The members of Paris 2024 adopted, in the board of directors, on Monday March 21, the main lines of the organization of the ticketing which will be implemented during the Olympic (OG) and Paralympic Games of Paris 2024, in a little more two years. The sum of nearly 1.2 billion euros in revenue is expected for the sale of tickets to attend the competitions, or 30% of the budget of the Organizing Committee for the Olympic and Paralympic Games (Cojop).
In detail, some 13.4 million tickets will go on sale – 10 million for the Olympics (July 26 to August 11, 2024) and 3.4 million for the Paralympics (August 28 to September 8). Tickets giving access to the opening and closing ceremonies will be sold separately. By way of comparison, a football World Cup attracts an average of 3.4 million spectators; a Rugby World Cup, 2.5 million.
Half of the tickets – which will be entirely dematerialized for security reasons – will be offered to the general public at a price of 50 euros or less (25 euros or less for the Paralympic edition), including one million at 24 euros (500,000 tickets at 15 euros for the Paralympics), entry price whatever the Olympic sport, argue the organizers. In London in 2012, the entry price to the competitions was 27 euros.
It will therefore be, for example, theoretically possible to attend a match of French basketball players or the American Dream Team in hall 6 of the Parc des expositions for 24 euros – a room that the Blues do not like.
Opening of sales in February 2023
As for the allocation of the precious sesame, the Paris 2024 teams have opted for a system of purchase slots by drawing lots, a new procedure, which they consider “the fairest”.
During previous editions of the Games, buyers all connected at the same time as soon as the online ticket office opened, most often causing congestion on the reservation platform; for Paris 2024, the draw will allocate to the lucky winners, who will have registered in advance on the ticketing site by the end of 2022, time slots of several hours to buy ticket packs – to a limited number, which remains to be determined.
Concretely, it will be possible “to buy in real time the tickets that will be available at the moment T”we promise on the side of Paris 2024. Opening of sales in February 2023, according to the Cojop calendar.
Those who fail will have the opportunity to make up for it during the draw for single tickets (May 2023), or even, if the draw persists, when the remaining tickets go on sale at the end of 2023. . Ticketing for the Paralympic Games will be launched using the same procedure in the fall of the same year.
The organizers of the Paris Olympics specify that 80% of the tickets will be offered to the general public – 20% to the partners and stakeholders of the Games, to hospitality (VIPs, boxes, tailor-made offers), etc. To avoid the black market, it will also be possible to redeem tickets on a specific platform.
However, the ticketing offer for the Paris Olympic Games does not take into account a degraded health context. “We want full stadiums, and spectators from all walks of life to experience unique emotions and forge the memories of a lifetime”, enthuses Tony Estanguet, the president of Paris 2024.
Two years after the start of the Covid-19 crisis, it is nevertheless difficult to exclude the scenario of a pandemic which would force the organizers to rethink their offer.
In the meantime, they therefore do not envisage gauges at 25% or 50%, as during the Euro football championship in 2021. And even less emit the hypothesis of a closed session, as during the Tokyo Olympics, at the summer of 2021, or from Beijing, last February.