Zac Brown Band turned a Sunday night show at Fenway Park into a giveaway that few of the more than 35,000 fans in the crowd were expecting. Before the band played “Same Boat,” Zac Brown told the audience, “I’m buying every single person here a cruise for two people,” then added, “Every single person here gets a cruise for themselves and a loved one.”
The trips are on Margaritaville at Sea and can be redeemed on select voyages over the next year. A press release valued the surprise at almost $40 million, and Brown called it “the biggest giveaway in history, ladies and gentlemen, here tonight at Fenway Park.” Isabelle Cilley said she was not really a cruise girl, but would go if it was free.
The show was part of the Love & Fear tour and marked the band’s 15th consecutive sold-out performance at Fenway Park, where Zac Brown Band has held the record for the most consecutive sellouts. The group first played the ballpark in 2014 and was inducted into the Fenway Music Hall of Fame in 2022, a track record that has made Fenway one of the band’s most reliable stages.
What complicates the scale of Sunday’s surprise is that the tour already had been giving away four cruises per show in partnership with Margaritaville at Sea. That makes the Fenway promise feel both bigger and less cleanly defined: the crowd was told every person would get a cruise, but the broader promotion still appears to have been built around a smaller number of trips at each stop. The company said it was honored to work with Brown to bring the surprise to fans, while Brown framed it as a personal gesture tied to the night and to Fenway itself.
The trips are tied to the new Beachcomber ship, which is due to debut in January 2027 and will feature a live music venue called “Same Boat,” codesigned by Brown. Fans who left Fenway with what sounded like an extravagant promise now have a year to turn it into a booking, and the unanswered part is not whether the giveaway was real — it was — but how many cruises were ultimately assigned to the crowd under the tour’s existing rules.
