When the tour schedule for 1999's George Strait [ tickets ] Music Festival was announced in February, fans in several markets visited on the tour's 1998 run were disappointed to see the tour not returning. According to a statement issued Wednesday (5/12) on behalf of the festival, fans in every city will eventually face the same disappointment, as the festival is adopting a tour routing policy of not playing the same market more than twice.

The routing policy would exclude future visits to markets including Phoenix, Tampa, Dallas, Detroit, Oakland, Chicago, Kansas City and Houston, which the festival has played for the past two years.

The move has been cited as an effort to expose the festival to as many new fans as possible while meeting Strait's own scheduling constraints. Strait's stated desire is to play only dates that don't interfere with personal plans like those involving his son's school schedule, so the tour plays relatively few dates (18 this year) stretched through weekends of multiple months.

The unique tour date arrangement allows artists on the tour to easily mount their own tours around the Strait itinerary, as has been the case with the Dixie Chicks and Jo Dee Messina this year.

In only its second year, the tour has already established itself as one of the unique successes of recent memory, particularly noteworthy in the wake of Lollapalooza's deflated standing among touring festivals (the tour has been on hiatus for two years, re-tooling and looking for headline acts) after pioneering the very touring genre that the Strait Fest is modeled after.

Louis Messina, CEO and Chairman of SFX / Pace, the national producer of the tour, projects that the tour may be seen in retrospect as one of the top tours of the decade. The assessment has momentum on its side, as the festival has surpassed same-venue attendance numbers tallied on Rolling Stones and U2 outings of recent years. The festival was the 9th top-grossing tour of 1998, pulling in $33 million in ticket sales, according to Pollstar.

This year's tour, featuring Strait, Tim McGraw, the Dixie Chicks, Kenny Chesney, Jo Dee Messina, Mark Wills and Asleep at the Wheel, has six dates remaining. Following the tour, Tim McGraw, whose latest album A Place In The Sun debuts at #1 on Billboard's pop and country charts next week, will join with the Dixie Chicks for a summer tour. The Chicks will also be a featured act on this year's Lilith Fair tour.