How Toronto Turned Into Taylor Swift Town Ahead of 6 Nights of the Eras Tour Shows
Written by djfrosty on November 14, 2024
When Toronto-based entertainment and hospitality magnate Charles Khabouth heard that Taylor Swift would be bringing her record-breaking Eras Tour to the city he’s called home for more than 50 years, he knew immediately what to do.
“I opened a bottle of Dom Perignon to celebrate,” Khabouth, the founder/CEO of INK Entertainment, which operates a series of hotels, bars and restaurants and produces live events in the city, says, laughing. “I’ve been around 43 years in this business; I’ve never seen this hype in my life around anything. We do, I don’t know, 200, 300 live shows ourselves every year. We’ve had everybody in the city from the Stones to Madonna to Prince. This got much bigger support from everybody than ever possible.”
The city of Toronto is about to play host to one of the most significant events — culturally and economically — of the past two years, as Swift and her legion of fans descend upon the city for six nights across two weekends (Nov. 14-16, 21-23), the penultimate stop on a tour that has spanned two years and five continents and changed the fortunes of several cities along the way. And Toronto — known as a savvy, cosmopolitan city in its own right, though one that has at times had to fight to be considered in the same category as cultural capitals such as New York, Los Angeles or Chicago — has risen to the occasion.
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On Nov. 4, the city of Toronto and Rogers Communications renamed Blue Jay Way — the street in front of the Rogers Centre that is usually home to its hometown Major League Baseball team and extends from Nathan Phillips Square to the venue — as Taylor Swift Way, complete with 22 ceremonial street signs that will be auctioned in support of the Daily Bread Food Bank after the run is over. (Rogers is also matching donations to the Daily Bread Food Bank up to $113,000 — a nod to Swift’s favorite number, 13.)
And that’s just the opening enchantment that the city would eventually roll out. Since then, the city has announced a poetry-inspired pre-concert initiative overseen by Toronto Poet Laureate Lillian Allen, while other announcements have included the Toronto’s Version: Taylgate ’24 event, which is expected to draw some 60,000 people; an Eras! Eras! Eras! performance by the singing group Choir! Choir! Choir!; and a 13-site scavenger hunt tied to different songs from Swift’s catalog spread across the city, among many other things. There are Eras-themed city tours, dance parties, drag and trivia nights and pop-up shops around the city, plus giveaways from a slew of businesses. Destination Toronto — the tourism bureau for Canada’s biggest city — expects some $282 million in economic impact from Swift’s two-week mini-residency, including $152 million in direct spending, 93% of which is expected to come from tourists flocking to Toronto — an astronomical uplift for the city’s local businesses.
“We’ve seen the entire city getting caught up in the action — from a Taylgate party at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre to Taylor-themed hotel rooms and special menus at restaurants around the city,” says Kathy Motton, Destination Toronto’s senior manager of communications. “Major events like Taylor Swift bring visitor spending into Toronto, and that spending circulates long after visitors return home impacting a broad set of businesses. The obvious positive benefit is for hotels, restaurants and other tourism-related businesses, but that benefit also extends to businesses that are indirectly impacted by visitor spending.”
And many of those establishments have met the moment by overhauling their own properties to cater to the estimated 500,000 tourists flooding into the area.
“We’ve got so much happening on property,” says Liza McWilliams, director of marketing at the 1 Hotel Toronto, which transformed its Flora lobby lounge into the Folklore Lounge for the next two weeks, complete with a moss-covered piano, tapestries hanging on the wall with lyrics from Swift’s Folklore album and daily acoustic performances open to guests and the public. They also partnered with the Little Words Project, the original word-based friendship bracelet company, which is doing a pop-up shop in the 1 Hotel’s lobby for the first time in Canada. “I think it’s just really fun to be that much more creative and to dream up some really amazing things that kind of stay with the guests for a longer time,” McWilliams says. “Other than the [Toronto International] Film Festival, I would say we’ve never really been this specific when it comes to an actual city event.”
“This is like preparing for Toronto’s Super Bowl,” says Aaron Harrison, general manager of the Bisha Hotel, a short walk from the Rogers Centre. The Bisha also redesigned its entire lobby space (it went Reputation era), while the common spaces on each of its seven hotel floors are also getting era-themed makeovers, one suite has been entirely rebranded The Taylor (which had been running around $4,000 per night if you could snag it), and the hotel will be offering friendship bracelets, a glitter station and themed food and drinks for guests, among other things, in its Lover Lounge. “We wanted Bisha Hotel to feel like the ultimate fan headquarters,” Harrison adds.
In downtown Toronto, it’s almost more difficult to find a bar or restaurant that hasn’t leaned into Taylor-mania than one that has. (Talk about champagne problems.) The night before the shows kicked off, on Nov. 13, the iconic space needle was flashing rainbow colors in honor of Swift, and bartenders and restaurant staff were all talking about the influx of people in town for the shows. Streets are closed off, the city has dedicated websites aimed at helping both tourists and locals alike navigate the area, and Rogers spent $8 million to upgrade the 5G wireless service at the Rogers Centre ahead of the concerts.
Of the more than half-dozen people who spoke with Billboard for this story, almost all equated the preparations for the Eras Tour to those that go into the build up to TIFF — one of the world’s most prestigious film festivals, held in the city each September — but all said the Eras Tour hype went beyond even that. Some hospitality officials and locals are looking at it as a test run for the FIFA World Cup, which will stage six matches in the city in the summer of 2026, and as helping to prove that Toronto can accommodate, and with aplomb, the types of huge events that are often staged in the great cities of the world, ones that invite people to fly in from all over the globe.
There is one thing, however, that nobody is particularly looking forward to: “It’s going to be hell on earth in a sense of the traffic and the amount of people,” Khabouth says, laughing again. (He’s planning to ride his scooter through downtown “with a smile on my face” on the days of each show to avoid driving.) “But it’s a happy moment for all of us in Toronto, to have that energy, that vibe. It’s a concert that’s very positive, you’re gonna see a lot of happy faces, people excited. It’s a very good opportunity for Toronto to stand out and say, ‘Hey, we can play with the big boys.’”