Swifties are following Taylor Swift to Europe after finding cheaper Eras Tour tickets

Thousands of ride-or-die 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 remote solution: fly to Europe.

The pop star has kicked off the 18-city European leg of her record-breaking Eras Tour in Paris and planeloads of Swifties plan to follow Miss Americana across the pond in the coming weeks. The arena where Swift performs says Americans have bought 20 percent of the tickets for her four sold-out shows. Stockholm, the tour’s next stop, expects about 10,000 concertgoers from the US.

A concert may sound like an odd reason to visit a foreign country, especially when fans can watch the Eras Tour from home via the documentary now streaming on Disney+. Still, online travel company Expedia says the continent-hopping by Swift’s devotees is part of a larger trend it calls “tour tourism,” observing a pattern that emerged during Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour.

Some North American fans planning to fly abroad for the Eras Tour said they justified the cost after noting that tighter restrictions on ticket prices and resale in Europe don’t make seeing Swift abroad more expensive (and potentially cheaper) than seeing her closer to home.

“They said, ‘Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 ($2,488) to go see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can use that $1,500 and buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane ticket and three nights’ accommodation. a hotel room,” said Melanie Fish, Expedia spokesperson and travel expert.

That was 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 had no luck scoring what she considered reasonably priced tickets in the US. Undeterred, Warren and her husband decided to plan a European vacation around wherever she could snag a seat. It turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.

“You get out, you see the world and you see your favorite artist or performer at the same time, so there are a lot of wins to be had,” Warren said.

The three VIP tickets she secured close to the stage – “I would call it brute force and dumb luck” – cost €600 ($1,073) each. Swift then announced six tour dates in November in Toronto, within driving distance of Warren’s home. “Absolute nosebleed chairs” go for as little as 3,000 Canadian dollars ($3,637) on secondary resale sites like Viagogo, Warren said.

Tourism: does it really exist?

Hard-core 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 the avid followers of rock bands. Deadheads took to the road in the 1970s to chase the Grateful Dead from town to town.

More recently, music festivals such as Coachella in California and Glastonbury in England, and concert residencies in Las Vegas by the likes of Elton John, Lady Gaga and Adele, have drawn travelers to places they might not otherwise visit, Fish noted.

Travel and entertainment analysts have also spoken of pent-up consumer demand for ‘experiences’ over material objects since the Covid pandemic. Some think that music lovers’ willingness to expand their fandom horizons is part of the same massive cultural correction.

“It seems like it is more than a structural change, perhaps a personality transformation that we have all gone through,” said Natalia Lechmanova, the chief European economist at the Mastercard Economics Institute.

As Swift hopscotches around Europe, Lechmanova expects restaurants and hotels to see the same boost as Mastercard within a four-mile radius of concert halls in the US. cities she visited in 2023. The United States. The dollar’s strength against the euro could also boost retail spending on clothing, memorabilia, beauty products and supplies for the friendship bracelets fans exchange as part of the Eras Tour experience, the economist said.

Former college roommates Lizzy Hale, 34, who lives in Los Angeles, and Mitch Goulding, 33, who lives in Austin, Texas, already had tickets to the Eras Tour in LA last summer when they decided to try for Paris to obtain. London or Edinburgh, Scotland too. They saw a concert tour of Europe as an addition to the travel plans they had in May 2020 to celebrate Goulding’s birthday, but had to cancel due to the pandemic.

Goulding managed to get VIP tickets to one of Swift’s three shows in Stockholm. He, Hale and two other friends planned a ten-day trip, including time in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

“As people who love travel and music, it’s really special when you can find the opportunity to combine the two,” Hale said.

For Stockholm, 120,000 Swifties can’t be wrong

The local economic impact of what the zeitgeist has dubbed ‘Swiftonomics’ and the ‘Swift lift’ could be significant. It’s no wonder that the Singapore government’s exclusive deal with Swift to make the city-state her only tour stop in Southeast Asia earlier this year sparked regional jealousy.

No European government has complained that their countries are not among the dozens selected for the European leg of the Eras Tour, although some fans have expressed surprise that Gelsenkirchen, a city of about 264,000 inhabitants, is one of the three cities in Germany is the cut.

Airbnb reported on Tuesday that it is searching for Great Britain on its platform. cities where Swift performs in June and August – Edinburgh, Liverpool, Cardiff and London – increased by an average of 337 percent when tickets went on sale last summer.

Not to be outdone when it comes to spotting trends, the real estate rental company cited demand as an example of “passion tourism,” or travel “driven by concerts, sports and other cultural events.”

In Stockholm, 120,000 out-of-towners from 130 countries – including 10,000 from the US – are expected to flood 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, and airlines have added extra flights from nearby Denmark, Finland and Norway to take people to the May 17-19 shows, he said.

The city’s 40,000 hotel rooms are sold out, even as prices for tour dates have skyrocketed, Bergqvist said. Concertgoers are expected to pump some 500 million Swedish kronor, or more than $73.8 million, into the local economy over the course of their stay, an estimate that doesn’t include what they paid for Swift tickets or to go 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 seizing 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 attend the 3.5-hour show in Stockholm. The idea to see Swift in Europe came from her friend, and Matlock initially took some convincing.

“I was like, ‘I only want to go there if it’s a country I’ve never been to. I saw Taylor Swift,” she said.

A visit to the Scandinavian cities of Oslo and Gothenburg is on the program. The concert is the last night of the trip and Matlock is looking forward to interacting with Swifties from other countries: “Americans tend to have a very obsessive culture, especially Taylor Swift-related, so I’m curious to see if the audience will be a bit more vocal are. down.”

Will tourism survive after Eras?

It remains to be seen whether the music tourism trend has as long and strong legs as those of Swift and Beyoncé, and whether it will carry over to Billie Eilish, Usher and other artists with world tours planned next year. Expedia’s Fish thinks other major artists in Europe will prove this summer that booking a trip abroad around a concert is catching on.

Kat Morga, a travel consultant based in Nashville, isn’t so sure. Morga saw Swift perform in Nashville last year and this summer helped two clients with school-age children book European family vacations that included seeing Swift in concert. But she thinks the difficulty of buying tickets due to language barriers, currency conversions, international banking regulations and the risk of cancellations will limit the appeal of regular performances.

“I think this is an anomaly,” Morga said. “People don’t normally go and build their huge $20,000 family vacation just because Taylor Swift is there. She’s the only one. 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 travel as a driver of tourism. The Swift Effect causes a “little blip” when the superstar goes to smaller destinations, but for the global travel industry, “one star touring makes no difference,” he said.

“It can shift a little bit. Someone would go to the Caribbean for a week’s vacation. Instead, (that person says), ‘Let’s travel to this Taylor Swift thing,’” Fogel said. “It doesn’t increase it. It just moves it from here to there.