1.3 million tickets sold. €100 million in ticketing revenue. Spectators from 150 countries. 80% of total inventory sold. 60,000 tickets for the Opening Ceremony alone. And 57% of all tickets priced under €100, with a starting price of just €30.
Those are the numbers. But numbers don't capture what it actually takes to deliver a Winter Games ticketing operation across multiple cities in the Italian Alps.
Beyond the platform
When people talk about ticketing for a major sporting event, they usually mean the technology. The website. The app. The transaction engine. That's important — essential, even. But it's maybe 40% of what actually makes a Games work.
Milano Cortina 2026 spanned Milano, Cortina d'Ampezzo, Bormio, and Livigno — each with different venues, different access logistics, and different local infrastructure. Box offices at every venue cluster. Trained teams handling last-minute purchases, credential issues, accessibility requirements, and the thousand edge cases no FAQ page covers. Scanning operations at every gate — not just hardware, but contingency plans when connectivity drops in a mountain venue.
Marketing that fills sessions
Selling tickets to figure skating finals and Alpine downhill is the easy part. The real challenge is filling early-round curling, cross-country heats, biathlon qualifications. These sessions need targeted marketing, creative pricing, and distribution strategies that reach audiences who might not have considered attending.
The result: 80% of total inventory sold. Full venues create better atmosphere, better broadcast visuals, and better outcomes for every stakeholder.
What Games experience teaches
Every Games programme builds institutional knowledge that can't be documented in a playbook. How to handle a sudden weather cancellation affecting three venues simultaneously. How to manage a venue reconfiguration mid-Games. How to coordinate with transport operators when a scanning queue backs up beyond the venue perimeter.
This operational muscle memory — built over multiple Games cycles — is what separates a technology vendor from a ticketing service provider. The technology is table stakes. The operation is what delivers the experience.