Backstreet Boys at Sphere Las Vegas: A photo diary

Last week I had the most incredible trip to Las Vegas for some millennial therapy seeing the Backstreet Boys show at Sphere. Now that I am fully rested and recovered from the trip, I absolutely have to share all of the details with you! Grab a snack because I have to much to share-including the horrible experience I had after the show.

Before I get into the trip…can I just say how much I love being a Millennial? We lived in such a beautiful time of history. Just before the rise of social media and smartphones, but we still had a little bit of technology to keep us busy. We also had the best musical artists (in my humble opinion) In fact, pop culture for millennials was on another level. I was born in 1990, so I am a peak 90’s kid.

Where my love for Backstreet Boys started…and how we got tickets to the show

Like most girls, I was absolutely obsessed with boy bands and pop stars. When I was a child, we had N*SYNC, Backstreet Boys, Christina Aguilera and THE Britney Spears. There was always debates about which band was better between the boy bands, and of course they were always trying to pit Christina against Britney. The reality is, all of these artists and groups were incredibly talented. I do have very specific memories with Backstreet Boys and their Millennium album. I remember loving the all white and blue aesthetic, I remember the first time I saw the music video for Show me the meaning of being lonely, and I remember singing and dancing to that album with my friends.

Last year, I saw all over the internet that Backstreet Boys were playing a few shows at Sphere, but I was very much locked in with work and had spent money on other trips. It wasn’t even on my radar. I kept seeing all of the footage of the show and even knew of people that went. I became increasingly jealous.

Then, I saw that they had added dates for 2026. It still wasn’t necessarily on my radar because…to be honest…Las Vegas wasn’t even on my bottom 50 places to visit in the country. I don’t like cities at all and there was nothing about Vegas that was even remotely exciting to me. I saw it as a money pit in the middle of the dessert.

Nevertheless, my friend wanted to go and she fought in the Ticketmaster war for us. She didn’t even get tickets from Ticketmaster (I swear it’s a scam) but she got tickets from stub hub for a decent price.

It was official! We were going to Vegas!

I think she got the tickets in March so we had months to prepare for the trip. Waiting was the hardest part. It was easy until the date got closer. And then it became almost too exciting to handle. We got a room at the Flamingo for insanely cheap and the room was large and very clean. I was very happy.

We had also decided to not spend a fortune on fancy restaurants, and instead we wanted to eat our way around the strip, trying anything we wanted, even if we weren’t hungy.

When we arrived at the airport, I was excited to see two other ladies wearing the same shirt as me. Walmart did a fantastic job making BSB merch. I had pajamas and a crop top that I brought on the trip. Other ladies were wearing custom denim jackets and tee shirts. My friend and I even talked to a woman who was going to the concert for a second time.

We would soon discover that going to the show multiple times was incredibly normal.

The flight was fine. It was around four hours. Landing in Vegas was…something. It was 110 degrees. Of course we knew that traveling to Vegas in the summer wasn’t the brightest idea, and we had checked the weather before we went, but there’s nothing like actually being there in the heat…pure misery.

Our First order of Business? Grabbing a quick bite to eat, then finding the BSB terminal. The terminal is inside of the Venetian, so we found some food in there. I needed some protein after my travels, so I ordered a quesadilla from B.S. Taqueria. I paid way too much for my meal, but it was absolutely delicious!!

Visiting the Backstreet Boys Terminal

For those of you who don’t know, there is an entire fan experience set up in the form of an airport terminal inside of the Palazzo that you can visit before the show. It was so much fun and luckily I took lots of photos!

This was a two story experience with Backstreet Boys music blasting, several photo ops, lots of merchandise, a permanent jewelry station, a TRL stage for pictures, a wall of lots of their old media (magazines, posters, articles, etc.) and more.

This was the BEST way to spend the day before the concert. We went at 2:20 on Wednesday and there was barely anyone there. My first order of business was the permanent jewelry. I got a permanent bracelet in Charleston, SC on a girls trip and have been obsessed with them ever since. I was so excited to see that they were offering bracelets. I wanted to spend my money on something that would last a long time.

I chose the blue and gold bracelet with the BSB charm. My friend got her bracelet with a clasp so that she could remove it when she needed to. I love that they offered the clasp option.

The bracelets weren’t cheap…we paid $220 for both, but they were most definitely worth it. Hopefully mine lasts a long time and if it ever falls off I hope I find it because I can get it re-welded if needed.

After we got our bracelets we were able to enjoy the rest of the terminal. Here are some photos of what they had inside.

Right when you enter the terminal there is a boarding pass you can take a photo with.

There is also an airplane setup which is perfect for pictures as well. I also should add that at every station there were people there to take pictures for you! This was especially convenient for groups!

After we explored the terminal, we decided it was finally time to purchase our merch. There is a large merch store with options at almost every price point. I ended up purchasing a tee shirt as well as a keychain.

Showtime

The next day was basically a waiting game until it was time to head to Sphere. We were tired from staying out until 3am and hot because of the weather, we basically had to dilly dally until the show. I will have another post up with the other things that we did in Vegas, which isn’t anything special.

Finally, it was time for the show. Backstreet Boys requested everyone wore white with a hint of blue to the show, so I planned a very basic all white outfit with blue sunglasses and butterfly clips. When it was time to walk to Sphere, it was so exciting to see everyone’s outfits. You would be surprised what people come up with when given a very simple theme. Everyone had on white and blue but nobody’s outfit was the same. It had me wishing I put more effort into my outfit.

This is the only photo I have of Sphere, and this was taken after the show. When we walked through the Venetian, we didn’t have a view of it from the inside. This is the very best I could do.

Sphere looks very nice on the inside. It is clean and organized. I definitely had a good experience here.

We arrived with about an hour until showtime, so we just had to wait there looking at this screen. As you can see, we had a tiny big of an obstructed view because of the seats above us, but this didn’t prevent us from seeing everything on the screens. If you were to purchase tickets sitting farther back, this could be a problem. We were still closer to the stage than I imagined.

Backstreet Boys!

The Backstreet Boys took the stage right on schedule and opened the show with Larger than Life.

They performed a series of songs to hype everyone up and I definitely had an incredible time. The screen would change for each song making the experience much more interactive and also kind of felt like we were inside one of their music videos at times. I’ll add a few photos.

They closed the show with Everybody which I believe is this photo above. It is hard to remember sometimes. Overall, seeing Backstreet Boys was a dream come true. Never in my life did I think I would ever attend one of their concerts. 10 year old me would be SCREAMING! And at the end of the day, that is who I live for.

Getting yelled at by a Sphere employee…

After the concert, we attempted to stay to take pictures with the Backtreet Boys logo on the screen. We had taken photos for some girls next to us and they went to take ours when we started getting yelled at by a Sphere employee. She was telling us that we needed to leave because “we want to go home too”. Mind you, there are still thousands of people in the venue at this point.

I took photos for my friend quickly and she went to take photos of me and the employee is yelling at us the entire time *this only took about 4 minutes, maybe even less. My friend was rushing to get a good photo of me and this employee started walking closer to her and yelling at her. Finally I turned around and said just get a picture of the back of my head so we can leave.

She snapped a photo and we left. Other concertgoers around heard the way she was yelling at us and couldn’t believe it! After paying hundreds of dollars for our ticket and hundreds in travel costs, I don’t think it was unreasonable to get a photo after the show.

I honestly think that employee was just having a bad day and wanted to go home, but it was definitely unacceptable the way she was treating us and everyone else trying to take a photo.

This is the photo she took of me and you can clearly see there are lots of people still in the building. This was only a couple of minutes after the show. That was the only negative experience we had and at least it happened after the show was over.

Final Thoughts

What an incredible trip this was. Definitely a night I will never forget. Backstreet Boys put on amazing show and it made me so happy. I would do this again in every lifetime! If you ever have the opportunity go attend a show, I highly recommend.