The start of the singer’s world tour in Sweden last month has sparked a frenzy of demand for hotels and restaurant meals that it has shown up in the country’s economic statistics.
Searches for accommodations in cities on the tour shot up after it was announced, Airbnb reported.
Tickets for many concerts sold out within days and prices soared on the resale market.
In the UK, 60,000 people descended on Cardiff, including fans from Lebanon, the US and Australia.
Demand for hotel rooms tied to her concert in London was so strong that in one case, some homeless families being housed in a hotel by the local council were reportedly booted to make way for her fans.
The Stockholm concerts, where Beyoncé played to a crowd of 46,000 for two nights, reportedly drew fans from around the world – especially the US, where a strong dollar against the krona helped to make tickets in the Nordic country seem a relative steal.
In an email to the Washington Post last month, Visit Stockholm described the boom in tourism to the city as the ‘Beyoncé effect’.
Economists in Sweden believe that the singer’s decision to start her world tour in Stockholm in May led to a surge in local hotel and restaurant prices.
Prices rose by 9.7 percent in May year-on-year, down from 10.5 percent in April, the first time inflation came in under 10 percent in over six months.
‘Continued decrease in electricity and food prices contributed to the lower inflation rate in May,’ Mikael Nordin, statistician at Statistics Sweden, said in a statement.
At the same time, costs of certain goods and services rose, ‘for instance hotel and restaurant visits, recreational services, and clothing,’ the agency said.
According to Michael Grahn, chief economist for Sweden at Danske Bank, a visit by Beyonce to Stockholm could explain the unexpected rise.
‘Beyonce’s start of her world tour in Sweden seems to have coloured May inflation, how much is uncertain,’ Grahn said in a post to social media.
Grahn added that her much-hyped concert in May ‘probably’ accounted for 0.2 of the 0.3 percentage points added to inflation by hotels and restaurant prices.
‘I wouldn’t … blame Beyonce for [the] high inflation print, but her performance and global demand to see her perform in Sweden apparently added a little to it,’ he wrote in an email to the BBC.
Tens of thousands of fans flocked to Stockholm in the middle of May to catch the two concerts that kicked off her first solo tour in seven years.
Inflation peaked in December at 12.3 per cent – a more than 30-year high – then slowed slightly in January to 11.7 per cent, but unexpectedly spiked back to 12 percent in February.
Beyoncé is touring for the first time in seven years, sparking huge demand for tickets in Europe and from next month the US.
There is little doubt that the singer’s first solo tour in seven years marks a big economic moment.
At least one estimate suggests the run could gross almost £2bn by the time it ends in September.
