Booking the Olympics with Miles and Points
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, in addition to my potential trip to Euro 2021, I wanted to share how I planned to attend the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo!
Tickets
Unlike Euro 2020 tickets, tickets to the Tokyo 2020 Olympics were not lottery-based. Instead, ATPI, the Canadian arm of the “World-leading travel and events management” handled the booking process, and by handled, I mean butchered. In June of 2019, instead of a fairly straight forward system that was lottery-based, like the one put into place by the Euro 2020 organising committee, ATPI set up a system that had everyone login at once, and deliver tickets first-come, first-serve. It was an absolute nightmare of a system.
The bane of my existence… (cover photo Charly Triballeau / Getty Images)
By far the most annoying process was the fact that once the tickets were selected and in your basket, they were not reserved to you for 10 minutes to let you pay. Instead, you could only guarantee them by paying for what was in your cart at the time. While that was beyond belief frustrating, what’s even worse is that for every order there was a “shipping and handling” cost of $47.84 plus tax for each purchase - what a freaking rip off!
This lead to endless frustrating moments, as at one point I had tickets to the 100M dash final in addition to a basketball game. Ultimately, after losing about fifty different tickets to other people, I settled on grabbing two events just to get me to the games and then figured I could pick up further tickets closer to games time. Those two events, Surfing Round 1 + 2 and the Semi-Finals of 3 x 3 Basketball are both first-time Olympic events, so even if I wasn’t able to attend because I couldn’t find accommodation, I would be able to find a way to sell these tickets (little did I know, COVID happened!) For a total of less than $350 Canadian, I had two sets of two tickets to some awesome events and a reason to go to the Olympics, woohoo!
I was hoping that I would have more access to tickets, and that chance eventually came, as ATPI announced another set of tickets that was released in mid-February 2020, with only a few months to go to the Olympics. While at this point COVID-19 had started to creep into my thoughts, I went ahead and grabbed a few extra tickets, as I wanted to spend the whole 5 days in Tokyo experiencing the different Olympics venues. There wasn’t a large choice, so I grabbed cheap ($37.50) tickets to the field hockey night session because that’s a great time to hang out and drink beers during the Tokyo evening. Finally, I wanted a shot at seeing Canada win a medal, so I grabbed tickets to a morning finals rowing session, which has the men and women’s 4s finals.
After they announced that the Olympic games would be pushed back to 2021 I received an email that tickets would be good for next years event, but there would be a window to return tickets. On the 13th of May 2020, they announced a two-week window to return tickets for a full refund, although I suspect there will be another round of refunds once the official Olympic Games policy comes out.
What do you need to do to secure Olympics tickets? While I can’t in good conscious tell you to cheat the system, the first thing you should do is run multiple computers to try and grab tickets. Let’s be real though, there’s no way that ATPI can pull off that crap again, can they? Besides multiple computers, involve friends, which will make for an awesome experience AND double your chance at grabbing tickets!
Hotels
Tickets were frustrating to acquire, but there were enough of them on the market that it was still possible to grab some. Hotels on points on the other hand were almost impossible to grab. As I diligently waited for hotels to release reward space, I really hoped that I could grab some the moment it opened. So when Marriott opened their hotels at midnight Eastern 355 days before my event tickets, in August of 2019 (the day I was returning from my Turkey trip), I was disappointed to see no hotel rooms were remaining in the Tokyo area.
Strike out, no Tokyo Olympics hotels.
Neither were there rooms available for the Hilton and Hyatt hotels located in the Tokyo area. I looked to my back up, Hotels.com, which is a great loyalty program that offers an effective return of 10% on spending, which in my opinion is great. Unfortunately, the prices, as expected, were outrageous.
Luckily, I got lucky, and in January 2020, without any hotels, the Sheraton Grande Tokyo Bay Hotel located in Disney Tokyo opened up for booking. At the time it was a Category 6 and it was a whopping 240k points for 5 nights. As you can see, it’s not the “dream” destination that I was expecting.
Tokyo Grande Sheraton Bay
Regardless, hotels during the Olympics are expensive. Even this hotel was going for over $700 a night when it was finally made available to book.
When the games were cancelled in March 2020 I lept into action to figure out what to do with my booking. Based on the fact that you can only book Marriott 355 days in advance, and I knew booking would be competitive for the 2021 version of the games, I decided to reach out to the hotel and ask if they could move my booking over to 2021, which was promptly denied. That being said, the Marriott Platinum Elite line was empathetic to the cause, in addition to the fact that the hotel was going up to a Category 7, and gave me an extra 40k points in order to rebook it at the original price.
The good news was, in the midst of our COVID-19 Summer, on the Sunday at Midnight EST, 355 days before the booking I was able to book three hotels in Tokyo for the Olympics. The three hotels, Sheraton Miyako Hotel Tokyo, Tokyo Marriott Hotel and The Prince Sakura Tower Tokyo, Autograph Collection provide an awesome assortment of hotels, located within 30 minutes of the main Olympic venues.
Tokyo Sheraton
Prince Sakura Tokyo
All of these hotels are over $500 a night at the time of booking, but are only Category 5, Category 6 and Category 6 respectively, which means they’re cheaper than the Sheraton Grande Tokyo from a points perspective. Overall, getting at least $2500 of value from my Bonvoy is a great way to make attending the Summer Olympics affordable.
Flights
Flights to Tokyo were difficult to grab, but a lot easier than the hotels, as the strategy was always to find a connecting flight and the short hop from another Asian city to Tokyo. For the departure, my plan was to leave from a second city (Osaka, Sapporo etc.) to take advantage of less demand, connect in either California or another Asian city for a quick 24 hours exploring a new city. Easy, right?
Unfortunately, booking for two people when you don’t have enough points to book in one currency makes life difficult, but isn’t that the challenge of this hobby? I ended up getting creative, booking the boomerang with a leg in Cathay Pacific’s stunning first-class from New York - JFK to Hong Kong using Asia Miles (as outlined by Ricky at the Prince of Travel, since dead), and then returning from Hong Kong to Toronto after the Olympics.
Don’t you miss these creative bookings using Asia miles? 85k for a round trip to Asia!
I then booked my partner on the same flight using Alaska miles, connecting the next day to Tokyo. I used British Airways Avios (enough for about 10 trips to Dublin) to get myself back and forth from Hong Kong to Tokyo, in addition to getting my partner back to Hong Kong. Unfortunately, I didn’t have enough miles at the time to optimize my redemption and had to use a stiff 100,000 British Airways Avios to get the return flight from Hong Kong to Toronto, unfortunately, as we’ve learned from COVID-19, it’s better to burn them as soon as possible!
When it was announced that the Olympics were getting moved, I was able to get a refund for all my flights, which was pretty awesome, but it did mean that I would have to rebook flights for 2021. With more points in my arsenal and COVID-19 in the back of my mind, I decided that it was better to book an easier, more direct flight, rather than a more complicated route. And don’t worry, I didn’t consider Air Canada’s offer of 300K points for a one-way ticket to Tokyo (Yes, I called Aeroplan a devaluation)!
Thanks Air Canada
Thinking that COVID-19 would still be around, I booked a one-stop flight using Asia Miles for 85,000 miles and about $90. This flight, with a short connection in Hong Kong to freshen up and enjoy the lounge before continuing on to Tokyo. Asia Miles are really useful for Canadians because they have great availability in normal times. Therefore, I choose these tickets because:
a) Cathay Pacific is awesome
b) I like the late-night flight leaving from Toronto so that I can come home from work, pack, eat dinner, then go to the airport for the late flight.
c) Cathay allows you to book these flights 355 days in advance
A convenient route to Asia
On the way back, I got a bit creative with my flights. While the new Aeroplan is charging an arm and a leg for direct flights, one-stop flights on Air Canada using the old Aeroplan (RIP) were readily available. Therefore, I booked Ethiopian Airlines 5th Freedom Flight to Seoul from Tokyo, which I thought would be a good review. After spending the night at the Grand Hyatt Incheon and exploring Seoul, we’re hopping on Air Canada’s direct flight from ICN to Toronto on the 777, for a useful review of (hopefully) post-pandemic Air Canada.
The Point
Ultimately, it may be looking less than likely I’ll be able to go to the Olympics in 2021, although it seems we will see a decision either way in March. That being said, even though the chaos, with a bit of time and effort (or consulting) Miles and Points have given me opportunities that I’d never be able to dream of otherwise. Stay tuned for the next event booking process…!
