How We Went to the Olympics (and You Can Too!)
Location: Paris, France
Length of time: 10 days
In July 2024, Charlie and I had the amazing privilege of attending the 2024 Olympics in Paris, France. This trip was over two years in the making, with us starting to plan as far back as 2022.
We’ve had many people reach out to us and ask how we planned our trip, so we wanted to share everything we learned over the past two years in preparation for attending the Olympics. It turns out that, if you know where to look, planning can be pretty easy. Look no further!
Planning for the Olympics
Charlie and I had long wanted to attend the Olympics, and we had even tried to get tickets to the 2020 Tokyo Olympics before being priced out (and, of course, the pandemic). For Paris, we approached everything with an open mind, hoping it would be accessible to us. Thankfully, we found the Paris Olympics to be pretty easy to navigate!
Planning resources
Facebook Groups
Yes, Facebook groups are still a thing! The single greatest resource during our planning process was a Facebook group comprising newcomers to the Olympics and individuals who have attended year after year. I leveraged this group every single day, especially during the ticketing process, and cannot recommend it enough. If you are trying to attend the LA 2028 Olympics, the group has been renamed “Los Angeles 2028 Olympics Planning and Preparation - LA28” and can be found here. It’s quiet now, but it will pick up once more Olympic news gets announced.
It’s also through this group that I was added to a Discord group for buying tickets on the resale platform. I think I paid some guy $15 to get added, and he had built out a bot to alert me whenever a new event that was interesting to me was added to the resale platform.
✨ LA 2028 Tip ✨: Keep an eye out in the Facebook group for the resale Discord!
The official Paris Olympics apps
Paris had many apps to leverage for planning and on-the-ground use, but three main ones that we leveraged include:
Paris Ticketing App - This app was necessary for storing our event tickets.
Paris Transportation - This app was a unique mapping application that utilized Olympic-specific venue information and road closures, and was the only mapping app we used during our visit.
General Paris 2024 App - This app was primarily designed for general Paris 2024 news, as well as planning and announcing events, including ticket drops.
Buying the tickets
For each Olympics, the host city is responsible for creating its own ticket sales process. For example, with Tokyo, the tickets for Americans were only available in costly packages that included pre-organized accommodation (which is why we were priced out). This means that, while I can detail what worked for Paris, it might be different for future Olympics!
How to buy tickets
For Paris, we started planning about 2 years. The Paris organizers ensured that non-French spectators had a fair chance of snagging tickets, so they implemented a lottery system for ticket sales.
We separately signed up for the Paris lottery, which was broken up into two different stages, plus a resale stage:
The first stage of tickets was for lower-level, non-medal events.
The second stage of tickets included medal events and special events, such as the Opening and Closing Ceremonies.
Finally, there was the resale platform, which allowed people to list their event tickets for face value (take that, Ticketmaster).
✨ LA 2028 Tip ✨: For the first two stages, you will likely not know who is competing in what events - you will purchase tickets, and teams will be determined afterwards. This can be stressful if you’re attending for a specific country or athlete, which is where the resale network became very strategic once teams were announced.
Lottery Stage One
This stage required you to register on the Paris 2024 ticketing website, a straightforward process. Since it was a lottery, we had no idea whether we would be selected early or not. The earlier your lottery slot, the better your chance of getting the tickets you want.
After signing up for the lottery, we waited a few months before finding out when our time slot would be. Thankfully, we were selected fairly early. When it was our turn for the lottery, we woke up around 4 a.m. EST, logged into our ticket account, and frantically picked out events that seemed interesting to us. We had done some preliminary planning of what events we wanted tickets to, so we knew what to search for and act on quickly.
Speed is essential during these ticketing processes! This was also the moment when, if we hadn’t gotten the tickets we wanted, we likely would have decided not to go to the Olympics. So it was a make-or-break situation! At this stage, we were allowed to buy up to a certain number of tickets each (which we didn’t even get close to), and ended up buying the following:
Women’s Gymnastics Qualifying (this was our make-or-break)
Football
Lottery Stage Two
At this stage, you signed up in the same way as the first, and waited about two months to pick your tickets. We were lucky again in this lottery, which included all the medal events and the Opening and Closing Ceremonies. These were incredibly important to us, though at this point we already knew were going. In this lottery, we ended up buying the following:
Women’s Gymnastics Team Final
Opening Ceremonies
Equestrian
Swimming
The Resale Stage
After all the lotteries, it truly felt like the Wild West. The resale platform was incredible, but it was a completely different ticketing website. Thankfully, all tickets added to the resale website were at face value. This made deciding to buy so much easier! However, checking the resale platform daily (sometimes hourly) for tickets to fill out our schedule became mildly obsessive.
As mentioned earlier, I ended up joining a Discord group and gained access to a bot that sent notifications whenever an event I was interested in appeared on the resale network. Once again, you had to be QUICK with these tickets, but once I joined the Discord, I finally snagged some of our final tickets to round out our schedule:
Women’s Gymnastics Qualifying (added another slot once we found out the actual roster of who would be competing and when)
Concorde Urban Project (a little ticket that allowed us to check out the festival surrounding the new urban sports like BMX and 3x3 Basketball)
Another Football game that included hospitality service (which ended up being one of our favorite events)
At this point, we had more than enough events (maybe too many!) within the 9 days we were there, so we stopped looking! We then proceeded to other aspects of the planning process, including flights, accommodations, and additional Paris activities.
Booking Flights
Best time to book for the Olympics
We booked our flights about 6 months in advance. Six months felt like the right amount of time in advance where flights were the cheapest and we knew for a fact we were going on the trip.
Comparison of airlines and prices
For this trip, we aimed to keep costs as low as possible. Because of this, we planned to purchase the flights via Capital One points through their online portal. This may not be the most effective way to utilize your credit card points, but by combining points and travel credits, we were able to pay only $600 for a $ 2,100 set of direct flights through British Airways. For us, that made the most sense!
We determined that flying directly into Paris would be too chaotic due to the Olympics, so we decided to fly into London and take the Eurostar train over to Paris. This itinerary adjustment likely saved us a few hundred dollars. Since we were taking trains into Paris, we were also able to easily hop on the metro to bring us directly to our accommodation.
✨ LA 2028 Tip ✨: If you’re considering flying into LA for the 2028 Olympics, think about flying into neighboring cities to help adjust for some of the costs!
Booking accommodation
In terms of our accommodation for the Paris Olympics, we booked an Airbnb immediately after booking our first set of tickets, which was almost a year in advance! Booking this early had its pros and cons:
Pros: We got an amazing steal on an Airbnb, paying only $900 for 8 nights. We booked a room inside a small Parisian apartment, and while it wasn’t luxurious, we felt like we were truly living in a Parisian neighborhood. We were able to secure this price because we booked the place before most Airbnb rentals realized we were booking during the Olympics, when they inevitably increased their prices.
Cons: Many, many, people who booked Airbnbs early had them cancel ahead of the games. Often, this was so they could charge more than what they usually would. I would keep this possibility in mind for any Olympics.
There are also usually hotel packages associated with the Olympics, especially for foreign attendees. For the LA 2028 Olympics, you will likely see sky-high Airbnb, hotel, and other rental property prices.
Our itinerary
For most days of our Olympic experience, we generally organized our itinerary to include at least one event and something to do around the city. This allowed us to feel like we were getting as much “Olympics time” as possible, while still enjoying the host city.
Our itinerary (and a Canva template if you want to copy it) can be found here. It was composed of:
Day 1: Travel day, overnight into London
Day 2: Travel day, Eurostar train into Paris
Day 3: Two Football games at Parc des Princes
Day 4: Breakfast at Cafe Angelina, shopping at the Olympic Store, visiting Montmarte and Team Ireland House
Day 5: Breakfast and lunch around Paris and the Opening Ceremonies
Day 6: Equestrian at Versailles and a tour of Versailles
Day 7: Women’s Gymnastics Qualifying, Concorde Urban Project, and a second Women’s Gymnastics Qualifying event
Day 8: Swimming, the Club France & La Villette - Nations’ Park, and a Seine river cruise at sunset
Day 9: Beach Volleyball at the Eiffel Tower, a tour of Museum Orsay, and Women’s Gymnastics Team Final
Day 10: Travel day, returning back to Chicago
Tips for managing an Olympic schedule
Have a list of must-see events before you even get into the lottery system. Be sure to prioritize these events when building an itinerary.
Note that not all specific sporting events take place over particular periods in the Olympics, and the two events you might want to see may be almost 2 weeks apart. The Olympics often reuse arenas throughout the whole 2-week period, so sports that use the same arenas will not take place at the same time. For example, the arena used for gymnastics was also used for basketball once the gymnastic events were completed. Additionally, gymnastics and track and field are almost never during the same time. That means you may need to make tough decisions on what you want to see, or stay for the entire 2 weeks!
Keep in mind the geographic distance of the event venues. The Olympics are very spread out, and thinking you can make it across an entire city for two events in one day isn’t reasonable. Choose events that are near each other, or be sure to give yourself enough time in between each event for transportation.
Don’t push yourself so hard that you don’t have fun. At the end of the Paris Olympics, I had walked 70 miles, which was almost 20,000 steps per day. We knew we had the stamina to do that, but you should listen to your body and consider spacing out events to avoid overexertion.
Try to see some of the touristy things in the host city. We found that places we would normally have visited in Paris, like Versailles and the Orsay, were much emptier than they usually would be, as most people were attending Olympics-themed places.
Find free events in the host city. For the Paris Olympics, the city did an incredible job of hosting multiple free events that allowed people to experience the Olympics without attending a ticketed event. One of these locations was at the Hotel de Ville, where free screens were available to watch Olympic events and take photos. Add these to your itinerary, but be aware that you will likely be waiting in lines.
Don’t sleep on the team houses! We visited a total of five team houses (Ireland, France, Ukraine, New Zealand, and India), and I can truly say that those were some of my favorite moments of the whole trip. This is where we felt like we got to meet new people from around the world. Each Olympics has a central area where many of the team houses are situated, and Paris’s was called the Park of Nations. Make sure to include them in your scheduling.
Getting around the host city
While we were in Paris, we got around 99% of the time using the Paris metro. Using any form of public transportation was made simple by the expertly designed wayfinding and branding of the Paris Olympics. Utilizing bright colors and simple, accessible iconography, we could easily hop on transportation anywhere in the city and arrive at an event venue without even needing to look at a map. We were truly amazed at how easy it was to get around Paris, and considered it the biggest success of the games.
The organizers of the Paris games created a transportation app unique for the Olympics, which included event-specific information and road closures. We used only this app during our time at the games.
✨ LA 2028 Tip ✨: If you are planning to attend the LA 2028 Olympics, it is no secret that LA does not have the same level of public transportation as Paris. It is yet to be seen how the LA 2028 organizers plan on moving people around, but keep in mind it will likely look different than Paris 2024.
Our Olympic highlights
The top Olympic events we attended
We went to the Olympics for two main events: the Women’s Gymnastics Team Final and the Opening Ceremonies. These two events, which bookended our experience, could have been the only two we attended and we would have felt satisfied. There’s nothing like seeing the Parade of Nations (even if they are on boats!), and seeing Simone Biles win gold with her team was something I will never forget.
Some unexpected moments that we ended up loving were: being assigned to the Fan Section for the Women’s Gymnastics Qualifying event where we cheered on Brazil, and getting the red carpet treatment with the Hospitality House ticket for Football.
Unique to Paris 2024, the sporting events were held at some of the most iconic landmarks in Paris. We specifically loved watching Beach Volleyball under the Eiffel Tower and seeing Equestrian at Versailles.
Best non-sporting Olympic experiences
Visiting the Team Ireland house was one of the best nights of my life, and every team house we went to showcased the vibrant culture of each country. We also loved shopping, and enjoyed spending TOO much money at the official Olympic store.
Highlight of exploring the host city
Charlie and I had both been to Paris before, so we didn’t feel like we needed to play tourist as much as we might have in a different city. However, there is nothing like seeing the Eiffel Tower (with the Olympic rings!) sparkle on the sunset Seine cruise.
To conclude this lengthy post, attending the Olympics was a dream come true for both Charlie and me. While it required years of planning, the atmosphere and energy of the Olympics are something I will never forget and will probably always consider the coolest thing I’ve ever attended. I hope this post helps you plan your own Olympic adventure. If you have more questions or need help with planning, feel free to reach out!
How You (Yes, You!) Can Go to the Olympics Next
If you’re hoping to attend the LA 2028 Olympics (or another future Olympics), I am here to tell you that it is entirely feasible! Here are my tips and resources for planning your own Olympic experience. And hey, maybe I’ll see ya there!
Start planning early. I recommend determining whether you want to participate in the Olympics at least two years before the event, around July/August 2026. This doesn’t mean you need to have everything figured out by then. Still, I would recommend starting to sign up for email notifications and joining the planning Facebook group to stay informed about ticketing information.
Stay informed about ticket sales and event schedules. I recommend signing up for LA 2028 ticketing information and joining the LA Planning Facebook group. Those will be the first places you will learn more information about LA 2028. The updated event schedule for LA 2028 can be found here.
Budget what you can afford. Attending the Olympics does not have to break the bank, but it can if you let it (or if you lose track of your spending). Charlie and I didn’t budget our trip down to the penny, but I estimate that we spent around $5200 for our trip, which breaks down roughly into:
$2000 for accommodation and transportation
$1000 for tickets
$1000 for souvenirs and other gifts
$700 for food (we ate very little as we were constantly moving)
$500 for other entertainment
Consider alternatives to buying event tickets (e.g., attending free events, live sites). As it gets closer to the Olympics, keep an eye out for information from organizers related to other, non-sporting, events you can attend. Knowing this, and having a must-attend list for events, will help you to make the rapid decision of purchasing tickets when the time comes.
Volunteer! Another way you can get involved with the Olympics is by volunteering your time. Volunteers largely run the Olympics, and with LA 2028 being held in the US, the opportunity for you to become a volunteer is higher.
If you are selected as a volunteer, you will be responsible for providing your own accommodation and transportation to any events for which you are hired, and you will not receive payment. You do, however, become a significant part of the Olympic experience. The volunteers for Paris received an entire wardrobe of clothing for the games, and may even receive tickets to specific events (in addition to the one they are working).
Volunteering is a fantastic opportunity to be involved with the Olympics if you have the chance, but don’t apply unless you can take the time off of work and afford to cover your own travel expenses. Volunteer information will likely be announced via the same LA 2028 newsletter and the Facebook group.