28. May 2025
The song wasted love of the Austrian singer JJ won the Eurovision song contest, which took place on May 10-17, 2025, in Basel. The event was expected to generate CHF 60 million in value added. The day after the event, the city of Basel declared the ESC a big success.
In this blog, we try to provide some first evidence on whether the ESC delivered substantially higher expenditures in the categories retail, accommodation, food & beverage services, and transport services. For this purpose, we use expenditure data provided by Worldline Schweiz AG, which are used for the dashboards of Monitoring Consumption Switzerland (MCS).
We gauge the effect of the Eurovision song contest by comparing expenditures in the merchant categories retail, accommodation, food & beverage services and transport services[1] during the week of the Eurovision song contest with expenditures in the same week in the previous year.
Figure 1: Year-on-year changes of expenditures in selected categories during the week of the Eurovision song contest, at the point-of-sale (POS).
Notes: Expenditure growth rates relative to expenditures in the same week in 2024. “Total” contains the sum of expenditures for the selected categories.
Figure 1 shows that expenditures in restaurants in the city of Basel increased most by 21.5%, followed by expenditures transport services, which increased by 7.3%. Expenditures in retail stores fell by 5.2%, and expenditures on accommodation fell by 20.3% (during the week of the ESC relative to the same week in the previous year). Overall, this implies that the total of these expenditures remained nearly unchanged.
To gauge whether other common changes may affect this year-on-year comparison, we also compare the expenditure changes in Basel Stadt with those in the cities of Bern and Zurich. In comparison with these cities, the expenditure increases in restaurants and for transport services remain striking, as well as the decrease of expenditures in accommodation. We further find that the decrease of expenditures in retail during the week of Eurovision song contest in Basel Stadt has been preceded, in the week before the song contest, by an increase of retail spending by 9.2% (relative to the respective comparison week in the previous year). This suggests that some consumers anticipated their spending in retail stores to avoid shopping in a more crowded city.
Distinguishing expenditures of domestic and foreign cardholders, we find that retail expenditures of foreign cardholders increased during the week of the Eurovision song contest relative to the same week in the previous year, but this increase did not suffice to compensate for the decrease in expenditures by domestic cardholders. For the other considered expenditure categories, the changes of expenditures relative to the previous year are qualitatively similar for domestic and foreign cardholders, albeit quantitatively stronger for foreigners. Interestingly, we find that, in the category accommodation, expenditures of foreign cardholders also decreased by 24.1%, i.e., similarly as for domestic cardholders, during the week of the Eurovision song contest.
Overall, our findings indicate that the Eurovision song contest has affected expenditures quite differently across categories. Of course, our results do not provide a comprehensive assessment of whether the Eurovision song contest has been a waste of money or not. The expenditure changes during the weeks of the Eurovision song contest are obviously only part of the story. Some effects may need time to materialize, and the event itself may have generated a consumption value for taxpayers in Basel. Furthermore, there may have been spillovers to spending in other cities in the vicinity of Basel, some of which are outside of Switzerland (in France or in Germany) and thus are not contained in our data set.
[1] The merchant category codes associated with the expenditure categories are documented here.