Thousands of Taylor Swift fans who missed out on her US tour last year or didn’t want to buy exorbitantly priced tickets are flying to Europe.
The star will kick off the 18-city Europe leg of her record-setting Eras Tour in Paris on Thursday, and planeloads of Swifties plan to follow in the coming weeks.
The arena where Swift is appearing says Americans bought 20 per cent of the tickets for her four sold-out shows. Stockholm, the tour’s next stop, expects about 10,000 concert-goers from the US
A concert might sound like an odd raison d’etre for visiting a foreign country, yet online travel company Expedia says continent-hopping by Swift’s devotees is part of a larger trend it dubbed “tour tourism” while observing a pattern that emerged during Beyoncés Renaissance world tour.
Some North American fans who plan to fly overseas for the Eras Tour said they justified the expense after noticing that tighter restrictions on ticket fees and resales in Europe made seeing Swift perform abroad no more costly — and potentially cheaper — than catching her closer to home.
“They said, ’Wait a minute, I can either spend $1,500 to go see my favorite artist in Miami, or I can take that $1,500 and buy a concert ticket, a round-trip plane ticket, and three nights in a hotel room,” Melanie Fish, an Expedia spokesperson and travel expert, said.
That was the experience of Jennifer Warren, 43, who lives in St. Catharines, a city in the Niagara region of Ontario, Canada. She and her 11-year-old son love Swift but had no luck scoring what she considered as decently priced tickets in the US Undeterred, Warren and her husband decided to plan a European vacation around wherever she managed to get seats. It turned out to be Hamburg, Germany.
“You get out, you get to see the world, and you get to see your favorite artist or performer at the same time, so there are a lot of wins to it,” said Warren, who works as the director of research and innovation for a mutual insurance company.
The three VIP tickets she secured close to the stage — “I would call it brute-force dumb luck” — cost €600 ($646) each. Swift subsequently announced six November tour dates in Toronto, within driving distance of Warren’s home. “Absolute nose-bleed seats” already are going for CAN$3,000 ($2,194) on secondary…
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