Cookies Policy

We use cookies to give you the best experience on our website. If you continue without changing your cookie settings, we assume that you consent to our use of cookies on this device. You can change your cookie settings at any time, but if you do, you may lose some functionality on our website.

What is a cookie?

Cookies are small text files that are sent by websites that you visit to recognise who you are when you return there. Their files are stored on a user’s equipment such as your computer’s hard drive or mobile device, and are read by your web browser.

We use cookies to make The Old Vic’s website able to sell tickets, easier to use and to better tailor the site to your interests and needs. Cookies can also be used to improve the speed of your future activities and sessions on our website. We also use cookies to compile anonymous, aggregated statistics with which we can gain insight into the way people use our website, so that we can improve the structure and content of the website. We cannot personally identify you on the basis of this information.

Advertising agencies also use cookies to find out if they have served you an advert from a particular brand on a site, or if you have seen a particular advert before. Website owners will use cookies to follow which pages that you’ve read so that they can see what parts of the site are popular or not. In short, cookies are a way of providing statistics on site visits as well as some limited functionality that makes your site visit easier. When used properly, cookies are an asset to a site visitor and a site owner. They are not viruses, but some unscrupulous outfits will use them maliciously – we follow best practice for cookie use.

A list of all the cookies used on this website by us, and our technology partners, can be found below.

Adobe uses a particular type of cookie called a ‘Local Shared Object’, which is typically collected if you watch a video for example that uses the Adobe Flash media player, i.e. an embedded YouTube video on a page that is being played via Flash. Please note that these types of cookie will not be found on iPads, which do not support Flash.

Have a look at Adobe’s website if you want to control Flash cookies on your computer. If you’ve got a Firefox browser you can also get an add-on to detect and delete Flash cookies.

Opting out of cookies?

There are a number of options available so that you do not have to store any cookies at all. You can either set your browser so that it will not accept and store any cookie, or if you have a little more time and knowledge you are able to allow only certain ‘trusted’ sites to store cookies on your computer. These sites may include us (of course), or the site where you carry out your online banking, or possibly your favourite news service.

It’s worth bearing in mind that if you decide to delete all of your cookies, then you will likely have to re-enter all of your usernames and passwords on all of the sites that you visit, which you previously didn’t even have to think about. As we mentioned before, cookies can be a real asset to your web surfing experience.

The Information Commissioner’s Office  provides some advice about cookies and their use, but it also provides a link to About Cookies. This website provides even more information about cookies if you feel that this page and the ICO is not enough information for you, but it also details how you might delete any cookies that you find, and shows you how to allow those trusted sites to store their cookies on your computer.

What is a web beacon?

Web beacons are also sometimes referred to as ‘web bugs’ and are small single pixel transparent image files. They allow website owners to know when a visitor has reached their website, and are used in conjunction with cookies to allow further website tracking to be monitored. Again, these files are not viruses, but are useful in helping us to make your web surfing experience better.

Third-party cookies

When you visit a page on The Old Vic website with content embedded from, for example, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube or Vimeo you may be presented with cookies from those websites. The Old Vic does not control these cookies. Please check the third-party websites for more information about their cookies.

We work with After Digital and Tessitura in maintaining and improving our website, and they must all satisfy the data protection requirements. If you have any more questions, please do contact us and we’ll be happy to help.

After Digital
After Digital provides build services to The Old Vic and helps us to maintain the software that runs our website. They provide us with reporting statistics where required, and will serve cookies on our behalf to enable any site personalisation and log in functionality.

The list below gives an overview of the different types of cookies that we use on The Old Vic website, together with their respective purpose and duration (i.e. how long each cookie stays on your device/computer).

known_user, token_refresh, bridge_user_status
Session cookies for the website. These session cookies are removed when you close your browser.

vuex
A persisted session cookie with details on the current session and whether or not to show the cookie banner. 1 day.

I18n_language
This cookie is used to store your preferred language. 1 year.

_hjSessionUser_, _hjid
Used by HotJar to provide behaviour analysis for the website. Expires after 1 year.

Queue-it, Queue-it-oldvictheatre_, QueueITAccepted-
These cookies are used by our third party ticketing queue provider, Queue-It to allow management of the user queue during busy periods on the website. 1 day.

HSID, SID, SSID, APISID, SAPISID, NID, CONSENT, DV, _ga, _ga_
These first party cookies are set by Google Analytics to distinguish users, throttle request rates, distinguish AMP clients and link AdWords campaigns to analytics. These persist for up to 20 years.

__Secure-3PSIDCC, __Secure-3PAPISID, __Secure-1PAPISID, __Secure-1PSID, __Secure-3PSID,
These first party cookies are set by Google To secure digitally signed and encrypted data from the unique Google ID and store the most recent login time that Google uses to identify visitors, prevent fraudulent use of login data and protect visitor data from unauthorised parties.

_clck, _clsk, CLID, ANONCHK, MR, MUID, SM
These cookies are set by Microsoft Clarity to allow multiple sessions to be attributed to a user, to identify unique web browsers, advertising, site analytics and other operational purposes.

SIDCC
Used by Google Maps to provide the identification of trusted web traffic. 1 year.

YSC, PREF, VISITOR_INFO1_LIVE
These third party cookies are set by YouTube to distinguish users viewing YouTube videos embedded on the website. Up to 13 months.

AWSALBTG
This cookie is set by the AWS application load balancer to allow user sessions to happen on the same set of servers for each request. 1 week.

This cookie statement was published on 24 March 2022. We are constantly working on supplementing and improving this. We therefore recommend reviewing this statement regularly to keep abreast of changes.