Data Methodology

Most of the numbers on StubOrder are calculated, not typed in: how many events an act has coming up, what tickets start at, which shows are selling fastest. This page explains where those figures come from, the judgment calls behind them, and what they cannot tell you. If a number here contradicts a number on another page, we would rather hear about it than have you guess.

Where the data comes from

StubOrder is a resale marketplace, and our inventory reaches you through a national ticket exchange. Events, venues, performers and listing counts all originate there. We copy that catalog into our own database about once an hour and build pages from our copy rather than querying the exchange on every page view, which is what keeps pages fast and keeps us inside the exchange's request limits.

The practical consequence is that a page reflects the catalog as of the last refresh. An event listed minutes ago may not appear until the next one, and a listing can sell between the refresh and your click. Live prices and availability inside the seat map on an event page come straight from the exchange at the moment you open it, so the seat map is always more current than the summary figures around it.

What counts as an upcoming event

The exchange sends several kinds of product through the same feed, and not all of them are events you attend. Three are excluded from every count, every "from" price and every "next date" on this site, while still being listed so you can buy them:

• Add-on products. Parking passes, tailgate parties, shuttles, and VIP or hospitality packages. A Buffalo Bills page that counted these reported 47 upcoming events for 20 games.
• Season-ticket packages. A bundle covering a whole season is not a single date, and its price is a five-figure outlier that distorts any price range it lands in.
• Postponed events with no announced date. When an event is postponed, the exchange holds its record with a placeholder date decades in the future rather than leaving it blank. We do not print that date as if it were real: those pages say the date is to be announced, and the event is not counted among upcoming dates until a real one is published.

Each of these appears under its own heading on the pages where it exists, so the schedule you scan is the schedule, and the extras are clearly extras.

How prices are described

Every advertised price on this site is written as "about $X" and is deliberately rounded up from the lowest listing price we hold. Two reasons. The lowest listing is often a single seat or a limited-view section that sells quickly, so quoting it exactly advertises a ticket that may no longer exist. And the figure we hold is the listing price, while your final total also includes any tax added at checkout.

A price range, where one is shown, describes the range of starting prices across the dates listed: the cheapest seat at the cheapest date through the cheapest seat at the dearest date. It is not the span from the cheapest seat anywhere to the most expensive suite seat anywhere, which would be a true but useless number.

The seat map on an event page is the authority. It shows live per-listing prices, and the order total shown at checkout is what you pay.

How "selling fastest" and "most popular" are calculated

We record how many tickets are listed for each event once a night. "Selling fastest" ranks events by how far that number fell between snapshots: a big drop means inventory left the market quickly. Rankings are also gated on scale, so an event that went from four listings to one does not outrank an arena show that shed hundreds.

This is a demand proxy and we describe it as one. We can see that listings disappeared; we cannot see whether they sold, were delisted by the seller, or were repriced onto a different record. Anyone claiming an exact sold count from public marketplace data is guessing.

Ranking by raw inventory alone was tried and rejected. It measures supply, not demand, and it promoted whichever event happened to have the most tickets sitting unsold.

How accommodation figures are measured

The hotel and hostel pages carry their own calculated numbers (how many properties are near a place, what star bands they fall into, how they score, how far they are from a venue), and those come from a different source than the ticket data above. They come from our accommodation partner, a global booking platform whose inventory we search and resell. We do not own the properties, set their prices, or collect the reviews.

Distance

Every distance we publish is a straight line, not a driving route and not a routed walking time. On a venue page it is measured from that venue's own coordinates; on a city page, from the middle of the city. Where a city has no civic coordinates on file we search from the centroid of its venues instead, which is the better point for this job anyway, because people booking a room for a show want to be near the show. When a page describes somewhere as walkable it means the straight-line distance is under a mile, which is a rule of thumb about distance rather than a claim about the route, the terrain or the crossings.

What "nearby" covers

City accommodation pages describe what the search found within about five miles of that centre point. Every count, star mix and average score on those pages describes that radius and nothing wider, and the properties shown as cards are simply the closest of them, usually far fewer than the number found. Where the two differ the page says both, because "36 hotels" and "110 hotels within five miles" are different facts and only one of them answers "how big is this market".

Star ratings and guest scores

Star ratings and guest scores are the supplier's, shown out of 10, and we publish them as theirs. We do not aggregate them into review markup for our own pages, do not average them into a StubOrder rating, and do not emit an aggregateRating in our structured data. Presenting somebody else's review corpus as our own rating is exactly the thing that markup is for asserting, and it would not be true.

Why rooms have no price until you pick dates

A nightly rate only exists for a specific stay. There is no standing price for a hotel, and there is certainly no standing price for a city, so we show none until you tell us your dates, at which point every property on the page is priced for exactly those nights. This is also why no figure on an accommodation page should be read as a price: the counts and scores describe supply and quality, never cost.

The hostel survey

Hostel pages exist only where there are enough hostels to be worth reading about, and that gate is the result of an actual census rather than a guess. We surveyed every city on StubOrder whose coordinates we hold (2,876 of them), counting properties our partner classifies as hostels or backpacker accommodation within about five miles of each centre, as of 18 September 2026. 116 cleared the five-property threshold, holding 3,231 hostels between them. 281 cities had between one and four, and 2,414 (83.9% of everywhere we looked) had none at all. That emptiness is the survey's finding, not a gap in our coverage.

For each city we also record hostels as a share of all accommodation listed nearby, because a count alone cannot tell a backpacker city from a business-hotel one. Where a city's total property count saturated the survey's own fetch limit, the denominator is known to be too small, so we publish no percentage for it at all rather than one that would be wrong in a predictable direction. 22 cities are withheld on that basis. The whole census, zeroes included, is published as a downloadable dataset.

How flight pages are built

The flights pages (a page for each event city, airport guides, the airports nearest a venue, and the stadium airports for each league) are built from our own event catalog and a public airport list, not from airline data. They carry no fares. A fare exists only once you search specific dates, and every search runs live when you press Search. The pages are rebuilt every day from the hourly catalog.

Which airports we list

The airport list is derived from OurAirports, a public-domain dataset, and holds only airports with scheduled passenger service. Coordinates come from our travel partner's airport reference data, and an airport whose coordinates disagree with its own country is left out rather than guessed. Large airports are listed everywhere. A smaller airport with scheduled flights is listed only where it has been approved individually and no other airport we list is within 60 km (37 miles). Business and private fields are left out, which is why a page sometimes says “the closest airport we list” rather than “the closest airport”. Airports in regions where we cannot sell tickets are excluded entirely: they never get a page, a link or a row.

Distance

Every distance we calculate for the flights pages is a straight line, from the venue's own coordinates or from the middle of the city. It is not a driving route and not a travel time: we do not calculate drive times, flight times, routes or schedules, and the only such detail on a flights page is an airport note carried over from one of our hand-written city travel guides. A venue whose coordinates put it more than 300 km from every scheduled airport in its own country is treated as mis-located and is given no airport at all.

Which cities get a flights page

A city gets a flights page when its upcoming events, counting the nearby towns its airports serve, reach 100, its main airport is within 100 km, and it has enough venues or airports to say something useful. It keeps the page while it holds 70 or more, and loses it only after seven daily builds in a row below that, so a city near the line does not flicker in and out. A nearby town that shares most of a bigger city's airports is folded into that city's page.

Airport guides

An airport gets its own guide when it is the first airport we list for at least five venues with upcoming events and at least 100 events between them. It keeps the guide while it has four venues and 70 events, again leaving only after seven builds below. When 85% or more of an airport's events are in one city whose flights page already lists it, and no other airport is the first choice for at least 5% of that city's events, the airport's address leads to the city page instead of repeating it.

Venue and league pages

A venue gets its own airports page when it is the home of a professional team we sell tickets for, or when it has at least five upcoming events, hosts at least ten touring acts that each play ten or more of our flights cities, and its nearest airport differs from the one its city page leads with. Where three or more such venues sit within a kilometre of each other, as in a theatre district, none gets a page of its own; of two, only the busier does. A league's stadium airports page exists only when at least 90% of the teams we list have a home venue with an airport we list, and no row would read “no airport”.

Prices, when you search

Every fare we show after a search is the total for all travellers with taxes and fees included, and it already includes our margin; nothing is added at checkout. Seat and bag prices are shown only as the airline offers them for your booking. Because a fare is never a standing price, no flights page shows one.

What we do not do

• We do not invent facts about a venue. Parking rules, run times, bag policies and age limits are set by venues and productions and change without notice, so we link to the venue rather than restate them.
• We do not aggregate third-party star ratings into review markup.
• We do not publish an event date the exchange has not actually given us.
• We do not set ticket prices. Sellers do, and prices can be above or below face value.

Corrections

If a figure looks wrong, tell us through the contact form and include the page address. Because these numbers are calculated rather than written, a correction is a change to how the figure is derived, and it takes effect everywhere that figure appears rather than on the one page that was reported.

For how buying, delivery, fees and cancellations work, see how buying on StubOrder works and the 100% buyer guarantee.