by Tim Brown, 44, and his wife, Marcella, 34, might not consider themselves bona fide “Swifties”, but when it was announced last June that Taylor Swift would be visiting their corner of the world the this summer they could not resist taking part in the scramble. for a pair of tickets.
The post-pandemic appetite for live music events has fueled global interest in the American singer-songwriter’s Eras tour, which surpassed $1bn in sales in November to become the highest-grossing concert series in history.
The summer pop culture event will reach Europe next month, kicking off in Paris on May 9th and wrapping up in London on August 20th with 49 dates between them in Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Austria, the Spain, Italy. , the Netherlands and Switzerland.
The unique nature of the tour’s ticketing system, which was revamped after a number of hiccups last year, will see a mass movement of travel fans who will not only be Swiftie-inclined but quick and willing to travel across the continent. .
Anticipating strong demand, Ticketmaster introduced a pre-registration system that rewarded some early applicants with access codes to the right ticket sales, via staggered windows for each city.
Ostensibly designed to give genuine fans priority over “scalpers” – people who buy and resell tickets for a quick profit – the pre-sale system also meant many fans signed up for tickets in destinations multiple across Europe to increase their chances.
Tim and Marcella, who live in Norwich, signed up not only for the nearest concerts – in London and Liverpool – but also in Amsterdam and Lisbon. The two were lucky with a pair of €91 tickets in the Portuguese capital and the trip is a weekend break. “I was living in Lisbon so I thought why not kill two birds with one stone,” said Tim. “We booked flights and four nights accommodation on the same day.” They are far from alone.
Katie Soo, chief business officer of rival ticketing company DICE, said: “The excitement and uncertainty of the ticket buying process may inadvertently encourage fans to apply for tickets in different cities, increasing the likelihood of them traveling across Europe. attend the concerts.”
Hotel prices
Some European cities have already reported a sharp increase in demand for hotel accommodation and short-term rentals during the summer, when hurricane Swift arrives. In Edinburgh, Liverpool and Cardiff, rooms in the Travelodge chain around Swift’s June dates are sold out from August 2023, a month after tickets for the shows go on sale.
In Paris, where fans are expecting Swift to perform an updated version of the Eras show with songs from the new Torture Department album Poets, 80% of the hotels and apartments listed on Booking.com are full. already. In Warsaw on August 2, only 9% of the hotels listed on the same site are still available.
Not all of the 18 cities covered by the Eras tour are obvious tourist destinations. From July 17-19, Swift will play three concerts at the 65,000-capacity home ground of football club Schalke 04 in Gelsenkirchen in the Ruhr Valley, western Germany. The city’s less common name prompted one US chat inn to say “the place might not even exist”.
But even in Germany’s rust belt the influx of Swift fans is temporarily changing the hotel market: any two-bedroom flats still available are going for €800-2,000 a night, and there’s no cheaper accommodation available only in the surrounding cities which are just as far from the place. a typical tourist track like Gelsenkirchen, for example Essen, Bochum or Herne.
Cities with stricter Airbnb-like vacation letting rules and a more limited stock of short-term rental apartments are reporting very significant increases in rates during Swift’s visit, with an increase of around 30% year-on-year on rental rates in Cardiff, Edinburgh and Milan, according to AirDNA, a data analytics company that focuses on the short-term rental market.
Of all the European stops on the tour, Vienna has had the most significant impact on its rental market, with booking rates for Swift’s concert nights recorded in February 44% higher than at the same point the previous year. By the end of March the number of nights booked in the Austrian capital for Swift’s length of stay in the second week of August had increased by 430% compared to the same period in 2023.
Tourism
When Luke Tilden’s wife, Tatjana, suggested last summer that the couple buy their 13- and 15-year-old daughters, Lena and Maya, tickets to a Taylor Swift gig for Christmas, the 53-year-old Briton end it first. “There’s no way in hell we’re going to get an unpaid ticket under our noses, I thought,” said Tilden, who works as an interpreter at the European Parliament in Brussels.
But after pre-registering for tickets in London, Paris and Munich, the Tildens unexpectedly managed to get four tickets in southern Germany and made a mini-holiday for the concert: “We’ll visit the in-laws in Bavaria, enjoy off. the countryside, do a bit of wandering.”
Cities across Europe are expected to replicate this on a massive scale, with fan excitement translating into lavish spending sprees on food, shopping and leisure. In Stockholm, for example, where authorities expect 159,000 visitors from 135 countries to arrive in mid-May, the commercial association has predicted a spending boost of €50m. “We hope that the whole town will be alive from the Eras tour,” said Tomas Andersson, a spokesman for the Swedish capital’s tourism board.
Whether fans will act like ordinary tourists, however, remains to be seen. “Pop culture tourists don’t necessarily care about traditional buildings and authentic restaurants,” said Maria Lexhagen, professor at the European Tourism Research Institute, University of Central Sweden.
“Teaming up with other fan communities is a stronger incentive, as is the idea of getting closer to the stars themselves. Many of them will map out where Swift spends her time in the city – looking for marginal but worthwhile places like back alleys or coffee shops.” Venues may be expecting Sydney again in February, when Swift accidentally swept into an Italian restaurant in the suburbs and thrust her name into global media headlines.
In Stockholm, the tourism board said they expected bookstores and second-hand clothing stores, rather than museums and royal palaces, to attract the majority of visitors. A number of venues are proactive: one restaurant within walking distance of the Friends’ multi-purpose Arena in Solna municipality is putting on a “Taylor Swift brunch experience” with a karaoke stage; the Waterfront nightclub Debaser is hosting a pre-concert party on May 16, an all-ages party with a Swift-themed quiz on May 19 and another party the day after.
Related: Taylor Swift dines at Pellegrino’s Sydney restaurant 2000 – and we missed it
Environment
As the Swift circus travels across the continent, the transport infrastructure of urban centers will also be put to the test. Around the journey’s three-night stop in Dublin at the end of June, Iarnród Éireann has announced additional late-night services to Cork and Limerick to meet the increase in demand. Additional tram and bus services are likely to be announced nearer the time.
Unlike rail operators, most airlines do not have the ability to charter additional flights. Due to yield management – airlines adjusting prices based on expected demand – flights into cities served by Eras are more likely to result in more expensive tickets rather than additional flights.
Officials at Lisbon airport said there were no extra flights chartered around Swift’s concerts on May 24 and 25 but that demand was likely to be reflected in slightly higher load factors. A spokesperson for Amsterdam Schiphol said that general aviation slots could be requested at short notice but that nothing out of the ordinary had been logged so far.
It was difficult to calculate the environmental impact of the trip with any certainty, experts said. “We can expect that some of Swift’s fans will travel far to see one, or more, shows across Europe”, said Stefan Gössling, professor of tourism at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, the Sweden. “But measuring the environmental impact of these trips is extremely difficult – it would involve a lot of guesswork.”
This did not mean that the carbon footprint was negligible. “Every flight someone takes adds to demand and therefore affects supply,” said Gössling. “The greater the demand, the more aircraft in service.”
The carbon footprint of pop stars is easier to estimate. Swift owns two jets with the French manufacturer Dassault, and its journeys can be tracked. During the 2023 leg of the Eras tour, Swift’s planes spent 166 hours criss-crossing the US in about 75 solo trips, although they could be used by people other than the singer.
According to data available through the open aviation tracking exchange ADS-B, Swift jets caused carbon emissions of about 2,830 tonnes of CO.2 equivalent over the course of a US Eras trip – about 1,700 times the average person’s annual contribution.
A spokesperson for Swift told US media last year that, before the tour began in March 2023, the pop star bought more than twice the carbon credits needed to offset each tour trip. Carbon offset credits are tradable certificates that allow buyers to offset emissions by investing in environmental projects that claim to reduce carbon emissions, although recent studies have questioned the effectiveness of such schemes.
Additional reporting by Ajit Niranjan
