Your Guide to Buying Tickets to the 2012 Olympics (Hint: It’s Really Hard)
If you’re looking for tickets to the 2012 Olympics, you’re gonna have to look pretty hard. Due to strict regulations by the International Olympic Committee, sale of Olympic tickets on the secondary market is very restricted and difficult to maneuver. To buy tickets directly from the official Olympic site, click here.
How To Get Tickets from the Official Site
Buying tickets through the official Olympic site is also a pretty difficult ordeal. To get to the ticketing page you have to navigate a variety of links, and once there (see: here) you must go through a 15-STEP PROCESS! This process includes creating a ticketing account tailored to the website, completing a separate online verification once you select your event, then requesting specific tickets, reserving specific tickets, confirming your delivery information, and verifying your credit card information. Did we mention that there are strict ticket limits on many events and you can only order using a Visa credit card?! On top of all this, this process only works if you are from the home country of the United Kingdom or another approved European country. If not, you will have to go through your own home country’s sanctioned seller, which will be explained in detail below. Still if you are lucky enough to navigate through this process, you will probably come up with some pretty good seats at relatively low prices, as face values for tickets are very reasonable.
How To Get Tickets If You Aren’t From the UK/Britain, Specifically the US and Canada
If you are from a country outside of the UK/Europe, you must go through your country’s specific appointed seller. For the United States and Canada, that company is CoSport. A similar process must be undertook on this website to purchase tickets, and again unfortunately you must create a login account.
The Secondary Market: Ticket Resale
The official London 2012 site asks that all patrons who can no longer attend their purchased event submit their tickets back to the official site for resale at face value. To do this you must sign into your account and go through an extended process. However, according to the site “Submitting your tickets to the resale programme does not guarantee that any or all of the tickets you submit for resale will be resold. This means that your order could be resold in full, in part or not at all.” So good luck.
So Are There Tickets Available Anywhere Else?
In short, if it’s up to the IOC, no. They are working hard to make sure that tickets are only sold through their official site and each country’s official re-sale market. In fact, they even have a web page that tracks which sites are claiming to sell Olympic tickets and deems them unauthorized. The page includes a comprehensive list of 70 such sites, among them being www.londonsummergames.net, www.londonolympictickets.com, www.sport.info, and sites of similar names. To see the complete list, check here.
A recent story ran in which a site claimed that London tickets were selling for up to 20x face value, but we found it very hard to dig up any data of the sort.
Our Suggestion
When buying tickets to this summer’s Olympics, we suggest sacrificing your own time and effort to go through the officially sanctioned sites. Avoid the possibility of being scammed or having your tickets nullified by the IOC. Unfortunately, SeatGeek does not have any tickets available to the Olympics because of the aforementioned reasons. Good luck and happy searching!
