Movies Interesting Facts LONDON — Thousands of Taylor Swift fans who missed her U.S. concert tour last year or didn’t want to buy exorbitantly priced tickets to see her again found a unique solution: fly to Europe. ,
The pop star is set to kick off the 18-city Europe leg of her record-setting Erasure Tour in Paris on Thursday, and planes of Swifties are planning to follow Miss Americana across the pond in the coming weeks. The area where Swift is appearing said Americans have purchased 20% of the tickets for her four sold-out shows. About 10,000 concertgoers from the US are expected in Stockholm, the tour’s next stop.
A concert might seem like a strange reason to travel to a foreign country, especially when fans can watch the Eras Tour from home via the documentary now streaming on Disney. Yet online travel company Expedia says the continent-hopping by Swift devotees is part of a larger trend it has dubbed “tour tourism,” noting a pattern that emerged during Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour.
Some North American fans planning to go abroad for the Eras Tour said that due to the strict restrictions on ticket fees and resale in Europe it is no more expensive for Swift to perform abroad – and potentially cheaper – than her at home. After a closer look they justified the expense.
“He said, ‘Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 to see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can take that $1,500 and buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane ticket and a hotel room. “I can buy three nights,” said Melanie Fish, Expedia spokeswoman and travel expert.
This was the experience of 43-year-old Jennifer Warren, who lives in St. Catharines, a city in the Niagara region of Ontario. She and her 11-year-old son love Swift, but they couldn’t find reasonably priced tickets in the US, which didn’t bother them. Frustrated by this, Warren and her husband decided to plan a European vacation wherever they could find seats. It turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.
“You get out, you get to see the world, and you get to see your favorite artist or artist at the same time, so it’s a lot of wins,” said Warren, who serves as director of research and innovation. ” For a mutual insurance company.
The three VIP tickets he acquired close to the stage – “I would call it brute luck” – cost 600 euros each. Swift later announced six November tour dates in Toronto, within driving distance of Warren’s home. “Absolute nose-bleed seats” are already available for $3,000 Canadian on secondary resale sites like Viagogo, Warren said.
Hardcore fans following their favorite singer or band on tour is not a new phenomenon. “Groupie” emerged in the late 1960s as a somewhat derogatory term for enthusiastic followers of rock bands. Deadheads took to the road in the 1970s to follow the Grateful Dead from city to city.
Recently, music festivals like California’s Coachella and England’s Glastonbury and concert residencies in Las Vegas by people like Elton John, Lady Gaga and Adele have attracted travelers to places they might not have otherwise visited, Fish said.
Travel and leisure analysts have also noted increased consumer demand for “experiences” over physical goods since the coronavirus pandemic. Some think that music fans’ desire to broaden their fan horizons is part of the same collective cultural reform.
“It seems like this is more than a structural shift, maybe a personality shift that we’ve all gone through,” said Natalia Lechmanova, chief Europe economist at the MasterCard Economics Institute.
As Swift hopscotches across Europe, Lechmanova expects restaurants and hotels to get the same boost that MasterCard saw within a 2.5-mile radius of concert venues in U.S. cities in 2023. The stronger value of the US dollar against the euro could also boost retail spending, the economist said, on supplies such as apparel, souvenirs, beauty products and friendship bracelets for fans to exchange as part of the Eras Tour experience.
Former college roommates Lizzie Hale, 34, who lives in Los Angeles, and Mitch Golding, 33, who lives in Austin, Texas, already had tickets to see the Eras Tour in L.A. last summer when they visited Paris Decided to try to get a ticket to London or Edinburgh, Scotland too. They considered a Europe concert tour as preparation for their travel plans to celebrate Goulding’s birthday in May 2020, but it had to be canceled due to the pandemic.
Goulding managed to secure VIP tickets to one of Swift’s three Stockholm shows. He, Hale and two other friends planned a 10-day trip that included time in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
Hale, who is pregnant with her first child, said, “As people who love to travel and enjoy music, if you can get an opportunity to combine the two, that’s really special. ”
What zeitgeists have called “Swiftonomics” and “Swift Lift” could have substantial local economic impact. It’s no surprise that the special arrangement the Singapore government made with Swift earlier this year to make the city-state her only tour stop in Southeast Asia sparked regional jealousy.
No European governments have complained about their countries not being among the dozen selected for the Europe leg of the Eras Tour, although some fans have expressed surprise that Gelsenkirchen, a city of about 264,000, was among the three cities in Germany. Is one of. cut.
Airbnb reported Tuesday that searches on its platform for the U.K. cities where Swift is performing in June and August — Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff and London — are up an average of 337% from when tickets went on sale last summer. increased.
When it comes to trend-spotting, the property rental company has cited the demand as an example of “passion tourism” or travel “driven by music, sports and other cultural events.”
In Stockholm, 120,000 outsiders from 130 countries – including 10,000 from the US – are expected to arrive in the Swedish capital this month, said Carl Bergqvist, chief economist at the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. Stockholm is the only Scandinavian city on Swift’s tour, she said, and airlines added extra flights from nearby Denmark, Finland and Norway to bring people to the May 17-19 shows.
Bergquist said the city’s 40,000 hotel rooms have been sold out, even as prices for tour dates have skyrocketed. She said concert visitors are expected to invest about 500 million Swedish kronor, or more than $46 million, into the local economy during their stay, an estimate that includes what they paid for Swift tickets or to travel to Sweden. Not there.
“So this is going to be huge for the tourism sector in Sweden and especially Stockholm,” Bergqvist said.
Nightclubs, restaurants and bars are taking advantage of the opportunity to cater to fans with Taylor Swift-themed events such as karaoke, quizzes and post-concert dance parties.
Houston resident Caroline Matlock, 29, saw Swift more than a year ago when the Eras Tour came to the Texas city. Now she’s making more friendship bracelets and trying to learn a few words of Swedish as she prepares to see a 3 1/2-hour show in Stockholm. It was his friend’s idea to see Swift in Europe, and Matlock needed some convincing first.
“I was like, ‘I only want to go if it’s a country I haven’t been to. I’ve seen Taylor Swift,'” she said.
Their itinerary includes visits to the Scandinavian cities Oslo and Gothenburg. The concert is the last night of the tour and Matlock is looking forward to interacting with Swifties from other countries: “Americans have a very obsessive culture, especially related to Taylor Swift, so I’m curious if the crowd will be more down-to-earth. ”
It remains to be seen whether the music tourism trend is as long and strong as Swift and Beyoncé’s, and whether it will catch up to Billie Eilish, Usher and other artists with world tours scheduled next year. Expedia’s Fish thinks other big-name artists in Europe this summer will prove that booking foreign travel around a concert is catching on.
Nashville-based travel advisor Kat Morga isn’t so sure. Morga saw Swift perform in Nashville last year and helped two clients with school-age children book European family vacations this summer that included seeing Swift in concert. But she thinks the difficulty of navigating ticket purchases through language barriers, currency conversion, international banking regulations and the risk of cancellation will limit the appeal of regular gig getaways.
“I think it’s an anomaly,” Morga said. “People are generally not going to make their big $20,000 family vacation just because Taylor Swift is there. That’s a one-off. He is special.”
Glenn Fogel, CEO of Booking Holdings, whose company operates Booking.com, Priceline.com, agoda.com, Kayak and OpenTable, is even less enthusiastic about concert tours as a tourism catalyst. The Swift Effect causes a “little miss” when a superstar visits smaller destinations, but for the worldwide travel industry, “a star moving around doesn’t matter,” he said.
“It might just shift it a little bit. A man was going to a Caribbean country to spend a week’s vacation. Instead the guy said, ‘Let’s take a trip to the Taylor Swift thing,'” Fogel said. ‘It doesn’t enhance it. It just takes it from here to there.”
Journalists Colleen Barry in Milan, Chisato Tanaka in Stockholm, Anne D’Innocenzio in New York, David Koenig in Dallas, Thomas Adamson in Paris and Brian Melly in London contributed reporting.
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