Pricepoint raises $6.6M seed round to build the future of hotel revenue management →
Partnerships
Build, refer or grow with Pricepoint. Pick the program that fits how you work with hotels.
View all →Partnerships
Build, refer or grow with Pricepoint. Pick the program that fits how you work with hotels.
View all →We tracked Taylor Swift's 2024 Eras Tour through Pricepoint properties in five European cities. Occupancy barely moved. Rates rose by a third to a half, and doubled in Edinburgh.
Between May and August 2024, Taylor Swift's Eras Tour played two or three nights in each of a dozen European cities. Each show brought tens of thousands of visitors into one city on fixed dates announced a year in advance. For a hotel, that is close to a perfect experiment: demand you can see coming, on nights you know about, in a market you already price every day.
We looked at what those nights did at Pricepoint properties in Lisbon, Madrid, Edinburgh, Dublin and London. We compared each concert night with the same weekday in the three weeks around it, with the same nights a year earlier, and, where we could, with a nearby city that had no show. We asked three questions. Did more guests come? Did rates move? And when did guests book?
The short answer: occupancy barely moved, because these properties were nearly full on those nights anyway. The whole effect showed up in price, from about a third higher in Lisbon, Madrid and Dublin to roughly double in Edinburgh. And in Edinburgh and Madrid, a large share of those nights had already been sold months earlier at close to normal rates.
On a normal Friday or Saturday in late spring, our properties in these cities already sell most of their beds. Lisbon ran at 94% occupancy on the weekend before its shows; Madrid at 79% on the Wednesday and Thursday a week earlier. A stadium show cannot add many guests to a building that is nearly full. What it can change is what each of those guests pays.
That is what we found. Room nights sold on concert nights rose by 1% in Lisbon, 6% in Dublin, 7% in Madrid and 14% in Edinburgh, against the same weekday in the surrounding weeks. The average rate rose by 31%, 33%, 38% and 102%. To check that the jump came from prices rather than from a different mix of properties selling, we also compared each property with its own normal rate. The result barely changed: +28% in Lisbon, +43% in Madrid and +116% in Edinburgh.
Madrid shows the pattern most clearly because its concerts fell on a Wednesday and a Thursday, nights that normally sell at about €52. On 29 and 30 May 2024 the same properties sold at €72 and €78, priced like a Saturday. In 2023 those two nights were ordinary weekdays at about €42.
A higher rate on one night could simply reflect a strong season. To separate the two, we compared each city with a control. Porto, three hours from Lisbon by train, had no show: its rates on the Lisbon concert nights moved by −4% against its own normal weekdays. Lisbon moved by +31%. That is a gap of 35 points. Madrid against Salamanca, a city in our portfolio with no concert, gives a gap of 32 points. Against their own 2023 nights, Lisbon and Madrid gain 32 and 41 points, and Edinburgh 111.
London is the exception. On the June Wembley nights, rates rose 9% in a city with dozens of other things competing for the same beds. The August run did better, +22%, with a useful check built in: Sunday 18 August had no show, and its rate rose only 7%.
Concert nights fill earlier than ordinary ones. Two months before the stay month, 47% of the room nights Madrid eventually sold for the concerts were already booked, against 35% for an ordinary week in the same month. In Lisbon it was 55% against 42%.
Edinburgh is the extreme. The tour dates were announced and tickets went on sale in June and July 2023. In those two months alone, guests booked 26% of everything our Edinburgh properties would sell for the June 2024 concert nights. Those 410 room nights sold at an average of £70. Guests who booked the same nights in April and May 2024 paid £123 and £102.
That matters because the rate a property charges a year out is usually its normal rate. In Madrid, rooms for the concert nights booked more than 90 days ahead sold 18% above each property's normal midweek rate. Rooms booked in the last 30 days sold 68% above it. One Madrid hostel sold 239 room nights months ahead at €33, and its last-minute rooms for the same nights at €44. A property near the stadium sold late rooms at €170 against a normal €74.
Lisbon shows that this is not inevitable. There, early bookings carried a higher premium (+57%) than late ones (+46%): most properties raised their concert-night prices as soon as the dates were known. Edinburgh shows the cost of not doing so. The two properties that sold large blocks a year out ended with the smallest gains over the whole event, +28% and +58%. The ones that held their inventory gained between +127% and +158%.
Three practical points come out of this.
The night before a concert also rose, between 10% and 18% in each city. The night after did not. We found no spillover to nearby cities: Porto and Salamanca moved as they had the year before.
Our properties in these cities are mostly hostels and small independent hotels, between 6 and 25 per city. This describes what happened at those properties, not the whole hotel market. Occupancy combines two different capacity bases across properties, so we lean on room nights and rate. Dublin and London have no clean prior-year comparison in our data, and Edinburgh's 2023 sample was smaller, so we use relative changes there. We could not check which properties had Pricepoint's automated pricing switched on at the time, so these results do not say anything about how well any particular pricing tool did. Liverpool, Cardiff and Paris had too few properties to include.
