In second half of year 2019, I went through a number of ticket sales for the Tokyo Olympics 2020. This page gives a quick summary of what I experienced to buy tickets as a 4 year United States resident originally from Tokyo, Japan.
June 24: Ticket lottery
The first chance to purchase Tokyo 2020 tickets is to join and win ticket lottery scheduled in June 2019. The request phase started and ended in May, and the lottery took place on website of CoSport, who is the Olympics Authorized Ticket Reseller (ATR) in US and some other countries.
I am Japanese, but I am blocked to access Tokyo Olympic Committee official ticket website. It is primarily for people locating in Japan, and people outside Japan, like me, regardless of nationality, needs to use ATR to buy tickets. It is CoSport for me living in the United States.
I created an account for CoSport, and I requested tickets for golf, baseball and softball.
And I lost the lottery.
I could not win even one single ticket for the Olympics. It showed me how competitive it is to get tickets…
Live ticket schedule and broker
Interestingly enough, the following live sales schedule is very different from Japan. Domestic residents in the host country needed to wait at least until Autumn 2019 for public ticket sales to begin. On the other hand, in the United States, it started in July 2019.
CoSport initially announced that the live ticket sales open on July 2nd, and then they postponed the start date by one week.
To me and my family, package tour was not a choice. We have a house to stay during the period of the Olympic games in Tokyo. We need to get individual tickets.
July 9th: First public sales
In the (first) live sales happened on July 9th, I was able to buy tickets for Equestrian. The reason I first picked the competition is that the venue is relatively close to my house in Tokyo. I would not say it is a walking distance but probably it is the closet venue among all.
The website said there were about 2,000 users/devices in line ahead of me. I waited in the queue for 40 minutes or so, and I did not find a lot of tickets left when I finally got to the top page.
After I selected category B tickets for Equestrian, I had to spend another several minutes to add them to shopping card and complete transaction. The CoSport website was so slow that even login to the site took me forever. By the time I finally completed the purchase, no tickets were available for any competitions. All tickets were quickly sold out within an hour, meaning probably only 10,000 people or less were lucky enough to get tickets. How competitive it is to buy Olympics tickets!
Then I realized that CoSport adds a lot of extra charges to the face value of the tickets.
- Currency conversion fee
- Merchant service fee
- Shipping
What the heck are all the extra fees? 🙁 In total I got 43 USD extra $ charge. They already added 20% of face value, then I ended up with paying more that 200 bucks for $140 tickets.
July 19: Extra live sales
I was not super comfortable with how CoSport makes extra money, but my family was super happy about the fact that we were able to secure tickets for the Olympics 2020 which is held in our home country. 🙂
Ten days after the public sales, I happened to visit the CoSport website just to see what is there. I expected nothing. I was just going to check if there is any update and make sure tickets are still sold out.
Then I discovered tickets were NOT sold out. I found tickets being on sale again for some sessions like:
- Basketball preliminary round
- Basketball 3 on 3
- Weightlifting
- Handball
- Hockey, etc
Well, is this fake or what? I do not care. I just selected tickets and proceeded with checkout process, and I made it!
No prior notice was given by CoSport. Did they drop unsold tickets all of a sudden? Wow. It is hard to believe, but it happened. I got a confirmation email and receipt from CoSport, meaning I successfully purchased tickets for all the above 5 competitions!
Is this going to keep happening in the future? How can I deal with it?
Tickets Site Tracker
When I was looking at Twitter, I happened to find this post:
It looks like this guy posts this kind of comment whenever CoSports adds new tickets on their site.
How can he keep track of the ticket sales?
Then I hit the URL os-site-tracker.com to see what is in there.
OK. I did not know that this kind of extra ticket sales also frequently occurred for Rio and London. Even for Tokyo, it has also already happened a few times since the ‘official’ public sales on July 9th.
Holy Cow.
This Tokyo 2020 Ticket Sites Tracker is not a free service. You need to pay 15 USD.
OK. I paid 15 bucks using PayPal.
You can select sessions you want to keep track of. Then you are supposed to get an alert email within 3 minutes after new tickets went on sale. I don’t know yet if it really works as it is supposed to. Let’s see.
(BTW, I do not mean to advertise this service. I am not receiving any money from them. :-))
A few days later, I happened to notice that they pushed a few alerts, and I missed all of them, only because they all fell into spam folder, not in my inbox.
You must be kidding.
I updated spam mail setting immediately.
July 24th: Another extra live sales
Five days later on July 24th, I found this alert email in my inbox.
Under “Change with last update”, you can find latest updates on sessions where you are keeping track of status. All others are newly available tickets for now.
I hit CoSport website and found tickets are available for 3 sessions of women’s golf. Also a few minutes later, I received another alert saying new tickets are available for men’s golf day 2.
I bought all of them, because golf is my top priority sport to watch (and play).
I let my wife know, and she purchased weightlifting women’s 55kg!
Thanks Tickets Site Tracker. We probably could not buy the tickets without you!
(Again, I am not having any affiliate deal with them. I am just thanking them for the great service. ;-))
Oct 10th: Second ‘official’ live sales
It was about two and a half months later when we received an email from CoSport (not from Site Tracker) saying there is another live sales starting in two days.
On October 10th, the day when the first Tokyo Olympics games began 55 years ago, the second publich sales started on CoSport website.
After two hours of battle, unfortunately I was not able to get any ticket.
It started with server error.
I got into endless queue.
And I ended up with being the page where no tickets were left.
It is still super competitive to get even one single ticket for the Olympics, through this officially announced process.
BUT, you can imagine what happens next, right?
Oct 10th: At that night
At the night of the Olympics ticket public sales, I visited CoSport website again, expecting ‘something unexpected’ to happen.
The public sales were ended several hours before, and no tickets were supposed to be available.
BUT, at 10PM, I found new tickets dropped on CoSport page which is no longer empty and shows names of competitions again.
There you go.
I started with checking what is available under golf, and discovered tickets for final round of women’s, which I could not buy in July.
I also checked several other competitions and bought tickets for:
- Women’s handball bronze medal game
- Men’s and Women’s volleyball preliminary rounds
- Women’s wrestling 57kg, and
- Women’s golf final round
The wrestling 57kg is a must-see session where Japanese athlete Risako Kawai is qualified and expected to win a gold. The tickets were super pricey but I simply did not want to miss a chance.
Nov-Dec: Extra live sales
I am not going into details on results of ‘sudden’ live sales happened in Nov and Dec. CoSport dropped new tickets for various competitions from time to time without any prior notice.
For the two months, I purchased tickets for:
- Men’s soccer gold medal game
- Women’s soccer preliminary (in Sendai that is closed to my hometown Fukushima)
- Women’s Water Polo preliminary, and
- Artistic Swimming duet technical routine (scheduled same day as Water Polo)
This continues into year 2020 until the postponement of the event was announced….
My ticket purchase history
| JUN | Lottery sale | None | 0 |
| JUL | Live sale | Equestrian | 1 |
| Extra live sale | Basketball, 3on3, Handball (x2), Hockey, Weight lifting | 6 | |
| Extra extra live sale | Golf (x4), Weightlifting | 5 | |
| OCT | 2nd live sale | None | 0 |
| Extra live sale | Golf, Volleyball (x2), Handball, Wrestling | 5 | |
| NOV | Extra extra live sale | Water polo, Soccer | 2 |
| Extra live sale continues | Soccer | 1 | |
| DEC | Extra sale – End of year | Artistic Swimming | 1 |
