Trip Report: Wimbledon Queue Guide & Getting Affordable Courtside Seats
If your dream is to attend a Grand Slam, Wimbledon is one of the easiest to get fantastic tickets for. While most tournaments sell their courtside seats at a premium, Wimbledon makes them available to people entering through the ‘ballot’ or ‘queue,’ on a set price chart. I attended Wimbledon in 2023, through the ballot and queue, and saw fourth round matches (£125), sat courtside for quarterfinals (£185) and women’s semifinals (£220), and the women’s final (£255). If you’d just like to see the grounds and matches on outside courts, or try for resale tickets onsite for show courts, all of that is possible for under 50 pounds a day.
Available Courts and Matches, Prices
There are three show courts for which tickets are required: Centre Court, No 1 Court, and No 2 Court. For the first six days of the tournament, the listed courts will show only singles matches. For the quarterfinals, only Centre Court and Court No 1 will show singles matches, and semifinals onward only Centre Court will show singles matches. Queue tickets for these courts are not available for the semifinals or finals. Ticket prices are on a set schedule and posted to the Wimbledon site each year. Early rounds are cheapest and ticket prices rise throughout the tournament.
I recommend to focus on Centre Court and No 1 Court because those are the only courts with a roof, and London definitely has a rain out risk. You need tickets to one of those stadiums to be able to access them, and have a rain-free environment to watch tennis. Other stadiums, especially early in the tournament, will still have singles matches. To get a sense of which courts offer singles matches, I recommend checking the prior year’s schedule on Wikipedia, through the day-by-day summaries page.
The queue distributes about 500 tickets per day to each show court. Looking at the Centre Court seating chat, sections in the 200s and 300s contain debenture tickets (a very expensive rabbit hole to research), and 100s and 500s are available for purchase through the ballot or queue. The queue typically gets a portion of the 100s section seats, which is where I was seated for the queue ticket and one of my ballot tickets.
Ticket resale is not allowed, except for resale of the ultra expensive debenture seats, which start at about a thousand pounds a ticket. For the ballot and queue seats, each year, Wimbledon releases its price chart. For 2024, the prices are as follows:
Enter the Ballot!
Entering the ballot is extremely important to increase your ticket odds. Even if you are not picked in the ballot, you can purchase up to two returned tickets. The ballot opens up very early, however, closing to applicants in the fall of the preceding year. Sign up for ballot alerts on the Wimbledon site.
My London-based friend and I registered for the ballot, and neither of us were chosen initially. However, we managed to buy tickets through the returned ticket portal. The site for Wimbledon tickets is ticketsale.wimbledon.com - no other ticket sites exist, except for debenture tickets, which sell for the thousands.
If you did try for the ballot and received no ticket offer, try following the @WimbledonAlerts Twitter account, which posts when larger ticket drops happen.
Keep trying to add to cart if you see available tickets - they may be allocated to someone’s cart, but until that person makes a purchase, they’re not truly gone.
I succeeded in getting two individual tickets. One was for a fourth round No 1 Court seat in the last 6 rows - Wimbledon prices these tickets slightly cheaper, but other than that, a front row and a nearly totally in the back seat cost the same. My other seat was a courtside women’s semifinal ticket. My friend managed to get two women’s finals tickets, in the 500s section of Centre Court.
If you purchase a ticket online, ask to have your ticket printed! Wimbledon tickets are a beautiful memento, but online tickets will be available on your phone only. You can ask on the grounds at a ticket office to print your ticket. For another cheap memento, check out the Wimbledon Tennis Ball Shop onsite. You can buy used Wimbledon tennis balls used during the tournament for one pound.
When to Queue
You have two main options to queue: arrive early morning and watch matches on smaller courts, or arrive the day or night before and camp overnight for a chance at show court tickets. Queueing for show court tickets on the weekend and early in the tournament requires the earliest arrival time. The quarterfinal matches generally have queues that build slower, as they occur on weekdays. We arrived at 1 PM on a Monday, for Tuesday quarterfinals, and received a queue position in the low hundreds. People arriving at 3/4 AM that day were getting queue positions under 1000, meaning still on a show court. You can expect the first 500 attendees to try for Centre Court tickets, and the next 500 to try for Court No 1, and so on, so check the schedule the day before to decide which court you'd like to target.
The Twitter account @ViewFromTheQ reposts queue number updates. It’s an important account to follow during the tournament to see how the queue numbers fluctuate day to day, and year to year.
Queue Experience in 2023
To successfully queue for show court tickets, you’ll need some camping equipment, food and water, entertainment, and hopefully some friends to make the process easier.
We started our queue experience with buying some camping equipment - none of us being campers, and flying in from different places, bringing our own gear was tough. We purchased our gear at Decathlon, buying sleeping bags, sleeping pads, and tents. To make the process easier, considering placing a pick up order. Bring food and water for the queue as well. You’re allowed to leave the queue for some periods of time, a half an hour is safest, but it doesn't make sense to leave constantly to buy snacks or water.
We arrived around 1 PM and set up out tents. Queue cards were distributed at about 3:30 PM, and we received numbers from 112-115.
Stewards checked if everyone was on the grounds, doing one full sweep during the evening. The people with queue cards 2 through 5 were not present for the check, and the stewards placed a card on their tent to please check with the stewards upon their would return. They didn’t return for several hours, far past the advised 30 minute limit, and were booted to the end of the line. They didn't have to pack up their tent, at least, and they were just given new queue cards. Luckily for them, they still ended up with Centre Court tickets.
Other than that, the evening passed uneventfully. We ordered Thai food for pickup, read books and relaxed. I spoke to some fans of my favorite tennis player. We went to sleep around 10 PM to try to actually rest before the early wake up time.
You're woken up around 6 AM by the stewards and instructed to pack up your tent. This, and other belongings, can be dropped off at left luggage. The process is orderly and simple. You can freshen up in the bathrooms, which are little trailers that are a step up from a porta potty.
Once you're packed up, the queue is 'compressed.' The pack up time takes about an hour or two, and you're shuffled into more lines. You may be a bit delirious at this point, but there's free coffee at some point, kept going through the lines. At this point, it felt like the lines were infinite. At some point, queue cards were traded for wrist bands corresponding to the court you were buying tickets for.
Only around 9:45 AM did we manage to buy tickets. We also had added some Amex offer for Wimbledon purchases to our cards, and when purchasing the tickets, we received some money back - maybe ten or twenty pounds.
Centre Court matches started at 1 PM, and we had the pleasure of watching the Swiatek-Svitolina and Djokovic-Rublev quarterfinal matches.
Checking the price of debenture seats for the day I queued, the tent and wait were more than worth it. All the expenses for the day were under £300, less than a tenth of the quoted debenture price of £3,750, plus the seats were closer.
Grounds Pass & Onsite Ticket Resale
If you have no energy for camping and totally missed the ballot, you can enter with a grounds pass in the morning. The grounds are definitely very busy, and some people just gets grounds pass to sit on the Hill to picnic with friends. There's a large screen showing matches visible from the Hill.
You can also try for resold tickets on the grounds. Find the Ticket Resale Kiosk. When someone leaves Wimbledon, their ticket can be scanned if they don’t plan to return and resold for charity. Many Wimbledon attendees do leave, as they are simply attending because they were successful in the ballot. With the way that tennis tournaments do scheduling, meaning only announcing the day before who is playing on a given court, many casual fans will watch a match or two, then leave. While watching on Court No 1, the seat next to me was occupied by two different people: the original ticket holder, and the person who purchased it through resale day of, previously only holding a grounds pass.
People line up for these tickets for a few hours, just actually on the Wimbledon grounds, after already waiting in the early morning queue. Even on finals days, this is an available option undertaken by hardcore fans. A word of warning: the year I went, there was some extreme wind and weather during the finals weekend, and grounds passes were unavailable, meaning there was no way to get a resold ticket.
Tickets are resold for 15 pounds for Centre Court and 10 pounds for Courts No 1 and 2, and grounds passes cost at most 30 pounds. This is by far the most affordable option to attend, but requires the most luck and a fair bit of time.
Getting There
Getting to Wimbledon from central London was easy, as the District line runs to Wimbledon station. The walk is short, and taxis or Ubers from central London are also an option.
As for flights, I had flown from New York, and New York to London is an extremely common route and I had an easy time finding availability. On the way there, I flew Virgin Atlantic's premium economy, and on the way back, economy. While the fees are high on these tickets, I purchased during a points promotion and had a transfer bonus, and there were no cheap cash options. Cash flights were over a $1,000 for the dates I was looking at when I was looking, and premium economy even more.
I transferred during a 30% bonus from Capital One. For premium economy, to London, I paid £340 and 27,500 miles. On the way back, in economy, I paid £217 and 14,000 miles. In total, I transferred 32,000 miles with the transfer bonus. Virgin Atlantic fees can make the miles seem more like an opportunity to buy a discounted cash ticket, but their ample availability makes them a great option, even in peak summer.
If you'd like assistance booking your own Wimbledon trip, or any Grand Slam, reach out through our Trip Planning Services page for award flights or hotels.
