Marriott Adds Taylor Swift Eras Tour To Loyalty Points Program

28.02.2024 - 21:57 / forbes.com

In a bid to win over a younger audience to its hotel chains, Marriott International is adding Taylor Swift's Eras tour to its loyalty program.

You might just need to have quite a lot of loyalty points in your account though—500,000, to be exact. Bloomberg reports that while this would usually get a traveler four or five nights stay at the Ritz Carlton in New York or the St. Regis in the Maldives, it can now be put against seeing Taylor Swift perform in 11 cities across Europe and North America.

It's not unusual for Marriott to offer an exchange for points for high-profile travel events—they do so for Formula One Grand Prix races and the Superbowl. The difference here is that these Taylor Swift points are fixed, whereas usually they go to the highest bidder, upwards of 500,000 points—the idea is to encourage a younger audience to trade them in.

In this case, these points will get you two tickets to see Taylor Swift perform (as well as transport to and from the venue), two nights in a Marriott hotel, dinner at an affiliated restaurant, as well as a spa treatment. Marriott has already tested this idea in Tokyo and packages sold out very quickly. CNN reports that there will be 48 packages available in locations across Stockholm, Madrid, Zurich, Milan, Hamburg, Vienna, Miami, New Orleans, Indianapolis, Toronto and Vancouver.

The actual cost of buying 500,000 points would be around $650,000, as per Bloomberg's calculations, although you are only allowed to buy 100,000 points per calendar year. This isn't Marriott's most expensive loyalty package ever either—5.3 million points were exchanged for a hospitality package to the Superbowl in 2024.

The Eras tour tickets have been notoriously hard to come by. French newspaper, Le Figaro reports that between 17 March 2023 at her first concert at Glendale's State Farm Stadium, and last November 11 at Buenos Aires' Estadio Mas Monumental, Swift sold 4.35 million tickets over 60 dates for an average price of $239.

Her impact on the travel economy since the tour began almost one year ago has been undeniable and well documented. As CNTraveler reports, every city she has performed in has seen a huge spike in travel and tourism revenue. Across the U.S., for example, the revenue generated per hotel room was 4% more than the national average and 7% more than the same period the year before.

For those travelers who might not have 500,000 points in a loyalty account, Marriott is also offering 250 sweepstake prizes, meaning that once you set up a loyalty account you can enter, and you could win one of these trips without any points to your name.

To enter the Eras sweepstake you must live in one of 23 countries and the winners will be chosen by lottery to win, in the most part,