On Aug. 3rd, my husband and I are heading to the Olympics in Paris. The anticipation has been absolutely killing me! I can't wait to get over to Europe and chant U - S - A at the top of my lunges with my fellow Americans, while we watch the worlds best track athletes put on a show!
We've been planning and saving for this trip for over 2 years now. Have you thought about wanting to go to the Olympics some day? Well, there is a lot that goes into planning for such a trip.
If all the buzz about the Olympics has you wanting to go to the next Olympic Games then read up! Because it was a long process that started with having to get win a raffle in order to just purchase tickets.
Getting Tickets
Tickets for the Olympics go on sale a over a year before the start date. I remember getting an Instagram add about getting tickets to the Olympics back in the fall of 2022. Out of curiosity I clicked it. This is how I found out about the raffle. In order purchase tickets to the Olympics you have to sign up for a lottery system and be chosen to buy tickets. Just for fun I signed up with one of my email addresses. The next day I told Ryan what I had done and told him to sign up also. So he did. Then a couple days later I decided to sign up with yet another email, and later that day I signed up with my work email.
We used 4 different emails for the lottery system and about two months later only one of our email addresses got chosen to purchase tickets.
In the congratulatory email, there were instructions on when and how we could buy tickets. You see we were given a 4 hour time slot during which time we could log into a portal and buy our tickets. The email also included a one hundred page pamphlet with all of the "sessions" we could buy tickets to. There was everything from the big ticket items like gymnastics and track, to the new events of breaking and the marathon race walk relay.
Ryan and I looked it over. It was so overwhelming that he created a spreadsheet of all the sessions we were interested in attending, he included the days and times of the events, session numbers, venues and cities.
You see all the events taking place at the Olympics aren't necessarily happening in Paris. For example, our friends are going to follow the women's soccer tournament, they're using the train to travel to 3 different cities in France to see the games. Because it is a tournament style event they don't know what teams they'll actually see. They bought tickets to rounds of the tournament that they thought they'd like to see. The only game that is actually happening in Paris is the last one that they will be seeing, which is the gold metal match. They will also be in Nice, and Marseille for games!
Because Ryan and I got tickets to Track and Field and the finals for Women's Sand Volleyball we will be in Paris the entire week.
Our time slot to purchase tickets was a week later, early on a Saturday morning. We slept through the first hour of the window because our window started at 6:00a and we figured we wouldn't need 4 hours to make our purchases. But to our surprise many of the best seats were completely sold out by the time we got logged in.
Luckily, we were able to get tickets to the majority of what we wanted to see. But my advice is to log in the minute your window opens.
I bought the tickets for everyone and had my friend pay me back. In all I purchased 4 tickets to track events, 2 tickets to sand volleyball, and 6 soccer tickets for our friends. In total I spent just over $5,000 on everyone's tickets. Track and Field were by far the most expensive, even more expensive than other big ticket events like gymnastics and swimming.
Accommodations
Finding a place to stay in Pairs the entire week was a bit of a headache. I'm so thankful that my friend loves to plan this part of the trip because she was so organized and helpful.
We started out by making a Wishlist on Airbnb with all of the places we wanted to stay. The plan was to get a place to stay for the first half of the week for just Ryan and I, as our friends will be at the soccer games elsewhere in France, then get a shared space the second half of the week to close out the trip with them.
We were able to find a place for about $1,000 for four days, and we found another place for 5 days for about the same price. We felt like we were all set! However, we were so wrong. This was probably the most stressful part of planning the trip.
We knew we needed to book sleeping arrangements early because they would be difficult to come by the closer and closer we got to the games, so we booked the trip on August 14th of 2023. It felt really good to have that out of the way. Until it wasn't.
A few days after we booked our Airbnb rentals I got a message from the second place we were staying. They were dropping us! They'd made up some bogus reason as to why they couldn't accommodate us anymore. It had something to do with them not booking that far out for planning purposes, which if you really think about it doesn't make a lick of sense.
A few days later I looked at the rental we were going to stay in to find out that they had jacked the price up like crazy! Originally we were going to pay about $1500 for 4 nights but now it was showing up as over 6 grand for the same amount of nights! It was insane!
My friend is very particular as to where she stays, so she took the reins on finding accommodations for us that wouldn't completely break the bank. She wasn't able to find us any Airbnb or VRBO rentals that hadn't already been booked. It was wild. So for the second half of the week we will be staying in separate hotels that are across the street from one another. The hotel for 4 nights is costing us more than the Airbnb at $1,200.
How Are We Paying For All Of This?
Upon reading all of this you might be thinking, "geeze that's a lot of money!" And yes... you're right... it's a lot of money. I haven't even talked about flights, but those ended up being around $3k.
This is by far going to be the most expensive trip Ryan and I have ever taken, but because the ticketing process started so long ago we were able to pay for things in pieces.
When I first signed up to hopefully be able to purchase tickets for the Olympics I also set up a savings account using Oportun, which is an app that I actually found from reading another bloggers website about travel a few years ago. It's an app that automatically saves money towards goals that you set up. It does cost $5 a month, but it's been so worth it over the past few years. It's allowed me to pay off my car in just 3 years and now it's helped us get to Paris for the Olympics!
CLICK HERE for my referral link. We will both get $5 if you use it. This link may only work on your phone though. If it doesn't work use my code SONSCH389 when you sign up.
Because of the app I was able to save over $7,000 for this trip and use it throughout the past 2 years that we've been planning it. My husband used it to save the money to purchase our flights. Because of this nifty little app we haven't put anything on credit cards for this trip!
We have paid for all of the big ticket items already and we've both set new goals to save for fun money while we're there.
There you have it!
Well now you know! This is how two working class people are making their dreams of going to the Olympics come true! We've been planning this trip for so long that I can hardly believe it's happening in just 3 short weeks.
But if you want to go to the 2028 LA Olympics then planning ahead is the only way to do it. Start thinking about it now!
Thanks for reading! My husband and I will be in Europe for just over 3 weeks! If you are a current client or hoping to get on my schedule this fall I am filling those spots now! Please contact me to secure your time slot. These are first come first served.
It's always a pleasure to know that people are reading my writing. I'll be taking a million photos while we're abroad and sharing them to my Instagram, and yes, I will absolutely be writing a blog about the trip itself once it's over. Stay tuned!
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