You’d struggle not to hear Taylor Swift buzzing around your daily life these days – not only in the form of her impossibly frequent new music being played on the radio, but in countless sociocultural phenomena that you might not even put down to the all-American sweetheart.
Rising to fame as a teen in the early 2000s, she modernised country music and broadened its popularity worldwide with the release of her eponymous debut album, “Taylor Swift”, in 2006. Her influence was clear from the start of her career, and she would go on to prove its power with every record-breaking move since then.
In 2023, her influence returned to the spotlight with her impact on NFL views. Just by appearing in the crowd at her boyfriend’s Kansas City Chiefs Sunday game, viewers skyrocketed to 27 million – levels last seen at the previous Super Bowl. The cultural impact of Taylor Swift does in fact run deeper than boosting the sales of her love interest’s football jersey, though. (According to Fanatics, the spike was a cool 400% if you were curious.)
|The Swift Effect is a cultural phenomena likened to 1960s Beatlemania
In 2015, she publicly rallied for leading streaming service Apple Music to reevaluate a payment loophole in which artists weren’t paid royalties when users streamed their songs during a three-month free trial of the platform. Speaking on behalf of her fellow artists, she called out the tech giant for asking musicians “to work for nothing” and Apple had no choice but to reform the policy.
In 2018, she urged her Instagram followers to vote in upcoming American elections and within 24 hours Vote.org reported there had been 65,000 electoral registrations – 34% of the number of registrations recorded in the entire month prior.
In 2021, she announced she would be re-recording her first six albums and re-releasing them all with an adjusted title. Swift has been very vocal about reasons behind the re-releases; the story being that the music label she released these early albums under denied her the rights to own the master recordings of any song, meaning the label’s owner controls their licencing. By re-recording the albums and releasing them as “(Taylor’s Version)”, she gains ownership over her past work and fights back against similar injustices against musicians.
2023 then marked the start of her Eras Tour. In an epic voyage across all the world’s major cities, Swift will have performed 152 shows in 23 countries across five continents by the finale on December 8th 2024. As of the end of 2023, Eras had officially grossed $1 billion – the only tour in history to do so. Adding $4.3 billion to the US GDP, S$400 million to the Singapore economy, and 471 million Swedish Krona into Stockholm, to name a few Eras cash injections, Swift’s impact on the global economy will take some beating.
Moving economies, shifting political landscapes and changing the music industry aside, we’re interested in the impact of her ongoing Eras Tour on the serviced accommodation sector: how did the highest grossing tour of all time influence the pricing corporate housing?
Supply chain pressures during major music events are something the travel and tourism industries know all too well, indeed hotel and aviation companies have reported demand surges and average daily rate (ADR) hikes in many business travel destinations, but we looked at our own booking data to see if the same was true in our world.
We compared the booked rates for Eras Tour dates to rates for the same period a week before, a month before, a month after and the previous year (adjusting the comparative dates to all fall on weekends to be fairly comparable). While there were some increases in locations like Tokyo, Sydney, Edinburgh, London and various US cities, our rate data shows a general stability in ADR when Taylor is in town.
The biggest ADR increase seen in our bookings was in Denver, Colorado. She performed there on July 14th and 15th 2023 and our records show ADR was $200.67 for these dates – 25.04% higher than the same dates a month prior and 6.66% higher than the week prior.
Staying in the US, the next biggest spike was in Tampa, Florida for her performances on April 13th, 14th and 15th 2023. ADR for these dates was $248.67 – 12.26% higher than the month before and 20.48% higher than the following month.
Moving south to Brazil, the Eras Tour hit Sao Paulo on November 24th-26th 2023. ADR was R$728.05 for this period – 16.34% higher than the previous month.
The music titan then graced Tokyo between February 7th and 10th, the first stop on the 2024 leg of the tour. ADR for these dates clocked in at 21,738.87 JPY – an 18.46% spike compared to the same period in 2023 and a 17.73% spike compared to the following month.
See more ADR analysis in the SilverDoor Market Update
|Serviced apartment pricing: the only thing unaffected by Eras?
General stability found in serviced apartment ADR: There was a handful of other cities around the world with moderate weekly, monthly or yearly ADR increases, but all less than Tampa’s 12%. On the whole, other than slight expected fluctuations, our rates for serviced apartment bookings on Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour dates remained stable.
Taylor was in Paris for 9th-12th May, during which time ADR was €188.98 – only 2.24% higher than the week before and actually a slight 0.36% lower than the month before.
London was treated to two Eras stints, one in June and the other scheduled for early August. For her 21st-23rd June dates, London ADR was £231.97 – just 2% higher than the week before and 8% higher than the month before, but an increase of rates moving into summer would be expected anyway. ADR for her August dates are also only predicted to rise no more than 3.4% compared to the week and month before.
Rates in Dublin for 28th-30th June were €186.21, which was a 2.3% increase compared to the week before and a 3.5% increase compared to the previous month.
It was a similar story in Amsterdam where rates only went up 3.7% to €213.37 for July 4th-6th compared to the week before, and were actually 1% lower than the same dates the previous month.
In Sydney, ADR sat at 310.06 AUD when Eras hit the city on February 23rd-26th – only a 2.65% rise compared to the week before and 2.21% rise compared to the previous month.
Our Finance team did report that one operator in Sydney added an additional nightly fee onto an invoice described as a “Taylor Swift surcharge” for a stay that happened to be during her February tour stint in the city. Upon closer inspection, there were other surcharges added to several bookings over Eras dates in cities including Singapore. This is something the Singapore government are increasingly making mandatory during major events hosted in the city in a bid to boost the revenue generated by an influx of international visitors.
Singapore’s push to cash in on events-based tourism is epitomised with their Swift exclusivity deal, where the city-state paid for itself to be the only stop on her south-east Asian leg of the tour. Reports show this boosted Singapore inbound flights by 186% and overall accommodation bookings by 462% for the Eras dates.
Seemingly a successful tactic, Singapore’s Ministry of Trade and Industry estimate a YoY GDP growth of 2.7% for Q1 2024, all reports citing Swift’s Eras Tour as a primary contributor.
But aside from a few surcharges, our booking data shows a stability of Singapore ADR – rates over her shows averaging S$306 and fluctuation only moving around 10 SGD compared to the surrounding weeks and months. A different story to the pricing of hotel rooms where, according to STR, the “Swift Surge” drove ADR as high as S$438.36 for Singapore's Eras opening night.
|An operator perspective on managing the influx of demand for Eras dates
I spoke to Clive Dlima, Head of Sales and Marketing at Mansley Serviced Apartments with properties in two Eras destinations, London and Edinburgh, because I wanted to find out a little about their experience with the influx of visitors for Taylor’s tour.
Similar to my findings of general rate stability for Eras dates worldwide, Clive reported: “Whilst we did increase our rates a little more than what early June rates would usually be, the difference was not very big at all. Swift’s tour dates fell in June, which is already the beginning of peak season in both Edinburgh and London, so rates were already on the rise.”
Next, I asked about pricing and lead times: “We chose to implement a five-night minimum stay to optimise occupancy and help us maintain competitive pricing. The minimum stay restriction worked well with our other longer bookings and allowed us to retain a strong value proposition ADR-wise.
There was an almost immediate uptick in enquiries as soon as the tour dates were announced. Lead times doubled, with reservations coming in even before the tickets were released but demand peaking as the tickets went on sale. This meant lead times for Eras dates were generally longer than usual!”
It goes without saying that the heightened demand for accommodation on Eras dates does add pressure to the supply chain and operators may have less stock available than usual – particularly for enquiries with a shorter lead time – but our teams have reported no occasion that they’ve been unable to place a guest during stops on the Eras tour.
So, whilst there have undoubtably been availability squeezes at times, when it comes to pricing our operators have held their rates steady. Whether you’re a Swiftie or not, her global influence is undeniable – but perhaps serviced apartments are the one thing untouched by the Eras Effect.
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