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“You flew your Learjet up to Nova Scotia to see the total eclipse of the sun,” Carly Simon sang in her 1972 hit “You’re So Vain.” This year, it isn’t just Learjet owners who are heading out in search of totality.
Roughly 4 million Americans are hitting the road to find the best spot from which to view the April 8 solar eclipse. Totality will move south to north, from Mexico through the midwestern U.S., and then cut over the coast into the north Atlantic. And for the tourism industry, the eclipse is “the equivalent to having 50 Super Bowls simultaneously from Texas to Maine,” Michael Zeiler, who runs a website called the Great American Eclipse, told Vox.
Over half of the Airbnbs in U.S. cities along the eclipse’s path are fully booked for the night of April 7, according to data from AirDNA. As many as 20,000 people are expected to descend on the Maine town of Rangeley, otherwise home to just 1,200 people. In Indiana, a state preparing for 500,000 visitors, the portable toilet business has never been better. Eclipse viewing events have been planned at a Texas alpaca farm, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway, and the Solar Strings music festival at Astral Valley in Missouri. Quite unexpectedly, a cosmic confluence has become the tourist blowout of 2024.
BY THE NUMBERS
$1 billion: The tourism revenue expected out of the April 8 solar eclipse, according to one estimate. Of this, roughly $428 million will be generated in Texas alone.
2 hours: The approximate duration of the eclipse’s passage over North America
15: The number of U.S. states from where the eclipse will be visible
31.6 million: The number of people who live in the path of totality this year
4m 23s: The duration of total darkness in Eagle Pass, a border town in Texas
1,950 miles per hour: The speed at which you’d have to drive to keep pace with the moon’s shadow
218: The number of years since Ohio last saw a total solar eclipse
QUOTED
This is likely going to be the single biggest tourism event we’ve ever had. Obviously, it’s going to be a short duration — a long weekend — but for that concentrated period of time, it’s going to be a very big deal.
—Michael Pakko, an economist at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, who told the Washington Post that he expects his state to receive a tourism windfall of $105 million
GOING LIVE
A total solar eclipse is admittedly a rare thing. But over the last couple of years, it feels like we’ve heard quite often about live, real-world events being deluged by people and their expenditure. Last year in Sweden, Beyoncé raised inflation after she performed there, because fans from around the world flocked to Stockholm and spent heavily in hotels and restaurants. In Singapore, a leg of Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour added hundreds of millions of dollars to the national GDP. A record number of fans attended Major League Soccer games in 2023, which might well be attributable to the presence of Lionel Messi.
Far be it for us to detract from the star power of the Queen Bey, Tay Tay, Leo, and, well, the sun—but is there something else going on here? Certainly on the monetary front, it seems to bear out the theory that economies the world over, and the US in particular, haven’t suffered from tighter interest rates. Spending has remained high. “Among discretionary items,” a recent McKinsey report found, “consumers expressed in February a higher intention to spend on travel and home (such as on short-term rentals, home improvement, hotel resort stays, and flights) than they did in the fourth quarter of 2023.”
Another explanation is possible, of course: that people are spending beyond their means. US credit card balances hit a new record of $1.3 trillion in January, even as delinquencies rose; in November, the Fed revealed that more Americans were falling behind on their card payments than since the tail end of the 2008–09 financial crisis. That same month, economists at the Fed wondered if U.S. households had depleted all the excess savings they accumulated during the pandemic.
Certainly the kinds of things people seem to want to spend on—travel, live events, eclipse-chasing—are precisely the experiences that were denied to them for two covid-stricken years. In that sense, the shadow of the pandemic continues to loom large over the consumer economy.
ONE ☀️ THING
Eclipse tourism has been a thing practically forever, one must assume: Who can resist the lure of an event as cosmic and confounding? The Victorians went on package tours to witness totality. Among the modern pioneers of mass-market eclipse tourism was Ted Pedas, a Pennsylvania-based science educator. In 1970, he approached the Virginia town of Eclipse, urging that it hold an outdoor celebration to mark the solar eclipse in March that year. “He was taken for a rock festival promoter, and quickly escorted out of town,” an obituary of Pedas recalled. Undeterred, Pedas helped launch the world’s first eclipse cruise a couple of years later: Voyage to Darkness, featuring 834 people and one cat named Penny Nicol, sailing from New York City to the North Atlantic. Following that, Pedas organized at least a dozen more. The science fiction novelist Isaac Asimov, who lectured on a 1973 eclipse cruise, recounted in his memoir: “Never did so many people have so steadily good a time without any of the activities usually associated with a cruise. They were being educated and loving it!”
Thanks for reading! And don’t hesitate to reach out with comments, questions, or topics you want to know more about.
Have a cosmically great weekend!
— Samanth Subramanian, Weekend Brief editor