Travel Tips

London 2012 Insider’s Guide: Finding Unsold Tickets & Unsung Events

Locations in this article:  London, England

CoSport has had significant problems. Just before I left for London, the tickets were mailed to my home address in the US. For three of the four events I purchased, the seats weren’t actually together. Every time I’ve tried calling the CoSport phone number to complain, it’s gone to a voicemail system saying the mailbox is full. I tried e-mailing their customer service email address and haven’t gotten a response yet. At least I didn’t have to wait six hours in line for tickets, like some Americans did.

Part of the problem with CoSport (and with all Olympic ticketing companies) is that you don’t know which seats you’re actually buying. You can purchase “Category A” or “Category B” and there’s no seating map available that shows the general sections where “Category B” might be. Another problem is that you purchase tickets to different time periods during the day, but months ago, you didn’t know which teams were competing when. I really wanted to see USA water polo because I went to high school with someone on the American team. I wanted to wait to buy them until I knew the schedule. Well, I’m still trying in vain to get those tickets and have just about given up.

In the meantime, once I got here, I was told that the London 2012 website was releasing more tickets every day. Those tickets are only available to UK or EU citizens, but fortunately, my sister lives here and she’s married to a Brit. The site shows different available events on each of our computers. It also shows certain events are available, but when you click to purchase them, it says they’re no longer available. Kind of like Charlie Brown with a football being taken away from him. The website has also mislabeled certain events, so that it showed men’s water polo one afternoon, when it was really women’s water polo.

The tickets seem to get released around 11 pm and on my first night, after enough random clicking, I wound up with field hockey tickets for USA vs. Argentina on Wednesday. Last night, I got China vs. Hungary and Italy vs. Russia in women’s water polo. I’ve tried putting up a Craigslist ad to get men’s water polo or even offered a trade, but haven’t had much luck.

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