World Cup!
 

We have just secured tickets to the World Cup for the play-off for 3rd place in Stuttgart in July. We are coming from Australia, quite a long way, but can only stay about 3 weeks. We would like to go to Munich for the Australa vs Brazil game on the 18th June anyway, regardless of whether we get tickets. Does anyone recommend other Germany destinations? We feel Berlin would need to be one of these.

The other curious thing is that we are only applying for official tickets from FIFA - the others on the internet are way too expensive anyway for me - but how would they work?

Thankyou

Hi Lori,

Congrats on your great luck! I had been quite desperate myself to go over to Germany. I failed in the first phases, but I noticed that FIFA was allocating 8% of tickets through the country's respective federation, to ensure that each country has fans represented at each game. That essentially amounts to about 3000-4000 per game. Luckily, I was able to be one of those lucky recipients and I got tickets to all of the USA games. You may want to do some research with the Australian Soccer Federation (not sure if that's there official title), but they will likely have tickets to allocate themselves. It may already be too late. I don't know.

Regarding your question on the ticket prices, you should know that they are all ticket brokers trying to work a deal. The reason that prices are so expensive is that FIFA is very restrictive on how they allocate tickets. The ticket broker doesn't have the tickets yet, but you would pay them a large amount of money for them to do the necessary legwork to obtain the tickets. That's why you can usually find every game available on the Internet. You are literally paying them to broker a deal for you, guaranteeing that you get the ticket for the large cost. Your best bet is to do what my wife and I were planning to do... go to the venue and try to get them from a scalper. Even though FIFA claims that each ticket will be assigned to a person with ID required, I highly doubt that security will be checking all of the people's ID and tickets to verify. If you have a ticket to get in, you'll probably get in.

I wish I could give you more advice about Germany, but I've never been. Our basic itinerary is:

4 nights in Cologne (USA-Czech Republic in Gelsenkirchen)
3 nights in Alsace France (USA-Italy in Kaiserslautern)
3 nights in Zell Austria
2 nights in Munich (USA-Ghana in Nuremberg)

I'm getting most of the "non-World Cup" plans to fill my itinerary through this website. I basically built the schedule around the games, grabbed accommodations, and am now in the research phase. This website is great for that research, I've discovered.

Last piece of advice: Get your hotels squared away soon! You likely will struggle to find hotels in the vicinity of the stadiums, so plan on getting a rental car to drive.

Hope this helped! Good luck.

Ken

I am staying along the Moselle which is within 3 hours of 5 of the stadiums (including Stuttgart). I requested from about 10 hotels in this area and they all still had vacancy.

Ken,
If you haven't already, you should check out a Yahoo! group called YanksinGermany. It is a board where there is a lot of information sharing by Americans going to the World Cup this summer. I secured tickets to matches in Hamburg and Berlin but plan to scalp tickets in the event the US makes it to round of 16.

ragdoll,

are you implying you might be willing to sell your tickets?

If so, pls let me know!

No, sorry to get you all excited. We plan on attending the Hamburg and Berlin matches although the Hamburg one may be a sleeper (KSA vs UKR). We'll then wait to see how US fairs and maybe try to scalp some tix. Have you been unsuccessful in scoring some tix to your home town match?

Ragdoll,

Thanks for the advice. I'll definitely check it out. I've gotten most of the itinerary squared away and even have a good portion of the in-between time planned out. It should be a great time!

Ken