Buying tickets for Olympic Events - Part 18

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I want to start this post with a small disclaimer. Many people feel uncomfortable talking about money—especially how they choose to spend it. For that reason, I won’t be sharing the exact prices we paid for each ticket. That said, I still believe this post offers genuinely useful advice for future Olympic spectators. I’m not ashamed of what we spent; in fact, if I had to do it all over again, I would make the same choices (minus a couple of mistakes you’ll read about below). If anyone wants to chat privately about the financial details, I’m always happy to do so. And for those who want official numbers, here is the link to the Milano–Cortina ticket price list.

The Ticket-Buyer Experience

Let’s start with the “shopping experience,” beginning with Hospitality tickets. These tickets go on sale long before regular tickets and, honestly, they seem to always be available. On the day of the Men’s Hockey gold medal game, you could still buy Hospitality seats—for 2,750€ each.

What do you get for that price? Not much more than a regular ticket. Access to a lounge before the game, some food and drinks, and a bit of swag (a T‑shirt, a pin, maybe a tumbler). The real problem—besides the eye‑watering price—is that Hospitality tickets cannot be resold on the official app. We met people who paid a fortune to secure seats for the gold medal game, and others who gambled on which quarterfinal their team would play… only to end up stuck with tickets they couldn’t resell. From the beginning, Dave and I agreed Hospitality wasn’t worth it for us.

The Seat Location Lottery

When you buy Olympic tickets, you don’t get to choose your exact seats. You only choose a category. The website offered a map, but it was nearly useless—just three price categories for the entire arena. Once you paid, you had to open the official app to see your section, row, and seat number. Still no detailed map, so you had no idea whether your seats were great or mediocre. It was frustrating, but in fairness, we never ended up with terrible seats. The arena was small—around 16,000 seats—so the worst seats were still decent.

The map provided on the ticket selling app

Our Tickets

As I mentioned in Part 14, we arrived in Milan with only four pairs of tickets. Once the tournaments began, those four pairs quickly turned into nine. Here’s what we added once we were on the ground:

• One pair for the Men’s preliminary CAN–SUI (12 Feb)

• Two pairs for the Women’s quarterfinals (14 Feb)

• One pair for the Men’s qualifying playoff LAT–SWE (16 Feb)

• One pair for the Men’s quarterfinal CAN–CZE (17 Feb)

  
  

We bought the CAN–SUI prelims on a resale site and paid double the original price. No regrets, just a lesson learned.

The LAT–SWE qualifying playoff? That one was… a mistake. A very expensive mistake. It turns out that misunderstanding the structure of the Men’s tournament is a great way to accidentally buy tickets you didn’t mean to buy. Dave had nothing to do with this error. I tried to resell them once I realized the error, but no luck. Note to self: do your homework before buying pricey hockey tickets.

For the Men’s quarterfinals, we waited until we knew which teams were playing. As long as you were willing to pay for Category A, these tickets weren’t hard to get. We splurged and ended up right behind the goalie—you could practically see Sidney Crosby sweat during warm‑up. That game was electric. The die‑hard fan beside Dave hugged him after the overtime winner and declared it the best game he’d ever seen. In total, we bought tickets to nine games. It was a lot of money… and worth every cent.

One of the best surprises (mentioned in Part 14) was the upgrades. And no small upgrades. For several games, we were moved from Category C to seats in Category A, For one game, we were moved centre ice, right behind the athletes’ families. These upgrades weren’t rare. Many people online reported the same thing. My theory? Because tickets were so expensive, most spectators were seeking Category C tickets. When those sold out, the organizers simply moved C‑ticket holders into A or B to free up more C seats. I can’t prove it, but it fits the pattern. It even happened for our Opening Ceremony tickets. We bought Category C and were moved to Category A; seats listed at 2,400€ each! As you know from Part 5, we ended up giving those tickets to Véronique and a guy we met in Italy, and they were spectacular. Or, as Véronique put it: “Better seats than J.D. Vance!”

Lessons Learned

First, we should have bought Men's preliminary games tickets, when we could! My mistake was to hope that cheaper tickets (as announced, but not advertised for sale) would eventually be released. I checked many times but never saw them for sale. I should have just bit the bullet when I had the chance, instead of waiting and paying almost twice that amount on an unofficial (but trustworthy) resale site.

If I could do it again, I would have bought Men's gold medal tickets as soon as regular tickets were available. Were they available when I checked? I honestly don’t remember. They were so expensive I didn’t even want to look. But now that I’ve experienced hockey at that level, live, I’m hooked. Being in the arena is incomparable. Even watching with 700 Canadians in a pub doesn’t come close. And if Canada hadn’t made the final, I’m convinced reselling would have been easy.

We probably should have bought tickets for short track speed skating, a discipline where Canada shines and one that always has me on the edge of my seat at home. As Dave said: “If you pay $400 for a ticket, that’s only $100 a year!” (He’s very proud of that logic).

My final advice on ticket is the following: Register for presales. Check the ticket site multiple times a day. Be ready to pay for Category A or B. That’s how I snagged a ticket for Véronique to see Women CAN–USA in the prelims, and how I got figure skating training tickets for only 30€. Those were available for just a couple of days and let us see major stars without paying 450€.

That sums up our Olympic tickets adventure. In my next post, I’ll dive into one of the most charming (and sometimes overwhelming) traditions of the Games: Pin trading.