Fans from all over the world are travelling to Germany for Taylor Swift’s “Eras Tour”. They also need to stay somewhere. Good for the industry.
Hundreds of thousands of fans want to see pop star Taylor Swift at her concerts in Germany. Since many “Swifties” are travelling from Germany and abroad, hotels and landlords of other accommodations are doing good business. As the booking platform Airbnb announced, inquiries for Munich, where Swift is giving two concerts at the weekend, have increased by almost 600 percent compared to the same period last year. In the Ruhr area city of Gelsenkirchen, which is hardly known for its tourist appeal, searches for the period around the pop star’s three concerts on July 17, 18 and 19 even increased by more than 7,000 percent, reports Airbnb. The inquiries came from interested parties from all over the world.
The responsible Dehoga regional associations in North Rhine-Westphalia, Hamburg and Munich had also observed an increased interest in overnight stays before the Swift concerts. Gelsenkirchen was already well booked weeks before the first concert, said a spokesman for the German Hotel and Restaurant Association NRW. However, there was still some capacity in the surrounding cities. The Hamburg Dehoga regional association also reported “additional capacity due to increased demand for Hamburg”.
A third of bookings from the USA
Across all European cities on the “Eras Tour,” enquiries have increased by an average of almost 60 percent compared to the same period last year, Airbnb said. Most enquiries were made for rooms in London, followed by Lisbon and Edinburgh. Airbnb compared searches for the concert dates with searches from the same period last year.
Airbnb data also tells us a lot about the demographics of “Swifties.” 70 percent of the guests who booked overnight stays in the tour cities through Airbnb during Swift’s European tour were female. A third of the bookings were made from the USA.
“There was an increased American demand on the market, which we noticed when advance sales started,” confirmed a spokeswoman for Dehoga in Hamburg. This is also due to the fact that tickets in Germany are sometimes much cheaper than in the USA.
Event holidays as a new travel trend
Taylor Swift is at the forefront of a new travel trend, Airbnb reported. So-called event vacationers across Europe “point to a strong connection between cultural events and travel planning around major events.”
Large events could “provide short-term impetus to the hotel industry and also have a positive impact on the catering industry,” said the spokesman for Dehoga in NRW.
The singer will perform a musical journey through her creative phases (“eras”) in the European cities of Amsterdam, Cardiff, Dublin, Edinburgh, Gelsenkirchen, Hamburg, Lisbon, Liverpool, London, Lyon, Madrid, Milan, Munich, Paris, Stockholm, Vienna, Warsaw and Zurich.
Source: Stern
