Taylor Swift fans are flying to Europe for cheaper tickets to the Eras Tour

LONDON (AP) – Thousands of Taylor Swift fans who missed her U.S. tour last year or didn’t want to buy exorbitant ticket prices to see her again have found an unusual solution: Fly to Europe.

The pop star is set to kick off the European leg of her record-breaking 18-city Eras Tour on Thursday in Paris, and in the coming weeks, planeloads of Swifties plan to accompany Miss Americana overseas. The arena where Swift performs reported that Americans bought 20% of tickets to her four sold-out concerts. Stockholm, the next stop on the tour, is expecting about 10,000 spectators from the United States.

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

Some North American fans who plan to fly abroad for the Eras Tour felt they justified the expense, noting that tighter restrictions on ticket fees and resale in Europe make it no more costly for Swift to perform overseas – and potentially cheaper – than catching it closer to home.

“They said, ‘Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 to see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can use that $1,500 to buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane, and three nights in a hotel room.’ 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 haven’t been able to get tickets for what she thought were decent prices in the US. Undeterred, Warren and her husband decided to plan a European vacation wherever she could get places. It turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.

“You go out and see the world and you see your favorite artist or performer at the same time, so there are a lot of wins involved,” said Warren, who works as director of research and innovation for a mutual insurance company.

The three VIP tickets she secured near the stage – “I would call it brute force dumb luck” – cost 600 euros ($646) each. Swift then announced six November tour dates in Toronto, near Warren’s home. Warren said the “absolute nosebleed seats” already go for C$3,000 ($2,194) on secondary resale sites like Viagogo.

Tourist tourism: does it really exist?

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 offensive word to describe ardent supporters of rock bands. In the 1970s, Deadheads went on the road, chasing the Grateful Dead from city to city.

Fish noted that recently, music festivals such as Coachella in California and Glastonbury in England, as well as Las Vegas concert residencies for artists such as Elton John, Lady Gaga and Adele, are drawing tourists to places they might not otherwise visit.

Travel and entertainment analysts also cited pent-up consumer demand for “experiences” related to tangible items since the coronavirus pandemic. Some believe that music lovers’ desire to expand the horizons of their fandom is part of the same mass cultural correction.

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

While Swift hopscotches around Europe, Lechmanova expects restaurants and hotels to see the same growth Mastercard saw within a 4-kilometer radius of concert halls in the U.S. cities she visited in 2023. Strong value of the U.S. dollar against the euro could also increase retail spending on clothing, souvenirs, beauty products and supplies as fans exchange friendship bracelets during the Eras Tour, 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 Los Angeles last summer when they decided to try to get tickets to Paris, London or Edinburgh, in Scotland too. They saw a concert tour of Europe as an addition to travel plans they had in May 2020 to celebrate Goulding’s birthday, but had to cancel the trip due to the pandemic.

Goulding managed to get VIP tickets to one of Swift’s three performances in Stockholm. He, Hale and two other friends planned a 10-day trip that also included time in Amsterdam and Copenhagen.

“For people who like to travel and listen to music, if you can find an opportunity to combine those two things, it will be really special,” said Hale, who is pregnant with her first child.

In the case of Stockholm, 120,000 swifts can’t be wrong

The local economic impact of what the zeitgeist has dubbed “Swiftonomics” and “Swift Lift” could be significant. Not surprisingly, the exclusive arrangement the Singapore government struck with Swift earlier this year to make the city-state its only stop in Southeast Asia has sparked envy in the region.

No European government has complained that its country was not among the dozen selected for the European leg of the Eras Tour, although some fans expressed surprise that Gelsenkirchen, a city of about 264,000 people, is one of three cities in Germany to make the cut.

Airbnb said Tuesday that searches on its platform for the U.K. cities where Swift performs 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 in spotting trends, the property rental company cited demand as an example of “passion tourism” or travel “driven by concerts, sports and other cultural events.”

120,000 arrivals from 130 countries, including 10,000 from the USA, are expected to arrive in Stockholm this month, said Carl Bergqvist, chief economist of the Stockholm Chamber of Commerce. Stockholm is the only Scandinavian city on Swift’s route, and the airline has added extra flights from nearby Denmark, Finland and Norway to attract people to the May 17-19 concerts, he said.

Bergqvist said the city’s 40,000 hotel rooms were sold out even as prices skyrocketed during the concert season. Concertgoers are expected to pump about 500 million Swedish kronor, or more than $46 million, into the local economy during their stays, and that estimate does not include the amount they paid for Swift tickets or travel to Sweden, he said.

“So this will be of huge importance for the tourism sector, especially in Sweden and Stockholm,” Bergqvist said.

Nightclubs, restaurants and bars are taking the opportunity to cater to fans by hosting Taylor Swift-inspired 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 Texas. Now she’s making more friendship bracelets and trying to learn a few words in Swedish in preparation for a 3-and-a-half-hour performance in Stockholm. The idea of ​​seeing Swift in Europe was familiar to her, and Matlock needed some convincing at first.

“I thought to myself, ‘I only want to go if it’s a country I haven’t been to yet. I saw Taylor Swift,” she said.

Their plan is to visit the Scandinavian cities of Oslo and Gothenburg. The concert is the last night of the trip, and Matlock is looking forward to interacting with Swifties from other countries: “Americans tend to be very culture-obsessed, especially with Taylor Swift, so I’m curious if the crowd will be more subdued-down.”

Will itinerant tourism survive after Eras?

Time will tell whether the music tourism trend will have legs as long and strong as Swift and Beyoncé and whether it will spread to Billie Eilish, Usher and other artists whose world tours are scheduled for next year. Expedia’s Fish believes other big-name artists in Europe will prove this summer that booking an overseas concert trip is popular.

Kat Morga, a Nashville travel consultant, isn’t so sure. Last year, Morga saw Swift perform in Nashville and helped two clients with school-age children book a family vacation to Europe this summer that included seeing Swift in concert. However, he believes that difficulties in purchasing tickets despite language barriers, currency conversions, international banking regulations and the risk of cancellations will limit the attractiveness of regular concert trips.

“I think it’s an anomaly,” Morga said. “People don’t usually plan their big $20,000 family vacation just because Taylor Swift is there. She is one of a kind. She’s special.”

Booking Holdings CEO Glenn Fogel, whose company operates Booking.com, Priceline.com, agoda.com, Kayak and OpenTable, is even less enthusiastic about touring as a tourism initiator. The Swift effect causes a “little shock” when a superstar heads to smaller destinations, but for the global tourism industry, “one star on tour doesn’t make a difference,” he said.

“It might just change things a little bit. One person was going to the Caribbean for a week’s vacation. Instead, this person (says), ‘Let’s get to the Taylor Swift story,'” Fogel said. “It doesn’t make it bigger. It just takes it from here to there.”