OREANDA-NEWS. Qantas Airways, Australia's premier airline, has partnered with seven-time GRAMMY winner Taylor Swift as the exclusive official airline for the Australia and New Zealand dates of Swift's blockbuster The RED Tour. Starting in late November, Swift will perform stadium shows in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Perth, as well as arena dates in Auckland. Swift will be the first solo female artist in twenty years to undertake a national stadium concert tour of Australia, with the last being Madonna's Girlie Show tour in 1993.

Qantas Group Executive Brand, Marketing and Corporate Affairs Olivia Wirth said the airline was pleased to partner with Taylor Swift and The RED Tour in Australia and New Zealand.

“As the national carrier, Qantas is thrilled to support Taylor Swift's Australian tour and looks forward to flying Taylor and her team around Australia. We'll be offering our customers the opportunity to win tickets to the shows and our frequent flyers will have unique opportunities to purchase tickets,” said Ms Wirth.

Taylor Swift's The RED Tour will include the following Australia and New Zealand dates:

DATE CITY VENUE

November 29 & 30 Auckland, New Zealand Vector Arena

December 4 Sydney, Australia Allianz Stadium

December 7 Brisbane, Australia Suncorp Stadium

December 11 Perth, Australia NIB Stadium

December 14 Melbourne, Australia Etihad Stadium

Currently, Swift is spending her summer on the North American portion of The RED Tour, playing 66 shows (including 13 stadium stops) in 47 cities in 29 states and 3 provinces spanning 6 months in 2013.

Swift's The RED Tour performance features two multi-level stages, elaborate costumes, dancers, aerialists and changing sets. Taylor moves around the venue and uses different stages, giving every audience member a great seat. Taylor plays electric guitar, banjo, piano and acoustic guitar and changes costumes 10 times over the course of the evening. Her set features several songs from her record-breaking REDalbum, as well as new takes on several other fan favorites.

The RED Tour is earning universally high praise from top critics:

Rolling Stone-“Seeing Taylor Swift live in 2013 is seeing a maestro at the top of her or anyone's game. No other pop auteur can touch her right now for emotional excess or musical reach. Red [is] the slickest, smartest and just plain best mega-pop statement of our time. Seeing Taylor onstage now is seeing....total commitment, total fan fervor, total connection between audience and performer. A true arena-rock goddess at an amazing peak”.

The New York Times -- “A king-size spectacle, [whose] juxtapositions have power, one theatrical scene after the next. Taylor Swift off-script is very much like Taylor Swift on-script: not just the brains of the operation, but the brawn, too, the unflappable force that ensures stuck landings. Ms. Swift's voice is stronger than it's ever been, and also sturdier….she sang vividly from behind a piano, show[ing] credible dark emotion.”

The Village Voice-“Taylor Swift was born to entertain. Swift remains genuine….which speaks further to her endless appealing nature as a performer.”

Taylor Swift, who writes all of her own songs, is a seven-time GRAMMY winner, and is the youngest winner in history of the music industry's highest honor, the GRAMMY Award for Album of the Year. She is Billboard's reigning Artist of the Year, and the only female artist in music history (and just the fourth artist ever) to twice have an album hit the 1 million first-week sales figure, and is the first artist since the Beatles (and the only female artist in history) to log six or more weeks at #1 with three consecutive studio albums. Taylor has an album on Rolling Stone's prestigious The 50 Greatest Albums of All Time (by women) list, Time magazine has named her one of the 100 Most Influential people in the world, and she is Billboard's youngest-ever Woman of the Year. Taylor, who is signed to Big Machine Records, has career record sales in excess of 26 million albums and 75 million song downloads worldwide, and has had singles top both the country and pop radio charts around the globe.

The Australia and New Zealand portion of The RED Tour is produced and promoted by The Frontier Touring Company, and tickets are priced from USD 85.