Has Harry Styles killed the world tour?

When Harry Styles announced the dates for his 2026 "world tour", fans were quick to notice it actually only includes performances in seven cities.

Though the 31-year-old has announced 67 dates for the Together, Together tour in total, this includes several residencies, with 12 nights in London, 10 in Amsterdam and 30 in New York City.

His string of performances at Wembley Stadium in June and July means he will overtake Coldplay and Taylor Swift as the artist with the most performances at the venue in a single year.

But this is coming at a cost to some fans. As well as tickets to the show, many say they've had to fork out for hotels and transport, too.

Cheryl Diamond, 42, from Northern Ireland, will be seeing Styles at Wembley.

"The travel and the hotel are going to cost way more than what the tickets were," says Cheryl, who spent £71 on her ticket.

But as a huge Styles fan, she says she "probably would have travelled anywhere."

Some fans say the cost of accommodation is too high, though. Georgia Prickett, 27, and her friends will be travelling from the Cotswolds, Portsmouth, Birmingham and Leeds for two shows at Wembley - and they're all planning on returning home straight after the concert.

"As soon as the artist releases their date, the hotels whack up their prices," Georgia says. She'd rather save money and get the last train back after the concert - even if that means she'll have to miss the last few songs, as she did during one of the shows she saw on Styles' 2022 tour.

Harry Styles' last world tour, Love On Tour, was set to kick off in April 2020 but was disrupted by the pandemic. In the end, the tour lasted 22 months between 2021 and 2023 and included a 15-night residency at Madison Square Gardens in New York City and six nights at Wembley. But over the course of the tour, he also visited dozens of other cities, performing in many venues for just one or two nights, including Coventry, Edinburgh, Glasgow and Manchester.

But he's taking a decidedly different approach with Together, Together, opting for just seven cities across six countries in this initial tour announcement.

Artists increasingly appear to be choosing to perform more dates in fewer cities, says Nick Reilly, content editor at Rolling Stone. Last year, for example, Beyonce performed at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in north London for six nights, while Coldplay performed in Hull for two nights and in London for six.

Though Ariana Grande's tour this summer includes 41 nights, the only countries she's visiting are the US, Canada and the UK, with her only dates in Europe being 10 nights in London.

One of the major drivers of this trend is likely to be cost, says Reilly.

"Touring and the cost of production has gone up exponentially in the last few years," he says. Given the "scale and the lavishness" of tour shows, Reilly explains that visiting fewer cities means "a lot less transporting these very expansive, ambitious sets around the world".

Travelling to lots of cities can also be exhausting for a performer and their support crew, says Emma Bownes, senior vice president of programming for AEG International, which operates the O2 arena in Greenwich, London, where Elton John, Queen and Adam Lambert, and Drake have all undertaken residencies.

Performing longer stints in one city also makes it "hands-down" easier for artists to secure good support acts, says Reilly. Styles, for example, is being supported by Shania Twain in London and Jamie XX in New York City.

The rise in bands performing longer residences at fewer venues has led to an increase in "gig tourism", says Reilly. Fans are willing to forgo a conventional holiday and put the money towards travelling to another city or country for a gig instead, he says.

"Fans are prepared to travel in to watch a show, make a weekend of it," Bownes agrees.

This is nothing new to Summer-Rose Starenczak, 28, who lives in a small town in Norfolk. She's used to having to stay in London overnight if she wants to see any big-name artists, who rarely perform any closer to where she lives.

Summer-Rose has paid nearly £350 for tickets for herself and her daughter, six, to see Styles perform at Wembley. She's also spent £66 on train tickets and is expecting to spend about £200 for two nights' accommodation.

Styles will be her daughter's first concert, and Summer-Rose is looking forward to spending a couple of nights in London with her. She's already booked theatre tickets for their other night in the capital.

Kim Hosty, 41, from Fife, plans to treat Styles' shows in London "like a summer holiday".

She has tickets to see seven of Styles's shows at Wembley, and plans to spend about two weeks in London with a friend from Australia who is flying in for the shows.

"Would I like him to be performing in Edinburgh? Absolutely… It's obviously a cheaper alternative. But it hasn't stopped me from buying tickets."

Kim did the same with Swift's Eras tour last year, when she spent a week in Wembley, and she'll be travelling across the UK for four dates of Louis Tomlinson's tour this year, too.

Last year, AEG surveyed 3,000 UK adults and more than a third said they had booked overnight accommodation to attend a gig, while 19% said they had travelled internationally for concerts or festivals. One in 10 people buying tickets for events at the O2 is from overseas, says AEG.

Many people are flying in from abroad to see Styles perform in London - in part, because of the limited locations of his tour, but also because of varied pricing between countries.

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MacKenzie Dunaway Gardner, 31, from Texas, tried to get tickets for Styles' shows in New York City, but says the prices were "really really outrageous".

Instead, she's heading to London for eight of Styles' shows with friends from Pennsylvania and Georgia.

Getting tickets to the Wembley shows was a "100% no-brainer" for her, she says.

MacKenzie acknowledges it will cost her thousands of dollars in flights, accommodation and other costs to spend two weeks in London seeing Styles' shows in the summer.

"It's very expensive, and I'm very privileged," she says. "I know so many people that aren't going to be able to do it."

Hotels.com told BBC News search interest in accommodation in London for the weeks of Styles' tour had already spiked. Similarly, Airbnb said UK searches on its site for accommodation in Harrow, Wembley's London borough, were up 7400% year-on-year, with a huge growth in searches for neighbouring boroughs, too. The average Airbnb price in London during the tour is £110, it added.

Not every artist can rely on fans being willing to fill out an arena or stadium for multiple nights in order to make a residency work, Reilly says.

"When you're Harry Styles, arguably the biggest male pop star in the world, you are in a unique position where whatever you do, you're very lucky because fans are going to come and see you regardless."

This resonates with MacKenzie, a Styles fan since the age of 15.

Seeing one of the singer's Love On Tour concerts at Wembley in 2023 was "one of the best days of my life next to my wedding", she says, adding that she and her friends "promised we would be there when he returned".

"Whatever it took to make it happen, we would."