The “Swifties” are coming! And they’re already booking hotel rooms.
How do we know?
The Greater Miami Convention and Visitors Bureau caught on to the trend recently when it found advance bookings at a sampling of 112 hotels have been spiking for Oct. 18-20 — a good six months away.
It’s the weekend superstar singer-musician Taylor Swift is scheduled to bring her worldwide Eras tour to Hard Rock Stadium in Miami Gardens, attracting some 76,100 nightly at a football stadium that can command capacity crowds of about 65,000 for Miami Dolphins games.
Roughly one in every five hotels surveyed by the Miami-Dade tourism promotion agency is already booked for the concert-filled weekend, the visitors bureau disclosed at a gathering of the Hospitality Sales and Marketing Association International in Fort Lauderdale.
Neither Visit Lauderdale nor Discover the Palm Beaches had any advance booking information available for Broward and Palm Beach counties.
But Peter Ricci, director of the hospitality and tourism management program at Florida Atlantic University, says regional lodging that weekend is unlikely to be cheap, and maybe less available than usual in some spots.
“My take on the ‘Taylor effect’ as it applies to South Florida is that Miami-Dade will have higher rates for October than probably most any time except immediately in the year following the end of the (COVID-19) pandemic,” he said.
“I expect occupancy to compress the marketplace including more demand for Broward and to a much more tiny effect, Palm Beach County,” Ricci added. “Where Palm Beach could benefit is by Discover the Palm Beaches doing post-Taylor ‘stay & play’ type activities with spa, club, high end restaurant, and so on to appeal to her mass market. Just for what it’s worth as a marketing promo.”