By Paul Foster | Founder & CEO, OnePlan
Paul Foster is the Founder & CEO of OnePlan, and was the Official Supporter of GIS Mapping & Digital Twin Software for Paris 2024. He has been involved in nine Olympic and Paralympic Games.
I’m a planner by nature, perhaps unsurprisingly for someone whose life’s work revolves around helping the world’s biggest events plan smarter. Normally, I’m the kind of person who books flights, hotels, and tickets well in advance, leaving nothing to chance.
But for Milano Cortina, I decided to do something different. I had a plan not to plan. And it turned out to be exactly the right call.
Why Winter Games Are Different
Winter Games are a very particular kind of major event, and understanding what makes them different is what made the late approach work.
Venues are often more dispersed than at a Summer Games, sometimes in remote mountain regions that require careful planning just to reach.
The combination of timing, winter travel, school terms, fewer tourists, and geography means that tickets don’t always face the same immediate pressure as they do for a Summer Games in a capital city.
There are also logistical realities unfolding behind the scenes that most spectators don’t see. Temporary venues frequently don’t have their final capacity confirmed until late in the build phase, simply because seating and operational layouts can’t be locked until construction is sufficiently advanced.
Organising committees respond to this by holding tickets back until they’re confident in the numbers, which means availability often improves significantly in the final weeks before competition begins.
The same dynamic applies to accommodation. Organisers reserve large blocks of rooms early for athletes, commercial partners, media, and officials, sensibly so, given the operational complexity involved. But once final delegation numbers are confirmed, many of those rooms are released back into the market, often just a few weeks before the Games open.
We saw this happen clearly in Paris: hotel rates dropped dramatically in the final weeks before the Opening Ceremony as blocks were released and the market adjusted. Anyone who waited was rewarded for their patience.
A Different Route and a Better Experience
The approach extended to the journey itself. Rather than flying into one of the busier Milan airports and navigating south before heading back north into the mountains, I flew from London to Innsbruck. It turned out to be a genius decision.
The drive from Innsbruck to Livigno takes around two hours and twenty-five minutes, passing through Austria, into Switzerland, and then down into Italy. It’s one of the more beautiful stretches of road in the Alps, quiet, unhurried, with the kind of scenery that reminds you why people have been crossing these mountains for centuries. Livigno itself sits just a few kilometres from the Swiss border, and arriving via that route rather than through Milan felt like the right introduction to a place that operates on its own terms.
Last-minute flights to Innsbruck were readily available and very reasonably priced. The contrast with the anxious early booking that major events usually demand was striking.
What Waiting Actually Delivered
Two weeks before travelling, I secured a 25% group discount on Livigno event tickets. Accommodation presented no difficulty, good options remained available at fair prices, with no sense of the last-minute scramble that the conventional wisdom around major events would predict.
This shift isn’t just a personal observation. There’s growing evidence that more fans are leaving their purchases later, and the pattern is being noticed beyond the events industry.
A recent Reuters piece highlighted how ticket demand for Milano Cortina ramped up considerably closer to the Games, reflecting what the article described as a broader trend of late buying habits among event-goers. The market is adapting to a world where flexibility has become a legitimate strategy rather than a sign of indecision.
In a sense, it mirrors something we’ve seen in other areas of consumer behaviour. The traveller who books at the last minute is no longer necessarily the one who couldn’t plan. Increasingly, they’re the one who understood the market well enough to know that waiting was the better move.
Flexibility Isn’t the Opposite of Planning
At OnePlan, we build digital twins that help organising committees adapt confidently in real time, because no plan, however carefully constructed, survives contact with reality unchanged. The value of a live, shared operational picture isn’t that it prevents change, it’s that it allows you to respond to change without losing control of the wider picture.
This trip was my personal reminder of the same principle. Having a plan not to plan isn’t the absence of strategy. It’s a strategy that acknowledges uncertainty and builds flexibility into the approach from the start.Sometimes, especially in a world that’s constantly changing, that’s the most intelligent plan of all.
