Whether it's "quiet quitting" or "bleisure," the internet loves creating catchy new terms for old concepts.
Many are born on TikTok as a passing reference by a popular influencer and then slowly creep into everyday speech. The latest viral term has to do with travel fueled by Taylor Swift's staggering popularity around the world.
Related: Taylor Swift net worth 2023: The most successful entertainer joins the billionaire's club
Gig-tripping, or travel arranged around a concert or festival, has recently been named in Skyscanner's 2024 Travel Trends report as well as identified by multiple search engine as a rising search trend — Google Trends (GOOG) saw a spike in searches in the first week of March.
Taylor Swift fan travel is fueling a new viral term
While fans have been following their favorite bands on tours or traveling to see concerts not coming to their hometowns for decades, the specific term started getting steam after certain cities observed a rush of Taylor Swift fans come in for concerts on the Eras Tour that the performer began in March 2023 and will be on until December of this year.
More Travel:
- A new travel term is taking over the internet (and reaching airlines and hotels)
- The 10 best airline stocks to buy now
- Airlines see a new kind of traveler at the front of the plane
Travel platform eDream calculated that demand to fly to Warsaw, Edinburgh, Liverpool and Paris in the timeframe around upcoming Swift concerts in May and June (Swift is currently on the international leg of her tour) has been up a respective 339%, 176%, 133% and 108%.
In February, a video of a plane full of Swift fans singing her songs while traveling to a concert on Australian low-cost airline Jetstar was viewed more than 3 million times.
"If this isn't how you commute to the Eras tour, then I don't want it," Maddison Olsen wrote in the caption to the viral video.
Other instances of gig-tripping make it the travel term of 2024
When Taylor Swift was on the U.S. leg of her tour in the summer of 2023, one fan even asked the pilot on her Southwest (LUV) flight from Raleigh to Los Angeles fly over the city of Inglewood so that she could catch glimpses of the Taylor Swift concert taking place at SoFi Stadium.
While the fan got her way because that was already the established route, the fan didn't realize that SoFi was a covered stadium so all she could see out the window was the massive traffic around it.
Similar instances of gig-tripping have been observed for other popular performers such as Harry Styles and Olivia Rodrigo. As a result, the term has increasingly been gaining steam online.
The Skyscanner report estimated that 44% of U.S. adults are "willing to fly short-haul to see their favorites artists" while 18% "would go the extra mile with long-haul flights." Some fans from the U.S. who were unable to score sold-out Swift tickets back home have been hunting around the internet for tickets at any other location no matter how far away.
"I just booked a family on a European trip built entirely around Taylor Swift," travel agent Tim Elrod recently told Fox News. "My client wanted to see the Eras Tour with her daughters, but they couldn't get tickets in the U.S. ... That's when they called me, and three nights in Milan has snowballed into them now visiting cities all over Italy."
