New Sampling America Analysis: One Average Eras Tour Show Drew More Fans Than America's Three Least-Visited National Parks Combined in 2025

Sampling America today published a new data analysis that ranks all 63 U.S. national parks by 2025 visitation and compares each one with attendance at Taylor Swift's Eras Tour. The report, released November 6, 2026, is the first to line up the National Park Service's full-year 2025 recreation-visit counts against the tour's Guinness World Records ticket totals. It matters for travelers, park advocates and journalists because it shows in concrete terms how unevenly visits are spread across the park system: a handful of parks absorb huge crowds while many remote parks see fewer people in a year than a single stadium concert.

The headline finding: one average Eras Tour show (68,242 tickets, based on 10,168,008 tickets across 149 shows in 2023-24) topped a full year of visits at the three least-visited national parks combined. Kobuk Valley recorded 7,786 recreation visits in 2025, Gates of the Arctic 14,923 and Lake Clark 19,778, for 42,487 visits in total.

The gap widens as more parks are stacked together. The 31 least-visited national parks combined logged 9,987,124 recreation visits in 2025, which is 180,884 short of the Eras Tour's full ticket count.

At the other end, Great Smoky Mountains National Park recorded about 11.53 million recreation visits in 2025, roughly 1.36 million more than the entire Eras Tour, and more than Grand Canyon (about 4.43 million) and Yellowstone (about 4.76 million) combined.

Kobuk Valley's 2025 total also fell sharply from 17,233 visits in 2024. Even using the three parks' higher 2024 combined total of 47,645, one average Eras show still outdrew that trio.

Method: the comparison uses NPS monthly recreation-visit counts for calendar year 2025 and Guinness World Records' Eras Tour ticket totals (tour ran March 17, 2023 to December 8, 2024). Recreation visits are entry counts, not unique visitors, and a concert ticket is a different measure from a park visit. Park-and-preserve units are counted together as NPS reports them. The full 63-park ranking, method notes and a downloadable CSV are available in the report.

About Sampling America:

Sampling America publishes original travel and outdoors data stories, maps and explainers for readers who want numbers alongside the road trip.