The global whirlwind that is musician Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour came to the United Kingdom last week for its second batch of concerts.
Swift performed 10 shows in June, while now she is capping that of with a further five shows, all at London’s Wembley Stadium, home of the England national football team. It fits 92,000 for a concert, for a total of 460,000 people across the five nights. There were another three shows, or 276,000 people, that Swift performed at the same venue in June.
Those are all attendance records, and the tour itself is being touted as the most lucrative ever.
Swift also played three shows in Edinburgh, three in Liverpool and one in Cardiff.
Such was the demand that in Scotland, Edinburgh Council changed legislation to allow Murrayfield Stadium — incidentally, home of the Scotland rugby team — to enlarge its capacity from 67,144 to 72,990.
There is no doubt such a happening, or many of them, brings with it massive amounts of capital, and much of that will go to hotels’ profit-and-loss accounts.
Tickets for Swift's show are like gold dust. I read one report that said a family of four from California realized it would be cheaper to come to the U.K. to see her and get a great vacation out of the experience than it would be seeing her in their native state, where I assume the tickets were more expensive.
Other media outlets have reported that across the entire tour, in the U.K. and elsewhere, the concerts will have contributed “$10 billion to local economies by the time the tour ends in December … an average of $1,300 [per ticket holder] on things like hotels, food and drink and travel.”
One oddity and testament to the Nashville singer and songwriter is that the stadiums hosting her shows — at least in the U.K. and I do not suppose this would be different anywhere else — open a day before any show to give fans chance to buy Taylor Swift-branded merchandise. I do not recall that happening for other bands or musicians.
If one is jetting in from Los Angeles or San Francisco, what burden, seemingly, is an extra night and $400 more on souvenirs?
STR, CoStar's hospitality analytics division, will soon have U.K. hotels data that might well indicate the force of this tour. There will also be hotel data for Vienna, where Swift was forced to cancel three dates in August following revelations of terrorist activity that threatened the safety of concertgoers.
It's likely there will be hotel performance jumps in the cities in which Swift has performed, and in which their hoteliers no doubt are skipping along with her music on their personal devices.
I think they ought to.
Taylor Swift has more shows to do, nine shows in Canada following a three-month gap after leaving the U.K.
The last show is on Dec. 6 in Vancouver, and HNN might well see what the hotel-industry metrics there are, too.
Even if one is blasé about her music — I could not hum one of her tunes if you paid me, but I probably would recognize it if it came over the airwaves — it cannot be argued that this tour is a force of nature and might well never be replicated.
Or, with any luck, it will be by someone we have never heard of as yet who is twiddling around with a guitar somewhere.
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