Selling Europe’s Music Festivals

Though Europe’s music festivals are wildly popular – drawing huge loyal audiences from around the world – music tourism is often overlooked by travel agents.

Yet interest level among travelers is high, and so is demand.

Top festivals draw big numbers
Austria’s most famous music festival, the Salzburg Festival, attracted 278,500 concertgoers in 2012, breaking all attendance records since it began in 1920. The six-week festival features 250 events, ranging from Vienna Philharmonic concerts, to chamber music to operas by Mozart, Verdi, Rossini and Strauss.

Switzerland’s Montreux Jazz Festival has been showcasing dozens of top jazz, blues and soul musicians in outdoor and indoor concerts on the shore of Lake Geneva since 1967. Last year, it drew about 250,000 people.

Germany’s Bayreuth Wagner Festival is in such high demand that until two years ago a six-year waiting list for the opera festival was common. The rules have since been changed to make tickets more readily available.

Among popular music festivals in Italy are the Amalfi Coast Music & Arts Festival and the Verdi Festival.

Commissionable tours
“I would like to see a lot more pro-activity from travel agents on music tours,” said Anne Woodyard, co-owner of Music and Markets Tours.

Based in Reston, Va., Music and Markets Tours is a tour firm whose programs feature concerts in Italy’s Campania, Tuscany, Umbria and Veneto regions and France’s Provence, among others. It pays a 15% commission to travel agents.

Music and Markets Tours focuses on lesser-known music festivals for small groups of up to 10. It also features “fabulous venues you never find in the US, like a 13th-century cloister, castle or garden of a chateau, plus cuisine and history,” Woodyard said.

Clients are generally couples in their 50s to70s along with single women; most clients find the company online. Some then ask their travel agents to book the trip, said Woodyard, a pianist who guides the tours along with her husband Kirk.

Agent specialist
One travel agent who doesn’t overlook music tourism is Margot Cushing, CTC, of FROSCH in New York. Cushing handles mostly FIT music travel, arranging tickets for her clients directly from theaters or hotel concierges.

An Italy specialist, Cushing has sold opera tours to Italy’s Verdi Festival in Parma and to the Vienna State and Salzburg operas. Her music clientele is well-heeled, including some who are independently wealthy, and elderly, she said.

Opera buffs are likely to be strong repeat customers too.

Fanatical opera lovers
“The thing about opera lovers is, they’re so much more fanatical than fans of other performing arts or TV. They have subscriptions, and some follow certain singers all over the world,” said Fred Plotkin, an author of books on opera and Italian food and a former performance manager at New York’s Metropolitan Opera.

Plotkin should know. He leads his own opera tours to Italy, Austria and France, and he will lead three music tours to Italy and Ireland this year for Academic Travel, a tour operator in Washington, D.C. Plotkin also served as a Smithsonian Journeys Italy opera tour guide.  

Travel agents like Cushing work with Plotkin, paying him for his expertise and building packages around his opera lectures and his restaurant choices.

Cushing met Plotkin at a Verdi Festival presentation in New York. “Too bad we can’t put together a tour on this,” she said to him at the time. “We can,” he replied.

Next time: Handling concert tour travel is both rewarding and demanding for agents.