The visits of great music stars translate into significant benefits for establishments in Madrid and Barcelona, where they tend to remember international tours, but they cannot cause side effects to the economy, such as a spike in inflation, seen in other countries. “I would not dare to find a direct connection between an artist’s concert and the rise in prices in the tourism sector,” said Exceltur’s executive vice president, José Luis Zoreda, to Agencia Efe.
A signing that he made in connection with the start of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour in Stockholm, which did not go unnoticed on a musical or economic level: the two dates could have contributed to the inflation rate in Sweden in May, located at 9 .7%, above what was expected by analysts, according to the Statistics Sweden agency.
The concerts booked more than 90,000 people, triggering the pilgrimage of thousands of fans to the Swedish capital and, finally, a high hotel occupancy rate and an increase in the number of restaurant reservations. The final result was the increase in tourist prices in the city. “The stars come here all the time, but we rarely see effects like this,” said Danske Bank chief economist Michael Grahn, who believes the American pushed the index by at least 0.2 percentage points out of the 0.3 added by the hospitality industry. .
“Stars come here all the time, but we rarely see effects like this”
However, neither Beyoncé nor Taylor Swift to the country and, specifically, Madrid and Barcelona.
According to the latest data from the National Institute of Statistics (INE), which also includes Efe, the municipality of Madrid had 863 hotels and offered 90,438 beds in the month of June. For its part, Barcelona had 672 establishments and 85,785 vacancies. Regarding tourist apartments, only on Airbnb, 23,524 appear in Madrid and 17,230 in Barcelona, according to the numbers extracted from the Inside Airbnb portal (not related to the vacation rental platform).
The figures for both Spanish cities differ from those of Stockholm, whose infrastructure is based on 170 hotels, with 45,716 beds, according to data provided to Efe by SCB cas), and 4,232 homes registered on Airbnb. every Beyoncé concert at friends
Meanwhile, the American performed a single night in Barcelona before more than 52,000 people at the Lluís Company Olympic Stadium, approximately 33,000 fewer than the number of hotel beds in the Catalan capital. “Perhaps a key day, in which several events coincide in the city, there could be a case of saturation that would lead to an increase in prices. But just for a concert, in Madrid and Barcelona this should not happen,” he comments. Zoreda.
“The venues located around these large halls or stadiums are used to providing services on concert days”
The general director of Madrid Hospitality, Juan José Blardony, points in the same direction. “The venues located around these large halls or stadiums are used to providing service on concert days, since it is part of their target clientele and the location strategy of these businesses. Their prices are stable when covering this type of service starts regularly,” he says.
important benefits
Thus, it seems difficult that the future stop of Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour in Madrid, which will attract 65,000 people to the renovated Santiago Bernabéu stadium, results in an increase in inflation. Of course, it is expected that the benefits of tourist establishments in Madrid will increase. “The tours generate a great tourist flow in the cities, since they are leisure attractions that generate a significant movement of people,” says Zoreda.
Data from Madrid Hospitality show that around 600,000 tourists come to the capital every year to attend concerts, 6% of all visitors to the city. “At the hotel level, it represents more than 1,000,000 overnight stays,” points out Blardony.
In addition, the Madrid hoteliers association calculates “400,000 euros of direct impact on the hotel industry” for each musical event held at the Wizink Center, based on the cost of 16.80 euros per attendee that the multipurpose space encrypted in 2017. “With these data , we can point out that musical events generate 44 million euros in hospitality consumption each year”, adds the president of Hospitality Madrid.
12 months. In 2022, the live music industry had a turnover of almost 460 million euros.
