Got Tickets To Taylor Swift In LA? Now What?

The Taylor Swift Eras Tour rolls into Los Angeles this week with six (!) shows at SoFi Stadium August 3-9. These will be the final shows on the US leg of her tour. Given the issues during the onsale, and the continued coverage the Eras Tour has received all Spring and Summer, a few friends and colleagues have reached out to me with questions or asking for advice as to what some best practices are for attending the show here in LA. I figured I’d share my comments in a blog post.

1. First and foremost, if you’re traveling to Los Angeles, do not get on a plane or check into a hotel until you have received the tickets that you purchased. If you purchased tickets via Ticketmaster, you should have received the tickets right away. If you purchased tickets via a resale platform like StubHub, there is a possibility that you were not sent the tickets upon completion of the purchase. If this is the case, reach out to the resale platform and request tickets be sent ASAP because there is a very real possibility that the seller is not in possession of tickets. If a seller “busts” an order like this, you’d be refunded for the cost of the tickets, however if you have already flown out here, or stayed a few nights in a hotel, you will not be able to get a refund for those things.

2. No matter what you think about traffic in your city, I promise you LA’s traffic is worse. Your city’s weekday rush hour traffic is LA’s Sunday afternoon traffic. This being the case, leave plenty of time to drive to SoFi Stadium. (Yes, you must drive there. There are no transit options that don’t involve surface roads.) Concert traffic in-and-around SoFi Stadium tends to be worse than football games because there aren’t season ticket holders that are used to the volume of vehicles and traffic patterns. Also, don’t think you can just park or get dropped off on random side streets. There will be large amount of traffic cops enforcing street closures and traffic patterns.

3. Ticketmaster is the official ticket platform of SoFi Stadium and all of the tickets are digital. If for some reason you have a ticket that is not a Ticketmaster ticket, or it’s an actual printed ticket, you do not have an official ticket and will be denied entry.

4. Add your digital ticket to your mobile wallet before you get to the stadium. This will help speed up the entry process because you won’t have to fart around on your phone as you’re walking up to the gate. Cellular networks may also be spotty once you get onsite due to the volume of people there. There should be some sort of “mobile ticket assistance” Wi-Fi, but you won’t be able to access that until you’re close to the box office or the entry gates.

5. Screenshots of tickets won’t work. If for some reason someone in your party is not entering the stadium with the rest of the group , transfer the ticket(s) to them ahead of time. Also, if you’re the recipient of a transferred ticket, you need to actually accept the transfer and have a Ticketmaster account set up. An email stating that a ticket was transferred to you is not sufficient for entry

6. While all my other points above are important technical points, my biggest piece of advice is to be patient. It’s going to be a process to get into the concert and frankly, it can be annoying to enter large-scale sometimes. That said, it’s important to manage expectations before you head out to SoFi Stadium. If 70,000 people are all arriving around the same time at the same place, do you think that means you can just drive up and walk right in, 15 minutes before the show starts? Of course not. Take a deep breath. Take a hit from a vape pen. Take a swig from your “road soda”. Whatever you need to do to remain calm, do it. After all, attending a concert, especially one from a historic tour such as this, is supposed to be a fun experience. Don’t let temporary setbacks or microaggressions ruin the evening for you.

Are you going to the show or have you attended one in another city? Did I miss anything? Hit me up on Twitter X @garrettnolan and let me know.