VANCOUVER - To say thank you for sharing his life, Jeff Barber wants to give his adoptive father the gift of a lifetime -- a trip to the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

The Santa Clarita, Calif., resident is crossing his fingers that he'll find out this week that at least some of the tickets he's requested will come through.

In the mean time he's trying to scale the next hurdle in getting to the Games: Finding a place to stay.

Barber has called area hotels, sent e-mails to everyone he knows asking if they have any friends in Vancouver and even offered his house in California as a swap. He finally posted an online ad asking for help.

So far, he's had some nibbles but no bites.

"I'm pretty simple. If there's a queen-sized bed somewhere, and we're sharing a bed, that's fine with me," he said.

"I'm not looking for luxury."

Vancouver Olympic organizers begin charging credit cards this week for the millions of dollars in ticket orders they received during the first phase of sales this fall.

Many tickets will be allocated by lottery, but when it comes to securing a hotel room for the Olympics, it's first-come, first-serve, and the organizing committee is at the front of the line.

Of the 26,000 hotel rooms in the Lower Mainland, Olympic organizers have a lock on about half to provide accommodation for Olympic officials and the media.

They still haven't been able to find enough space for all their workers and are once again pondering the use of cruise ships.

Volunteers are expected to be accommodated by a homestay program. The homestay registry is expected to launch in December.

The security team and sponsor staff also need hundreds of rooms.

The RCMP-led security unit has also taken over part of at least one hotel and, like the organizing committee, are looking for cruise ships for more of their staff to stay.

Finally, another chunk of area hotel rooms are held by the official hospitality providers and still more have been snapped up by travel companies.

So, how many rooms does that leave for people like Barber to rent?

"Until we get into the New Year, it's going to be very difficult to make any predictions,"said James Chase, the chief executive officer of the B.C. Hotel Association.

While finding accommodation has been a headache for those with official Olympic affiliation, tourism officials are loathe to have it become a headache for spectators as well, seeing as it'll form a key part of their impression of the cities, province and country playing host to the world.

"There hasn't typically been a very well organized system for (spectators)," said Raymond Chan, the chairman of the 2010 Tourism Consortium, which is bringing together tourism officials from across the Lower Mainland, the province and the national level.

They were asked by the organizing committee to find a solution and have developed the 2010 Destination Planner, a online resource that includes an accommodations database.

The listings are sparse at the moment but Chan thinks once the one-year countdown hits next February and hotels and airlines open their calendars for bookings, the inventory will expand.

Private homeowners, on the other hand, aren't waiting.

On rent2010.net, there are currently close to 400 properties listed with an average asking price for a room in Vancouver at $389 a night, according to the site's administrator, Mark Szekely.

"There's a mixture of the very reasonable to the very unreasonable," Szekely.

"It's still quite early, there's a lot of uncertainty among home owners what the market will bear in winter 2010."

Officials are already seeing a trend similar to other Games -- both hotels and private owners asking sky-high rates for rooms and spectators refusing to pay.

The end result in both Torino and Salt Lake was empty rooms, said Candice Gibson, manager of consumer marketing at Tourism Vancouver and the co-chair of the 2010 spectator accommodations group for the tourism consortium.

"That can happen and that would be a real shame if that happened in Vancouver," she said.

"So we're warning them about that at every juncture and just promoting to them a good, solid and, we think, fair way of pricing."

They're suggesting hotels average their high-season rate for the last three years and add an Olympic premium of 15 to 20 per cent.

But in Whistler, even that kind of pricing is being viewed as exorbitant, with some media outlets balking at the $350 a night hotels are asking for rooms.

Laura Radley, 29, is also balking.

She and her hockey-loving husband are hoping to come from California to the Games and were hoping to rent an apartment. But she can't believe how much people are asking for a room.

"The tickets are so expensive themselves," she said.

"Now that we're looking into lodging, we're thinking how are we even going to make this work?"

For Barber, coming to the Olympics represents what he thinks is the last chance for some bonding time with his father, a Montreal native now in his 70s, and who was once a drummer for the Royal Canadian Air Force.

"Once I pressed that reserve button (for the tickets), we're going," he said.

"I'll make it work somehow."