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How to find out what's on in a city you're visiting

No single site lists everything happening in a city. Knowing why fixes the order you search in, because the data sits in four piles built for four different jobs and none of those jobs was yours. A ticketing platform carries what an organiser uploaded there to sell seats. Songkick and Bandsintown cover gigs. Time Out writes up the 350-plus cities its local editors work in, and the city hall, widest of the four, sometimes publishes its whole agenda as an open dataset with a date filter on it.

So start at the city. The whole run takes me about twenty minutes once you know the names, and the names are below.

Why nothing pulls it all into one place

On 17 April 2026 someone posted this to r/sideprojects: "every time i visit somewhere new i waste half a day figuring out what to do. eventbrite only shows ticketed events. facebook events is basically dead. is there something that actually pulls everything into one place, free stuff, pop-ups, local events, all of it?"

Twelve upvotes. Thirty-two comments. Nothing in the thread named a tool that does the job, and the top reply said so out loud: "I don't know of any app that has done it very well... it's just a bunch of content from promoters that I have no interest in."

Eventbrite does carry free events, and as of September 2026 there is a filter for exactly those, so "only ticketed" is unfair to it. The supply side is where the complaint lands, and Eventbrite's own Dutch about page names it: a "self-service ticketplatform". A listing exists there because somebody created it there. The 2024 figures still on that page are 4.7 million events in nearly 180 countries, 89 million average monthly users and 83 million paid tickets. All of it uploaded by an organiser who wanted an audience, which is a different list from what is on in Lisbon next Thursday. Bending Spoons bought the company, closing in early March 2026, and the roadmap page written after the deal calls Eventbrite "the most powerful events platform for creators", a sentence written for organisers rather than for whoever lands on a Friday with two free evenings.

As for Facebook, loading facebook.com/events on 6 September 2026 gave me a nearby-events surface and nothing I could count, so I have no way to tell you whether "basically dead" is fair or just a bad week for that poster. If that is the pile you are trying to replace, the alternatives are in what to use now that Facebook Events is dead.

Start with the city's own cultural agenda

A city council owns the museums and books the municipal theatres. Street markets need a licence from it, and a good share of the festival money comes out of its culture budget. Its own agenda is therefore the widest list of what is on, and it carries the free, semi-official half of the week that a ticketing platform has no reason to hold.

Paris publishes Que Faire à Paris ? as "l'agenda participatif de la Ville de Paris", released as open data by the Direction de la Communication under an ODbL licence, 3,238 records on 6 September 2026 and modified that same day. Barcelona's cultural agenda comes from the Ajuntament under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence and updates daily. Helsinki goes furthest. The City of Helsinki runs Linked Events, an API that merges Helsinki Marketing, the city's cultural centres and the Helmet metropolitan libraries into one CC BY 4.0 feed you can query by date or by bounding box.

Lisbon's is AgendaLX, the cultural agenda of the Câmara Municipal de Lisboa's Direção Municipal de Cultura, with a public JSON endpoint at www.agendalx.pt/wp-json/agendalx/v1/events and a mirror on the city's open data portal. The site refused my connection over and over that same morning, so the description above comes from Lisbon's dataset listing.

Flanders does the same thing at regional scale. UiTdatabank, run by the non-profit publiq vzw, self-reports more than 215,000 activities a year from over 28,000 organisers, syndicated out to what it counts as 1,000-plus channels. A concert that turns up on three unrelated Belgian sites is often one UiTdatabank record republished three times over, so finding it again somewhere else tells you nothing new about how busy the week is.

Then the tourist board

visitBerlin, run by Berlin Tourismus and Kongress GmbH, listed 5,214 events when I checked on 6 September 2026, filterable by date range and split across Exhibitions, Festivals and Markets, Concerts, Opera and Dance, Theatre, Films, Nightlife and Sports. Its own claim is modest and probably true: "We have Berlin's biggest event calendar with many tips." Vienna's board runs the same play at wien.info in more careful wording, where the search "presents you with a selection of events in Vienna". Somebody at the board picked that selection in advance, guessing at what a visitor wants. For a first weekend the guess is usually fine. It will not get you to the gallery opening three streets from your flat, which is the half of the week the council's own agenda carries.

In October 2021 someone asked r/AskEurope for the best website or app for events in each city, concerts excluded, and every answer named one city and one site: visitcardiff.com, trojmiasto.pl, myhelsinki.fi, citylife.sk, kamdomesta.sk, visitabdn.com. One person said to walk into the tourist info centre. Not a site, and still sound advice. Five years on that thread ranks first for "find events while traveling europe app", which tells you how little has changed. Search "visit [city] events", then run the search again in the local language, because the local-language page usually carries listings the English one never gets.

Songkick and Bandsintown, for gigs only

Songkick's Lisbon metro page had 249 upcoming events on 6 September 2026, filterable by Tonight, This weekend, This month, by individual month and by 2026 or 2027. Set that filter to your arrival and departure dates. Three nights in Lisbon cuts those 249 rows down to the handful that fall inside your nights, which is the count you needed in the first place. Songkick changed hands in November 2025, when Warner Music sold it to the AI company Suno, and the App Store listing now shows Suno, Inc. as the seller.

Bandsintown Concerts, free on the App Store as of September 2026, does the same job from the artist side, notifying you about gigs by artists you already listen to. Ask either app about an exhibition or a Saturday market and you get nothing back, because neither one indexes them.

That lane is what r/solotravel wanted in April 2023: "Is there any way to see what concerts are on in a specific city during a specific dates?" Yes, and a Songkick metro page is it. One caveat from r/Concerts in June 2025 that I would take seriously: "By the time things like SongKick have surfaced some shows they're sold out." The concert-specific version of this hunt is written up separately, in how to see which concerts are on in a city during your dates.

Where the ticketed platforms help

Fever is where the Candlelight concerts and the immersive shows are, and Wikipedia's entry (the only source I could get, since Fever's own about page has gone) puts it at more than 500 cities across more than 30 countries as of June 2026, founded in 2012. Treat that as Wikipedia's number.

Meetup is still the right tool for the small recurring thing. A run club, a language exchange. It gave new organisers a free Starter plan on 11 October 2024, and the paid tiers I cannot price for you, because Meetup does not publish those numbers anywhere I could read them.

On 6 September 2026 Luma's own discover page listed around 5,000 tech events and around 4,000 AI ones, against 841 for Running, 627 for Family, 623 for Books and 536 for Food and Drink. It has grown past the tech-only reputation, but only just. Go there first if you are in town for a conference. For a week away with your mother, remember that those 627 family listings are the entire world.

That is roughly the complaint r/apps made in June 2025: "I've tried apps like Luma, Eventbrite... but I often find that the listings are too focused on larger, organized events. I'm looking for local happenings and meetups."

Time Out, the local paper, and the venue's Instagram

Time Out's own corporate page says it covers "over 350 cities and over 50 countries", written by what it calls a global team of local experts. Where a Time Out city site exists it is the fastest single read for a weekend, because a human already picked the twelve things worth doing and put them in order. Everywhere else the job falls to the local paper's what's-on page. In the local language, no app, no date filter, and in my experience more current than anything I can find in English.

A whole slice of what is really happening lives on Instagram and nowhere else. The bar with a Thursday DJ, and the bookshop reading nobody printed a poster for. Nothing indexes those, and the only method I know is following five venues near where you are staying about a week before you fly.

Most rows below are websites or open data feeds rather than apps, which is why there is no platform column.

The order I use before a flight

Open the city's open-data agenda first, date filter set to your arrival and departure, because that is the list carrying the free half of the week. Tourist board second, for the big things you would regret missing. Songkick next. Concert tickets go before museum slots. Then Eventbrite, Fever and Meetup for anything ticketed or recurring, plus Time Out if the city has a page. Instagram in the last week, for the five venues nearest wherever you are sleeping, and that is eight tabs for one trip, which is tedious enough that I ended up building the thing below.

Where the app I built fits in

I built the events side of Will U Be There to run that list once, in the background, rather than per trip and per person. As of 6 September 2026 it holds over 200,000 upcoming events across 57 countries from more than 360 hand-picked sources, the same kinds named above: tourist boards, city open-data portals, opera houses, ticketing platforms. You add a trip as a city plus two dates, and the feed shows concerts, exhibitions, festivals and markets within 15 km of where you are staying, inside those dates. Free events carry a free flag. You can star anything, and RSVP Going or Maybe to public events, which also shows you which of your friends are going.

Coverage is uneven. Cities that publish their own agenda come out dense, because the app is reading the same municipal feed you would. A mid-sized city with no open data and a quiet tourist board gets whatever the regional source carries, which can be thin. Where the app is thin, the tourist board site is still the answer. So this page lists them by name instead of pointing at a download button.

Three things people ask me before installing. It never receives your location. A city name and two dates is the entire input it is ever given, so there is nothing in the data that could say where you are standing right now. It works from your first trip, before any friend joins, because the events feed does not need a social graph. And it is on both iPhone and Android, free, no ads, no in-app purchases, in 17 languages, with the data hosted in the EU. What is stored and what leaves is spelled out on the privacy first page.

The other half of the app is the reason it exists at all: when a friend's trip lands in the same city on overlapping dates, you both get a push, so you find out before the flight rather than from an Instagram story afterwards. Groups work by one shared link, up to 200 people, no friend requests.

The app lists what is on inside your dates and leaves the picking to you. For a weekend in a city Time Out covers, Time Out will still tell you better which of four exhibitions is worth the afternoon.

For whatever city you are flying to next, open its council's cultural agenda first and set the date filter to your arrival and departure. Paris will hand back a few hundred rows. A small town may hand back four, and that answer is useful too: you now know to email the tourist info centre and stop opening apps.