How to get tickets for Olympic events

Being in an Olympic venue is a life changing experience. You’re surrounded by people from all around the world, celebrating the achievements of incredibly talented athletes. Waves of goosebumps are likely, especially if your country takes home a gold medal and you get to see your flag hoisted above the crowd and your anthem blasted through an Olympic stadium. The best dollars you will spend for your Olympic trip will be on your tickets, so don't scrimp here. If you plan well, it won’t break the bank. You don’t need the best seat in the place. You just want a seat. Here’s how to get as many as possible.

As many of our followers know, getting tickets for the Olympics at the last minute has now become nearly impossible. Don’t show up without tickets and think you’ll get some on the street. The fines are high, and unlike most sports events, Olympic venues in London were completely devoid of scalpers. 

The ticketing process is fraught with obstacles, including a complicated pricing structure, random availability on any ticket drop day, and the fact that buying your tickets at one time doesn't mean that those tickets are anywhere near each other in the venue, especially if you purchase them very late (or during the Games). So where do you start? The first ticket drop will be a year before the Olympics, with announced drops to follow. The best drop will be the first one, with the most low cost options in one drop. 

The first step is to prioritize which events you want to see, and how many tickets you need for each event. A good way to do this is to go to the Olympic website, and make quick calendar of which events are on which days. Check out your country’s Olympic site to find out who your best athletes are, and which events they’re likely to medal in to determine the medal rounds that will be worth paying a little extra for a medal round. Consider an event that is really representative of the country you’re visiting for the Olympics, and that you’re less familiar with, like Russia and the biathlon, or Brazil and soccer. Send the list around to your group, and find out which events appeal most to them. Then prioritize. Your list might look like this: 

Women’s Downhill (4) Wednesday, February 8, 1:20 p.m.

Men’s Luge (4) Thursday, February 9, 5:15 p.m.

Men’s Curling (4) Friday, 10:20 a.m.

The event name, date and time are all important to include in the list. 

Everyone who is planning to attend should set up an account with the official ticketing agent of their home country. Having friends from different countries helps here, because each country gets an allocation at each ticket drop, so a different country might have better access to a particular event. In the USA, Cosport handles the ticketing. 

Once you have an account, you will receive notifications of when ticketing windows will open. Everyone attending should mark this time in their calendars. EVERYONE needs to be working on tickets at that time. It will be very difficult for one person to get more than one set of tickets for one event in a ticketing window. It’s a team effort, and part of the beginning of the Olympic excitement!! 

The day before the ticketing window, get your list ready. Assign each person trying for tickets ONE primary event to start with, to ensure that you’re grabbing different things as soon as the window opens. 

Login to the site in advance, and start refreshing. Ping everyone reminders, to make sure you’re not working alone. 

Once the ticketing window opens, you can search two ways, by event, and by date. If you have a priority event you’re looking for, go for that event first. It will list the different days and times, and the prices for each type of ticket. None of these should be a surprise at this point, because you can look up pricing in advance of the ticket window. This is where your list is helpful, because some events may have several times even in one day. Select the event you’d like to go to, and the number of tickets you would like. If you need 4 and there are only 2, remember that it’s possible that in the future you could get two more, and that two are better than none for high profile events. 

Once you have your priority event, it’s time to go for an all-out grab on anything else you might want. Basket times have lengthened recently, so you’ll have a bit of time to instant message your friends after you’ve grabbed everything that you can. Grab extras of other priority events. If you have a naughty friend, or their credit card gets rejected, or they get asked for a visa code they can’t remember, you have a backup plan. Grab cheap seats at events on days that you don’t have a prioritized event. Some can go for as little as $25, and you’ll still be at an Olympic event. 

It will only take a few minutes to get to the point where you have about everything you might want. It’s time to IM your friends. They should be at the same point as you. Confirm what they have, and determine what everyone is buying. This is also a good time to look for single tickets if one person was a few short for an event. Buy one cart at a time, and dump the tickets you don’t need as you go.

Good Luck getting tickets (especially if you’re cheering for Team USA)!