are an increasing number of unofficial campsites around the festival, whose policies and values are not the same as theirs, and the festival accepts no responsibility for what those places sell you.

They will endorse only their own official campsites. If you are booking something that appeared in a search result rather than on the festival's site, that is the thing being described.

The small ones that save an argument

• Sziget sells a moving in ticket if you want to arrive a day before the festival starts, plus camping sets and lockers.
• Bring photo ID. Sziget requires a document with an MRZ code, the machine readable strip. Glastonbury asks for photo ID to collect your entry ticket.
• Glastonbury's coaches have at least one toilet, and the festival says plainly that it is not wheelchair accessible and will not be cleaned regularly during the journey. That is an unusually honest sentence for a festival to publish and it is worth knowing before a long ride.

What we have not read yet, by name

We are not going to imply a festival has no camping rules because we failed to open the right page. On the day we looked, the addresses we had for Wacken, EXIT and Rock am Ring camping returned nothing, and Roskilde's practical information page builds itself inside the browser, so a plain read finds an empty shell.

Those four are the next ones we will read properly, and each will arrive here with its own date attached.