Tim Brown, 44, and his wife Marcella, 34, may not consider themselves literal “Fasts,” but when it was announced last June that Taylor Swift would be visiting their corner of the world this summer, they couldn’t resist joining the fray. for a pair of tickets.
The post-pandemic appetite for live music events has fueled worldwide interest in the American singer-songwriter’s Eras tour, which surpassed $1 billion in sales in November, becoming the highest-grossing concert series in history.
The summer pop culture event will also reach Europe next month, kicking off in Paris on 9 May and ending in London on 20 August, with 49 dates in Sweden, Ireland, Portugal, Germany, Poland, Austria, Spain and Italy. , Netherlands and Switzerland.
The unique nature of the tour’s ticketing system, which has been tweaked following a number of disruptions last year, means there will be a mass movement of Swiftie-like travel enthusiasts who are not only Swiftie members but are keen to travel the continent.
In anticipation of popular demand, Ticketmaster has launched a pre-registration system that rewards some early applicants with access codes to convenient ticket sales through staggered windows for each city.
Conceptually designed to prioritize genuine fans over genuine fans, i.e. those who buy and resell tickets to make a quick profit, the pre-sale system also meant that many fans signed up for tickets at multiple destinations across Europe to increase their chances.
Tim and Marcella, who live in Norwich, have booked not only the nearest gigs in London and Liverpool, but also gigs in Amsterdam and Lisbon. The couple got lucky with a pair of €91 tickets in the Portuguese capital, turning the trip into a weekend break. “I used to live in Lisbon and thought why not kill two birds with one stone,” Tim said. “We booked ourselves a flight and a four-night stay on the same day.” They are far from alone.
Katie Soo, chief operating officer of rival ticketing company DICE, said: “The excitement and uncertainty around the ticket-buying process may have inadvertently encouraged fans to apply for tickets in multiple cities, thus increasing the likelihood of traveling across Europe to attend concerts.”
Hotel prices
Many European cities reported sharply increased demand for hotels and short-term rental accommodation during the summer as Hurricane Swift approached. Swift’s June dates at the Travelodge chain in Edinburgh, Liverpool and Cardiff have been sold out since August 2023, a month after show tickets went on sale.
In Paris, where fans are waiting for Swift to debut an updated version of her Eras show with songs from her new album by the Department of Tortured Poets, 80% of hotels and apartments listed on Booking.com are already full. As of August 2, only 9% of hotels in Warsaw listed on the same site are still available.
Not all of the 18 cities covered by the Eras tour are obvious tourism destinations. Swift will perform three concerts between July 17 and 19 at the 65,000-capacity ground of the Schalke 04 football club in Gelsenkirchen in West Germany’s Ruhr valley. The city’s not-so-familiar name prompted a US chat show host to joke that “this place might not even exist.”
But even in Germany’s rust belt, the influx of Swift fans is temporarily changing the hotel market: The remaining two-bedroom apartments available are selling for 800-2,000 euros per night; Cheaper accommodation is only available in surrounding cities outside the city. The usual tourist trail like Essen, Bochum or Herne to Gelsenkirchen.
Cities with stricter rules on allowing Airbnb-style holiday lets and where the stock of short-term rentals is more limited saw a particularly marked rise in prices at the time of Swift’s visit, with rental prices in Cardiff up nearly 30% year-on-year reports. Edinburgh and Milan, according to AirDNA, a data analytics company specializing in the short-term rental market.
Of all the tour’s European stops, Vienna is experiencing the most notable impact on the rental market, where booking rates for Swift’s concert nights in February were 44% higher than at the same point a year earlier. By the end of March, the number of nights booked in the Austrian capital during Swift’s 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 daughters Lena and Maya, 13 and 15, tickets to a Taylor Swift concert for Christmas, the 53-year-old Briton initially declined the offer. “I thought we had no chance of getting a ticket without paying through our noses,” said Tilden, who works as a translator at the European Parliament in Brussels.
But after pre-registering for tickets in London, Paris and Munich, the Tilden family unexpectedly got the chance for four tickets in southern Germany, turning the concert visit into a mini-vacation: “We will visit the in-laws in Bavaria, enjoy a little walk in the countryside.
The hope in cities across Europe is that this will be repeated on a large scale and that fans’ excitement will translate into lavish spending on food, shopping and entertainment. In Stockholm, for example, where authorities expect 159,000 visitors from 135 countries in mid-May, the chamber of commerce is predicting a €50 million increase in spending. “We hope the whole town will be excited about the Eras tour,” said Tomas Andersson, spokesman for the Swedish capital’s tourism board.
But whether fans will necessarily behave like ordinary tourists is open to debate. “Popular culture tourists don’t pay much attention to traditional buildings and authentic restaurants,” said Maria Lexhagen, a professor at the European Tourism Research Institute at Mid Sweden University.
“Coming together with other fan communities is a stronger motivation, as is the idea that they can get closer to the stars. Many will map where Swift spent her time in the city; they will seek out seemingly marginal but meaningful places like back alleys or cafes. Venues may be hoping for a repeat of Sydney in February, when Swift walked into a modest suburban Italian restaurant and thrust her name into global media headlines.
In Stockholm, the tourism board said it expected bookstores and second-hand clothing stores to attract most visitors, rather than museums and royal palaces. Some venues are being proactive: A restaurant within walking distance of the multi-purpose Friends Arena in the municipality of Solna is hosting a “Taylor Swift brunch experience” with a karaoke stage; waterfront nightclub Debaser will host a pre-concert party on May 16, an all-ages all-ages party featuring a Swift-themed quiz on May 19, and an after-concert party the next day.
Relating to: Taylor Swift dines at Sydney restaurant Pellegrino 2000 – and we missed the story
Environment
As the Swift circus spreads across the continent, the transport infrastructure of city centers will also be put to the test. Around the tour’s three-night stop in Dublin at the end of June, Irish Rail announced additional late-night services to Cork and Limerick to meet the expected increase in demand. Additional tram and bus services are likely to be announced soon.
Unlike rail operators, most airlines do not have the capacity to charter additional flights. Due to yield management (where airlines adjust prices based on expected demand), the struggle to travel by air to cities hosting the Eras tour will likely result in more expensive tickets rather than additional flights.
Officials at Lisbon airport said no additional flights were chartered due to Swift’s concerts on May 24 and 25, but that demand would likely be reflected in slightly higher occupancy rates. A spokesman for Amsterdam Schiphol said general aviation slots could be claimed at short notice but nothing unusual had been recorded so far.
Experts said it was difficult to calculate the exact environmental impact of the tour. “We can expect some Swift fans to travel a long way to see one, if not several, shows across Europe,” said Stefan Gössling, a professor of tourism at Linnaeus University in Kalmar, Sweden. “But measuring the environmental impact of these trips is extremely difficult; it requires a lot of guesswork.”
This did not mean that the carbon footprint was negligible. “Every flight someone takes contributes to demand and therefore affects supply issues,” Gössling said. “The greater the demand, the more aircraft will come into service.”
It’s easier to estimate a pop star’s carbon footprint. Swift owns two jets owned by French manufacturer Dassault, whose journeys can be tracked. On the 2023 leg of her Eras tour, Swift’s planes spent 166 hours crisscrossing the United States on approximately 75 separate trips, though it’s possible they were driven by people other than the singer.
According to data obtained through the open-access aviation tracking system ADS-B exchange, Swift’s jets caused carbon emissions of approximately 2,830 tons of CO2.2 US equivalent during Eras tour; approximately 1,700 times the annual contribution of the average person.
A spokesperson for Swift told US media last year that the pop star had purchased more than twice the carbon credits needed to offset all tour travel before the tour kicks off in March 2023. Carbon offset credits are tradable certificates that allow recipients to offset emissions by investing in environmental projects that claim to reduce carbon emissions; however, recent research questions the effectiveness of these plans.
Additional reporting by Ajit Niranjan