LONDON (AP) — Thousands roll or die Taylor Swift the fans who lack during her concert tour in the United States last year or who did not want to buy exorbitantly priced tickets to see her again, found an insane solution: fly to Europe.
The pop star is set to kick off her European leg in 18 cities Eras Tour record in Paris on Thursday, and planeloads of Swifties plan to follow Miss Americana across the pond in the coming weeks. The arena where Swift performs said Americans bought 20% of the tickets to her four sold-out shows. Stockholm, next stop on the tour, expects around 10,000 American spectators
A concert might seem like a strange reason to visit a foreign country, especially when fans can watch the Eras Tour from home via the documentary now streaming on Disney+. However, an online travel agency Expedia says Swift’s followers traveling from continent to continent are part of a larger trend he’s dubbed “travel tourism,” while also observing a trend that emerged during Beyoncé’s campaign. Renaissance World Tour.
Some North American fans planning to travel abroad for the Eras tour said they justified the expense after noticing restrictions were tighter. restrictions on ticket fees and resales in Europe made seeing Swift perform abroad no more expensive – and potentially cheaper – than catching her. closer to home.
“They said, ‘Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 to go see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can take that $1,500 and buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane ticket and three nights in a hotel room,” Melanie Fish, an Expedia spokesperson and travel expert, said.
That’s the experience of Jennifer Warren, 43, who lives in St. Catharines, a city in Ontario’s Niagara region. She and her 11-year-old son love Swift but I had no chance to score what she considered to be reasonably priced tickets to the United States. Undeterred, Warren and her husband decided to plan a vacation to Europe wherever she could find places. It turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.
“You go out, you see the world and you see your favorite artist or performer at the same time, so there’s a lot of payoff,” said Warren, who works as director of research and innovation. for mutual insurance.
The three VIP tickets she purchased near the stage – “I would call it brute force luck” – cost 600 euros each. Swift then announced six tour dates in November in Toronto, a short drive from Warren’s home. The “absolute nosebleed seats” are already selling for C$3,000 ($2,194) on secondary resale sites like Viagogo, Warren said.
TOUR TOURISM: IS IT REALLY A THING?
Die-hard fans following their favorite singer or band on tour is not a new phenomenon. “Groupie” emerged in the late 1960s as a somewhat derogatory word for ardent fans of rock bands. The Deadheads hit the road in the 1970s chasing the Grateful Dead from town to town.
More recently, music festivals like Coachella in California and Glastonbury in England, and Las Vegas concert residencies by Elton John, Lady Gaga and Adele have drawn travelers to places they wouldn’t otherwise visit, Fish noted .
Travel and entertainment analysts have also spoken of pent-up consumer demand for “experiences” on material objects since the coronavirus pandemic. Some think that will of music lovers expanding their fandom horizons is part of the same mass cultural correction.
“It seems like it’s more than a structural change, maybe a personality transformation that we all experienced,” said Natalia Lechmanova, Mastercard’s chief economist in Europe.
As Quick hopscotches Across Europe, Lechmanova expects restaurants and hotels to experience the same boom that Mastercard has seen within a 2.5-mile radius of concert halls in the U.S. cities she visited in 2023. strong value of the US dollar against the euro could also increase. retail spending on clothing, souvenirs, beauty products and supplies for the friendship bracelets that fans exchange as part of the Eras Tour experience, the economist said.
Lizzy Hale, 34, who lives in Los Angeles, and Mitch Goulding, 33, who lives in Austin, Texas, former college roommates, already had tickets to see the Eras Tour in Los Angeles last summer when They decided to try to get one for Paris. London or Edinburgh, Scotland too. They considered a concert trip to Europe as compensation for travel plans they had in May 2020 to celebrate Goulding’s birthday, but had to cancel due to the pandemic.
Goulding managed to secure VIP tickets to one of Swift’s three shows in Stockholm. He, Hale and two other friends have scheduled a 10-day trip that also includes time in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.
“As someone who loves to travel and appreciate music, if you can find an opportunity to combine the two, that’s really special,” said Hale, who is pregnant with her first child.
FOR STOCKHOLM, 120,000 SWIFTIES CANNOT BE FAKE
The local economic impact of what the zeitgeist calls “Swifttonomics” and “Swift lift” can be considerable. Airbnb reported Tuesday that searches on its platform for British cities where Swift is performing in June and August – Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff and London – increased by an average of 337% when tickets went on sale last summer .
Not to be outdone when it comes to trend detection, the real estate rental company cited the demand as an example of “passion tourism” or trips “driven by concerts, sports and other cultural events.”
In Stockholm, 120,000 foreigners from 130 countries, including 10,000 from the United States, are expected to invade the Swedish capital this month, said Carl Bergqvist, chief economist of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. Stockholm is the only Scandinavian city on Swift’s tour, and airlines have added extra flights from neighboring Denmark, Finland and Norway to bring people to the May 17-19 shows, a- he declared.
The city’s 40,000 hotel rooms are sold out even though prices have skyrocketed for tour dates, Bergqvist said. Concert visitors are expected to inject about 500 million Swedish crowns, or more than $46 million, into the local economy during their stay, an estimate that does not include what they paid for Swift or to get to Sweden, he said.
“So this is going to be huge for the tourism sector in Sweden and Stockholm in particular,” Bergqvist said.
Nightclubs, restaurants and bars are taking the opportunity to indulge their fans with Taylor Swift-themed events, such as karaoke, quizzes and post-concert dancing 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 the three-and-a-half-hour show in Stockholm. The idea of seeing Swift in Europe was her friend’s, 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 saw Taylor Swift,’” she said.
A visit to the Swedish cities of Oslo and Gothenburg is on the program. The concert is the last evening of the trip and Matlock is looking forward to interacting with Swifties from other countries: “Americans tend to have a very obsessive culture, especially one related to Taylor Swift, so I’m curious if the crowd will be more energetic. down.”
WILL TOURIST TOURISM LAST AFTER TIMES?
It remains to be seen whether the music tourism trend has legs as long and strong as those of Swift and Beyoncé, and whether it will spread to Billie Eilish, Usher and other artists whose world tours are planned next year . Expedia’s Fish believes other big-name acts in Europe this summer will prove that booking a trip abroad around a concert is catching on.
Kat Morga, a Nashville-based travel consultant, isn’t so sure. Morga saw Swift perform in Nashville last year and helped two clients with school-aged children book family vacations to Europe this summer, including seeing Swift in concert. But she thinks the difficulty of managing ticket purchases across language barriers, currency conversions, international banking regulations and the risk of cancellation will limit the appeal of regular getaways.
“I think it’s an anomaly,” Morga said. “People generally aren’t going to build their huge $20,000 family vacation just because Taylor Swift is there. She is unique. She 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 instigator. The Swift effect causes a “small incident” when the superstar travels to smaller destinations, but for the global travel industry, “a star on tour makes no difference,” he said.
“It might just change things a little.” Someone was going on a week’s vacation to the Caribbean. Instead, this person (says), ‘Let’s move on to the Taylor Swift thing,'” Fogel said. “It doesn’t increase it. It just moves it from here to there.
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AP 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 Melley in London contributed to this report.
