A concert has one deadline and one bottleneck, and they sit at opposite ends of the evening. The deadline is the moment the headline act walks on, which is later than the time printed on the ticket and earlier than the crowd assumes. The bottleneck is the twenty minutes after the last song, when a great many people attempt to leave a building through a small number of doors.
Everything worth planning about the night sits around those two points. This guide covers how to read a stage time, where a car can and cannot wait at a large venue, why the encore is a decision rather than a formality, and how to get six people away together rather than in three separate directions. Tickets and entry are entirely your own arrangement with the promoter or venue.
Doors, support acts and stage times
The time on a ticket is when doors open, not when anything begins. A support act commonly follows an hour or more later, and the headline act later again. Venues publish approximate stage times in the days beforehand, sometimes on the evening itself, and approximate is the operative word. Planning your arrival from the door time alone tends to mean an hour standing in a hall you have already looked at.
The useful approach is to decide what you actually want to see and work back from that. If the support act matters, arrive for doors. If it does not, a later arrival is more comfortable and the venue is easier to reach. Confirm the timings with the venue or promoter yourself, tell us what you have settled on, and we build the departure around it with a proper margin for the last mile.
That last mile is the part that varies. Large venues sit inside road networks designed for ordinary evenings, and on show nights they are not ordinary. Whether you are heading for an arena on the edge of a city or a stadium in the middle of one, the final approach is where the time goes, and it goes in both directions.
Where the car waits during the show
Big venues manage their immediate surroundings tightly on event nights. Drop-off zones are defined, waiting is generally not permitted anywhere near the doors, and stewards move vehicles on without much sympathy. None of that is a problem provided nobody expects a car to be sitting outside the moment the lights come up.
The workable arrangement is a set-down as close as the stewarding allows, the vehicle waiting somewhere sensible nearby, and a collection point agreed before you go in. Your chauffeur chooses that point knowing how the traffic behaves rather than guessing from a map, and it is frequently a street or two back from the obvious one for exactly that reason.
The egress problem
The end of a large show produces a volume of people that no road network absorbs gracefully. Car parks empty slowly, pedestrian routes to stations fill, and the streets immediately around the venue lock up for a period that varies with the size of the crowd. This is entirely predictable and almost universally ignored when the evening is planned.
There are only two sensible responses. Leave before the end, which most people are unwilling to do, or accept a wait and make it comfortable. The second is easier with a car: you are collected from a point outside the immediate crush, you sit down straight away, and the queue happens around you rather than to you.
- Doors, the support act, and the headline stage time
- The likely finish, including one or two encores
- A collection point set back from the venue doors
- A realistic wait while the immediate streets clear
- Any journey onward, whether home, hotel or dinner
The encore decision
Most shows end twice. There is the apparent finish, then the encore, then the actual finish, and the gap between them is where a surprising number of evenings go wrong. Leaving during the encore buys perhaps a quarter of an hour of clearer road. Staying to the end means the full crowd, and there is no third option that gets you both.
Decide before you go in and tell your chauffeur which it is. A car positioned for an early departure sits somewhere quite different from one positioned for a late one, and switching between the two as the lights go up is not realistic. Either decision is perfectly good; the difficulty comes only from not having made one.
Groups, and the meeting point
Six people leaving an arena will not stay together. Some head for the merchandise stand, some for the lavatories, and the crowd separates the rest without asking permission. Trying to reunite inside a moving mass of people is slow and unpleasant, particularly with a phone signal that has been struggling since the interval.
Agree a named landmark away from the venue before you go in, ideally something visible and unambiguous rather than a street corner, and say it out loud so everybody hears the same thing. One person holds the arrangement with the chauffeur. The car then comes when the group is genuinely assembled rather than when the first person arrives and starts waiting alone in the cold.
- A named, visible landmark rather than a street corner
- The same instruction given to everyone before going in
- One nominated person messaging the chauffeur
- A plan for anybody whose phone is likely to die
- Agreement on whether you are staying for the encore
Dinner either side of the show
An evening built only around the concert leaves you eating at eleven or not at all. Booking dinner beforehand is generally the easier of the two options, provided it is early enough and close enough that the journey between them is short. Afterwards, kitchens are closing and the streets are at their least helpful.
Where the car is held for the whole evening rather than booked as two journeys, the shape of the night becomes yours to change. Dinner runs long and you leave later; the support act disappoints and you leave earlier. Everything is agreed over WhatsApp or email beforehand, and the vehicle stays with you across the gap rather than being released and rebooked.
