Getting reminded when tickets go on sale

This is the use case that made me build a reminder extension, so I have thought about it more than is reasonable.

The shape of the problem: an announcement page tells you a general sale opens Friday at 10am. You need to be on that page, at 10am, with the tab already open - because for anything popular the queue starts before the clock does, and thirty seconds of finding the site is thirty seconds behind several thousand people.

Almost every way of remembering this fails at one of the two halves.

Why the obvious methods do not work

Leaving the tab open. Works if the sale is tomorrow. Does not work if it is in three weeks, because by then the tab is one of forty and it has stopped being a reminder - it is just a rectangle in a strip. I have missed two sales exactly this way, both while the tab was still open.

A calendar entry. Gets you the alert. Does not get you the page. At 10am you have a notification saying “tickets” and you are searching for the site while it is happening. If you are going to use a calendar, at minimum paste the URL into the description - most people do not.

A bookmark. Gets you the page and nothing else. You have to remember to go, and the whole reason you saved it was to stop having to remember.

A phone alarm. Excellent at the time, useless at the page, and it goes off on a device that is the wrong one for buying tickets from.

The pattern is the same every time: the page and the moment live in different systems, and you are the integration layer.

What to actually do

Save the page and the time together, from the page itself.

That is the whole trick, and it takes about two seconds with Latr: the announcement page usually states the sale time in plain words - “General sale: Friday 10am” - so you highlight those words, right-click, and choose Remind me about this. It reads the time out of what you selected and files the page against it. No typing, no picker, no copying a URL anywhere.

When Friday comes, that exact page reopens on its own and the notification arrives beside it. You are on the site rather than searching for it.

The part I would not skip: an early warning

For anything with a queue, the notification arriving at 10am is already slightly late. You want to be on the page a few minutes before, so the tab is loaded and you are not fighting a cold DNS lookup while the timer runs.

So set an early warning - fifteen minutes is about right - and mark the reminder high priority, which makes the notification stay on screen instead of fading after a few seconds. A notification that faded while you were in another window is a notification you did not get, and for this one case that matters.

If you do this often, make it a per-site rule for the ticketing site you use: high priority, fifteen-minute warning, applied automatically to everything you save from it. Set it once.

And send it to your calendar

This is the one I would not leave out.

A browser extension can only fire while the browser is running. If the sale is at 10am on a Saturday and your laptop is shut, the reminder arrives when you next open it - which for a ticket sale is worthless. That is a real limit of the whole category, not a quirk of one extension.

So for a sale specifically: one click sends the same reminder to Google Calendar or Outlook, or downloads an .ics for Apple Calendar. Now your phone has it. The phone gets you to the desk; the browser reminder gets you to the page. Both, for anything you would be annoyed to miss.

I use the calendar handoff for perhaps one reminder in twenty, and ticket sales are most of that twentieth.

Things worth knowing about sale pages specifically

The announced time is often not the real time. Presales, fan codes and staggered releases mean the page you want may open earlier than the general sale. If the announcement mentions a presale, set two reminders. It costs four seconds.

Time zones. An announcement from a promoter in another country may be stating local time without saying so. Read the page carefully before you highlight; Latr will happily and correctly schedule the wrong time if the wrong time is what the page says.

Save the sale page, not the news article. The article about the tour is not where you buy. If the article is all you have, save it anyway - you can change the address on the reminder later - but if the ticketing page exists, use that.

Take the thumbnail. With page thumbnails on, the reminder in your queue shows a small picture of the page. When you have four sales in a week and the titles all read like Tickets - Official Site, the picture is what tells them apart.

A two-minute setup for anyone who does this a lot

Install Latr - free, no account.
Make a per-site rule for your ticketing site: high priority, 15-minute early warning.
Make a tag called something like tickets, so the whole set is one click away in the queue.
When you find an announcement, highlight the date on the page and right-click.
For the sales you truly care about, send it to your calendar too.

Steps 2 and 3 are one-off. The rest is two seconds per sale, which is roughly the point - anything slower and you would go back to leaving the tab open.