I thought I'd post my experience thus far in planning for the Rio Olympics. This information is probably too late to help most people, but might be useful for future Olympic planning.

I decided to go to the Rio Olympics rather late with regards to ticket purchases (late July 2015). I'm in the U.S., so Cosport is our Authorized Ticket Reseller (ATR). They had two rounds of a lottery to disburse tickets which ended before I had decided to go. They also had a general release of tickets following the lotteries which I also missed out on. At this point, I felt a bit screwed, but advice from people who had attended previous Olympics was that Cosport would continue to release tickets and to keep monitoring the site.

I subscribed to a number of threads on Tripadvisor's Olympics forum and Gamebids.com's forums in case there was a release of tickets and people reported it. Sure enough, Cosport dumped a bunch of tickets one day at random which I missed out on by a number of hours. Finally, a month or two ago, Cosport did another release of tickets, someone reported it on Tripadvisor, and I was alerted in time. I jumped on the chance and immediately spent around $2000 on tickets for various events. The highly popular events were not available, like swimming, diving, gymnastics, or beach volleyball; but, I got a nice variety of things, including two nights of track and field and the gold medal men's soccer match.

The prices varied widely dependent upon the event. "B" class tickets for track and field went for $300 at face value. With ticketing fees, I was at $350 for each ticket. A "B" class ticket for the men's soccer gold medal match went for $212 at face value. On the other hand, Men's basketball was a fairly reasonable $42, and I got a C class Greco Roman wrestling ticket for $20. I continue to monitor the Cosport site, but I'm fairly happy with what I have. All I'm really hoping for is the closing ceremony and beach volleyball. I have a number of free days to see Rio and whatever free events are going on (e.g. Marathon, sailing, etc.).

For accomodations, it was pretty clear I wasn't going to be able to it with points since all of the major chains weren't showing availability. Everything seems to be locked up by the Olympic committee. At this point, it was just basic legwork of reseraching hostels, B&B's, and Pousadas for availability and cost. About a third of the places I contacted were booked up, another third hadn't figured out what they were going to charge for the Olympics, and a third had rates at a rather significant multiple of their regular rates. However, the effort paid off and I was able to find a Pousada in the Ipanema neighborhood in an excellent location at only 2-3 times their regular rates. As expected, they wanted half of the total cost up front, which was fine.

Some Brazilians have advised to wait until 2016 to book accomodations since Cariocas aren't big on advanced planning and the options might be better, but I wanted to lock down my accommodations and am fairly happy with what I got. I don't mind a fairly basic place and the price is very fair.

As for plane tickets, I followed a fairly basic strategy. I have miles in both Star Alliance and One World. I did my homework and figured out all of the various routes from my home airport (SFO) to either Rio (GIG) or Sao Paolo (GIG, VCP) for both alliances. Then, as award schedules opened up, I kept checking for availability.

Aeroplan had early availability through YYZ to GRU in Premium Economy, but I wanted business class, so I passed on that. I found a convulted itinerary on Avianca which did SFO-SAL-LIM-EZE-GRU in business class, but was kind of crazy. I thought about booking the premium economy seat on Air Canada, but it was too late, and the availability wasn't there anymore. So, I booked the itinerary on Avianca just to have something locked up.

I kept watch on AA as they had the best routes. AA was consistently opening up award ticket availability SFO-MIA-VCP in business class about 2 days after their award schedule opened up. Sure enough, at midnight pacific time, I checked AA and was able to snag SFO-MIA-VCP in business class on the date I wanted. I did the same thing for the return, and got VCP-MIA-DFW-SFO. SFO-GIG never had availability (and still doesn't). I canceled my Star Alliance flight and ate the cancelation fee.

Now, I realize that booking this far ahead that changes are inevitable. Today, during routine checking of my itineraries, I discovered that AA wouldn't be flying the MIA-VCP route during the Olympics and that I had to call in to get that fixed. Fortunately, AA took care of me and opened up inventory between MIA and GRU. I even got a better itinerary on my inbound going GRU-MIA-SFO.

So, this has been my experience so far in booking an Olympic vacation - hotel, flights, and event tickets. I hope this is helpful others doing Olympic planning. If I remember, I'll report back on future experiences.