SEATTLE — Faster than the wind, passionate as sin, ending so suddenly — that’s how the more optimistic members of Seattle’s business community might describe the impact of Taylor Swift’s much-anticipated Eras Tour when it comes to Lumen Field this weekend.
Skeptics, on the other hand, are more likely to see it as a dead-end street.
The singer’s two concerts, scheduled for Saturday and Sunday, are expected to draw thousands of Swifties from across the Puget Sound region and beyond. And that swell of visitors may well bring a swell in economic activity for the city.
A marvelous time
“Fans are not just attending the shows, they’re making a whole trip out of it,” said Rachel Smith, president of the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce. “That’s going to contribute to local businesses and really generate a substantial influx of money into [our] communities.”
James Sido, a spokesperson for the Downtown Seattle Association, said that, according to some estimates, the downtown area is expected to see “at least double” the visits from earlier weekends this month — around 1.6 million people.
“Because of the Taylor Swift shows on top of everything else taking place … it’s certainly reasonable to think our July visitor counts will blow past what we experienced in June,” he said.
Sido noted that the city just came off from hosting the MLB All-Star Game festivities. The tourism season is also at its height, with downtown foot traffic reaching rates not seen since 2019.
“In some metrics we’re seeing activity that has outperformed 2019 numbers and that’s such a welcome sight,” he said. “It’s tremendous for small businesses, restaurants, retailers and arts and cultural venues that have managed to hold on through a really difficult period.”
Tickets for both concerts, on Saturday and Sunday, have long been sold out. On resale sites, the cheapest tickets available are well over $1,000.
Smith said that while restaurants and hotel rooms will be full, other sectors will also see a boost in revenue. Fans will be “shopping for custom outfits and getting manicures and hitting the hair salons” all week, she added.
The chamber does not have specific numbers for Eras Tour weekend, Smith said.
“We are making our assumptions on what other cities have seen,” she said. “We don’t have our own projections here, but … I think we can expect something similar.”
Smith noted that when Swift played two shows in Cincinnati this month, the regional chamber of commerce estimated an impact of over $90 million.
She also referred to one estimate by Kishore Kulkarni, an economics professor at the Metropolitan State University of Denver, who said the economic impact of the tour could reach around $35 million to $40 million per concert.
Citing a report from STR, a global hospitality data and analytics company, Smith said that Seattle-area hotel bookings for Saturday have jumped to 80% — compared to 38% at the same time last year.
Tom Wolf, managing director of Seattle’s Hyatt hotels, said that, from Thursday through Sunday, all three of his downtown locations will be at “99 to 100% occupancy.” Demand, he said, has never been this compressed.
“The All-Star Game is like landing the big fish, and we just had that,” he said. “And this weekend will be bigger than All-Star Game.”
“I have 2,063 rooms, right? So you can imagine I’ll have 5,000 people here, at [Seattle Hyatts] alone.”
Wolf noted that, in addition to the Eras Tour at Lumen Field, this weekend will also see the Mariners host the Toronto Blue Jays at adjacent T-Mobile Park. In his hotels, he said, the split between Tay fans and Jays fans is probably around 50-50.
“If Taylor Swift didn’t come, we probably would have still sold out for the Blue Jays weekend,” he said. “But I don’t know that the rates would have been as high. The room inventory didn’t change. What happened is that demand was so much greater that the rates just skyrocketed.”
Wolf said that hotels planning to increase their room rates for the Blue Jays series raised them “another notch” when they realized that Swift would play next door the same weekend — especially when Swifties started booking rooms several months in advance.
“Our rates went up close to $500 [per room],” he said. “Some of the other smaller hotels probably hit $600 or $700. The Four Seasons, probably well over $1,000.”
Swifties staying at downtown hotels might have the most difficulty getting to the concert itself. Wolf said that transportation to Lumen Field will be “either difficult, very expensive, or both,” adding that he expected Uber rates to triple over the weekend. And while some hotels will be running shuttles to the stadium, he said that the most reliable way of getting there may just be on foot.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if 40% of people just end up walking, or scootering,” he said. “Transportation is going to be tough. And obviously, parking is going to be astronomical.”
Ruining everything?
Not everyone is on the Taylor Swift train.
For example, while speaking to NPR earlier this week, economist Mara Klaunig tempered expectations that the tour will help create lasting new jobs. Most of those jobs, she said, are “pretty temporary” — concentrated in short-term service roles like parking attendants and concessions.
How does that square with Seattle’s lofty expectations?
“The trick is all in measurement,” said Jacob Vigdor, a professor of public policy at the University of Washington. “If you’re measuring how much money people going to the concert are going to spend in the local area, yeah, it might be something on the order of $35 [million] or $40 million. But then to figure out the net impact, you have to subtract how many people are staying away because of this concert, and how much money would they have spent.”
What the research actually shows, he said, is that for events like the Eras Tour, “the effect of people coming into town is offset by other people staying away.”
“People who are not interested in the event and understand that the restaurants are going to be too crowded, the traffic is going to be bad — they’re going to stay home and not spend money, or they’re going to spend their money someplace else,” he said, “So these two effects kind of balance each other out.”
Vigdor said that Swift’s concert will have less of an impact, in relative terms, simply because of the time of year.
“It would have been a different story if these concerts had been on a Tuesday and Wednesday in February, when typically the hotels have a pretty low occupancy rate, and not as many people [would] be downtown,” he said.
Instead, Swifties are flocking to Seattle on a weekend in the middle of July, at the height of both the cruise season and the baseball season.
“In the summertime, the city is already full with tourists and hotel occupancy is already pretty high,” Vigdor said. “You may have this temporary thing where hotels raise their prices for the weekend, so there’ll be this one-time windfall gain for the hotels — but they would have been occupied anyway.”
Christopher Clarke, a professor of economics at Washington State University, downplayed the notion that Swifties will have much of an impact beyond the traditional tourism sectors.
“The demand will go up for the hotels, for the restaurants, for the taxis, etc.,” he said. “But the demand will fall for something else. So you’re going to a restaurant; now you’re no longer going to a grocery store. You’re using your vacation money to go see Taylor Swift, instead of using your vacation money to go somewhere else.”
Those tourism dollars, he said, would likely have been spent eventually in Seattle; the Eras Tour has just concentrated the effect to a single weekend.
“A lot of times in the entire macroeconomy, these things balance out,” Clarke said. “It won’t have any overall price effect. It just kind of moves the price around for the temporary duration.”
Luckily, Clarke added that concerns about inflationary pressure — as was seen in with Beyonce’s concert in Stockholm — are similarly unfounded.
Inflation “will probably be very, very modest, if we can even see it in the large macro data. And it will be temporary.”
