Booking Major Events with Points & Miles - Euro 2020(1?)

2020 was supposed to be the year of travel, specifically, event travel. With both the 2020 Tokyo Summer Olympics and the 2020 European Football Championships, it was a year to be remembered. In fact, I was supposed to take 3 unpaid weeks of vacation to attend these epic summer events. That being said, planning a trip to major sports events on Points&Miles is possible, and it’s an exceptional value. Ultimately, while these events may not happen this year, I want to share how I planned to attend the 2020 European Football Championships.

Tickets

I first signed up for Euro 2020 tickets in June of 2019. Originally announced in May of 2019, major events typically give a long lead time to plan for tickets. Surprisingly enough, Euro 2020 was pretty open about the distribution of their tickets.

UEFA EURO 2020 will be staged between 12 June and 12 July 2020 in 12 European cities: Amsterdam, Baku, Bilbao, Bucharest, Budapest, Copenhagen, Dublin, Glasgow, London, Munich, Rome and Saint Petersburg. These host cities include eight national capitals, and 11 venues with a stadium capacity in excess of 50,000. In all, there will be 3m seats at the matches, with 2.5m – 82% of the total – being sold direct to fans.

Euro 2020 Website

The list of games was broken into different stadiums with the host stadium further broken into sections representing different price points. While cities like London and Dublin offered the most expensive tickets, all venues had tickets under 100 Euros. Ultimately, there were millions of applicants, including 300k applicants in the first hour!

All tickets were on a lottery basis, which meant that if you entered the lottery, requesting a number of tickets between 1-4, you had a 1 in n (whatever the number of people who entered) chance of getting the tickets. The website also showed you which tickets had more entrants and which tickets had fewer entrants, which helped me decide as a non-European free agent. Ultimately, if you were successful in the Lottery, you had a few days to pay for all of the tickets that you were assigned (which prevented you from entering every lottery).

My strategy for the lottery? Pick games that were less popular by virtue of their location, which made Baku as the logical choice, with their quarterfinal game. I was also keen to explore the area, especially neighbouring Georgia. In addition, I applied for all the games in Dublin, as it’s easy to get to on points with Aer Lingus’ flight from Toronto costing only 13K / 50K Avios points. Finally, I threw my name in London for the Round of 16 / Semis / Finals because why not?

Woo! Lucky me!

Ultimately, I was successful for two awesome games, the Round of 16 in London at Wembley Stadium and the Quarterfinal in Baku. With both games on a Saturday, and Canada Day holiday in between, it was a perfect opportunity to take a week-long vacation, flying into London, continuing on to the Caucasus and finishing in Baku.

Hotels

Normally, hotels are the hardest to get on points, as there are limited hotels in the destination and hotel chains typically block redemptions on the dates that the event is occurring. In the case of the Olympics, I had to book the hotels the day they came online. The 2020 Euros were distributed around the continent, which didn’t concentrate demand like a typical event. While London has a multitude of hotel options, I suspected that Baku would be hard to find a good selection of hotels, but boy was I wrong.

JW Marriott Baku

Baku has a wide variety of hotels, including a JW Marriott, a Hyatt Regency, Hilton Baku and even a Fairmont. Ultimately, I choose the Category 2 Boulevard Hotel Baku Autograph Collection (which was recently rebranded as the Baku Marriott Hotel Boulevard). For only 32500 points, I was able to score a room for two nights relatively near the stadium and in a decent location. When I booked the hotel it was advertised for about $300 a night, a great redemption on points!

Baku Marriott Hotel Boulevard (Marriott)

London, on the other hand, has a multiple of every brand, so I won’t go into too much depth about my decision, but I decided it was best to stay with a friend who had a spare room.

In between, I wanted to explore Georgia, which has a plethora of Marriott options, including maybe one of the best looking boutique hotels in the area, Rooms Hotel Kazbegi.

Located over 5000 ft (1700m) above sea level, this hotel was a part of the Design Hotels chain within Marriott. I had planned to stay multiple days there, in this Category 4 hotel, but sadly the hotel moved on from the brand as a result of the pandemic. In addition, the brand also has a location in Tbilisi. Ultimately, I haven’t rebooked my hotels, although there are plenty of hotels in Tbilisi and throughout the country, although non with the charm of the Rooms brand.

Flights

London is an expensive place to fly to but even a big event like Euro’s doesn’t really affect supply and demand for award flights. That being said, in 2019, as I didn’t want to spend the $ on the British Airways taxes and fees. Instead, my plan was to follow multiple different options from Toronto using Expert Flyer, and hope that Air Canada released a business class ticket on the direct flight (spoiler, Air Canada never released the flights under the old program)

Once I had finished spending the weekend in London, I knew that getting to the Caucasus isn’t cheap. As it’s still a developing tourist destination that’s quite far from London on the opposite side of the continent, I had to think of creative ways to get there. Ultimately, the cheapest way was to grab a flight on discount carrier WizzAir, who I’ve flown a few times when I lived in Europe. In my opinion, Wizz Air is the worst Low-Cost Carrier in Europe. That being said, it offered a flight for 70 British Pounds, and to be honest, I thought it would be a good review. I also upsized my booking and purchased a seat in Row 1 in addition to priority boarding for 116 British Pounds or ~$170 Canadian. The flight left London Luton (a terrible airport) at a good time (5pm) but it landed past Midnight at an airport (Kutaisi) 2.5 hours away from the capital. Ultimately, I decided to take one for the team, review Wizz Air and check out another part of Georgia.

Getting home from Baku was a different story. With limited flights available out of Baku, especially with airlines that are part of major alliances, it was tricky to plan a good route home. I luckily snagged an award seat on a Turkish flight out of Baku the day after the game, connecting in Istanbul. As I’ve been to Istanbul before and flown on Turkish’s Economy class, I decided to spend time in Egypt to check out the Pyramids with a day-long layover connecting to Egypt Air’s direct flight to Toronto. As this was booked under the old Aeroplan rules, while not a perfect option, it was only 57.5K Aeroplan miles in addition to $110 in taxes.

Old style booking!

Flight Rebooking

Ultimately, I cancelled both of these flights. While Aeroplan had flexible cancellation, Wizz Air obfuscated the whole cancellation process, so much so I published a very popular article that’s been referenced by thousands on how to get a refund for cancelled WizzAir flights. That being said, I have rebooked my flights for a very hopeful trip in 2021.

With a new job in 2021 and less time off, I decided to pull the trigger on those expensive direct British Airways flights when there was a 50% discount for redemptions. Ultimately, redeeming Avios on the Toronto to London route in Business class isn’t cheap, coming in at a whopping $567 dollars plus 25,000 Avios points (discounted from 50K Avios). If I was a loyal British Airways customer, I wouldn’t be happy with their loyalty program, that’s for sure!

We can hope!

On the way home, I was further limited by the choices of Baku’s airport. Many airlines are not / were not selling tickets, so I had to get creative with my routing. While it’s possible to book Baku to Doha on Qatar phoning British Airways Avios, the taxes are almost $400 for the one-way flight. That being said, you’re not able to connect in the Middle East while flying out of Europe using American Airlines AAdvantage points. With that out of the question, I decided to splurge again and choose to check out Qatar Airways product with a long layover in Doha (a good preview to another football tournament).

The Point

Ultimately, with some planning, watching a large scale event is possible with Miles and Points at a fraction of the cost it would be to see the match. Ultimately, I will more than likely not be able to attend the Euros this year, but it’s a good example of where Points and Miles can get you, if you’re willing to plan ahead and do your research.