Taylor Swift is in Europe. It makes hotels more expensive, changes flights, attracts Americans too

The massively successful tour also has one specific feature: because of the cheaper tickets, an unprecedented number of fans will be seen at the European concerts, who do not hesitate to fly from the United States to see Taylor Swift.

Organizers at the multi-purpose Paris La Défense Arena, where Taylor Swift will perform four consecutive concerts, expect a fifth of all visitors to fly in from the US. According to information from the AP agency, which contacted the promoters, a large number of American fans are also planning to go to Stockholm, where Swift will move from Paris. Up to ten thousand Americans should attend her performance there.

Travel company Expedia has a simple explanation for this behavior. Tour tourism, i.e. following popular artists to other continents, was already noticed by Expedia with the previous American singer Beyoncé’s Renaissance line. And the reasons – apart from passionate fandom – are financial.

Ticketmaster fiasco drives Americans to Europe

Due to the monopoly of Ticketmaster, which accounts for up to 70 percent of all US concert ticket sales, it is easier and often cheaper for many Americans to buy tickets in Europe. All the more so since Ticketmaster has had a fiasco related to the advance sale of tickets for The Eras Tour, during which the company’s servers crashed due to a bot attack, thousands of fans lost their electronic tickets, and the whole case ended up in the US Senate due to lack of transparency.

Many Americans who did not buy their tickets because of Ticketmaster (and were not willing to spend for them on the black market, where their price sometimes rose to an astronomical $20,000), went to Europe. “They said they could spend $1,500 on a Taylor Swift concert in Miami, or take the same amount and buy not only a ticket, but a round-trip ticket to Europe and three nights at a hotel,” Expedia spokeswoman Melanie Fish told the AP .

Another destination that will benefit from the influx of Taylor Swift fans will be Stockholm after Paris. A total of 120,000 fans from 130 countries are expected in Stockholm, who managed to sell out all 40,000 hotel rooms in the city and should pump a total of 46 million dollars into the local economy during their stay. Stockholm is Taylor Swift’s only stop in all of Scandinavia, to which the local airlines responded by introducing special flights from Denmark, Finland and Norway.

And club and bar owners have sensed the opportunity as well, who are preparing special events for Taylor Swift fans, such as karaoke evenings or themed after parties after concerts. The overall impact on Stockholm’s economy is so significant that even the local chamber of commerce is preparing for it. Its chief economist Carl Bergqvist, according to the AP agency, considers the Taylor Swift concert a huge opportunity for the tourism sector throughout Sweden.

European hotels for double

The phenomenon, for which the term Swiftonomics was coined, is thus spilling over into Europe. And the economic power of Taylor Swift fans is most clearly reflected in accommodation prices so far. The Airbnb platform in the four UK cities where Swift will perform on the tour (ie London, Liverpool, Edinburgh and Cardiff) saw a 337 percent increase in demand when the concerts were announced.

And according to a Lighthouse study this year, accommodation prices at Taylor Swift stops are increasing by a median of 44 percent. But there are places where the price of a hotel room has risen by more than 100 percent. “This is a significant boost for local hotels and demonstrates the power of Taylor Swift,” the study said. According to her, however, this effect is not universal and there are also places that Taylor Swift’s performance will not significantly affect in this regard.

Still, Travel+Leisure recommends planning your summer vacation with Taylor Swift’s concert calendar in mind and avoiding certain places on certain days. According to the website, the situation is worst in Warsaw, where the price of accommodation has risen by 154 percent on average. This is followed by the already mentioned Stockholm with a price increase of 119 percent, Liverpool with 116 percent or, for the Czechs, the closest Vienna, where hotel rooms are 88 percent more expensive around the time of the Swift concert. Paradoxically, rising accommodation prices do not concern the biggest cities, i.e. Paris and London.