How Vail Destroyed Skiing

As a business, the ski industry continues to hit new heights. Resorts have seen record numbers of skiers in recent years. Revenue is streaming in. Oh my god. And there's growing frustration on the mountain. Yo, what the ****? Skiing is becoming increasingly expensive, inconvenient, and out of reach. Tickets can cost almost $300 for just one day at that resort. Families can't afford it. Locals are pushed out of town. Ski areas are overcrowded and understaffed. Park City Ski Patrollers are officially on strike. And there's a lot of anger at the $6 billion company at the center of the ski resort industry. An online petition from Vail Resort's customers frustrated by unopened terrain and long lift lines is gaining steam. Fuck Vail! Vail Resorts, along with Altera, are the two dominant forces in the ski industry. And together, reshaped ski resort culture and the mountain communities that built it through expansion, skyrocketing costs, and business strategies that have sparked intense debate. They made a conscious decision to essentially decide, you know, we're going to increase our profits at the expense of people's happiness. Their influence has changed the experience of resort skiing and snowboarding over the past decade and a half, leaving many to wonder, did it have to get this bad? Is there a way out? Where is resort skiing going to continue in this direction? Follow me to find out. It wasn't all that long ago that skiing was much more affordable. In 1999, there were 509 ski areas operating in the United States, and many were battling to charge the lowest price for a lift ticket. A daily ticket ranged from $35 to $60, and there were some popular areas with even lower prices. It was also around that time that the last major government antitrust action hit the industry, forcing Vail to divest one of its properties. With more competition, a hotspot like Park City, Utah, had three mountain resorts run by three different companies. America, you are gonna love it. My friends used to live there. Julia McCarrier moved to Park City, Utah in 2013 and began working for the ski patrol at The Canyons, one of the three resorts before Vail entered the picture. If I remember correctly, that house was passed down essentially from ski patroller to ski patroller to ski patroller for a long time. Vail began acquiring Ski Mountains in 1996, but it wasn't until around 2010 that it really hit its stride. Breaking news coming out of Park City today, Vail Resorts has just purchased Park City Mountain Resort for $182.5 million in cash. Park City Mountain and Canyons will be combined for the 2015-2016 season. I would say when Park City and Canyons merged, that was when there was a really distinct shift. Everything that we can see is the Canyons ski resort. This is about half of Park City Mountain Resort. What up, dude? How's it going? Lou Chiapetta is another member of the ski patrol at Vail's Park City Mountain Resort. There are a lot of different demographics represented in Park City, from liberal all the way across to conservative. Not many of them are big fans of Vail as a corporation. Vail picked up three existing ski resorts in 2012, nine between 2013 and 2018, and a whopping 18 in 2019 alone after it purchased publicly traded company Peak Resorts. Today, Vail and its rival company, Altera, own over 50 major ski resorts and have control of over half of the entire U.S. ski market. They are the most powerful names in the industry, and together they are simply known as the duopoly. Well, a duopoly is two firms kind of running the show, and here we have two firms, Vail and Altera, who have gone around the country rolling up ski slopes and ski resorts one after another. Hal Singer is an economist and antitrust expert at the University of Utah. He's also an avid skier. What independent ownership does is it creates really strong and I would submit healthy incentives for the owner to treat its customers and its workers well. But once these firms get rolled up by these kind of faceless private equity firms, it's really no longer anyone's responsibility. The food increased. The cost of a day ticket went through the roof. There became a greater influence and a greater perspective on making sure that there was like a consistent experience as opposed to a unique experience. So goodbye Canis Lupus challenge. It costs hundreds of bucks a day to rent gear for your family. If you want your family in lessons for the whole day, that's gonna be a lot more. A private lesson costs even more on top of that. Skiing really took off in the United States in the 1930s after the Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York and the invention of the chairlift. As equipment got more affordable, the sport got more popular. And between the growth of artificial snowmaking and the opening of new mega resorts, skiing became more ubiquitous than ever. But it's also an expensive business to run. And by the 90s, the boom times were fading. More than 50 independent ski resorts in the United States closed between 1990 and 2000. Big companies like Vail began to roll up mountains. And in 2008, Vail changed the sport with an all mountain, all access card, the Epic Pass, which gives skiers access to all 40 plus Vail-owned resorts for around $1,000. If you buy one thing this year, make it the Epic Pass. In 2018, Altera followed suit with its own pass, the Icon, offering access to skiing at 17 destinations. Having the huge season pass option that you can go to many different ski resorts sounds like a good idea, but I am not sure that it's being executed in the best way. The cutoff to buy a pass this year was at the beginning of December, locking in large payments before any skiing is done. For Vail and Altera, this was a game changer, creating financial stability in a market that historically had its revenue reliant on unpredictable snowfall. Having pre-season sales of those gives them, you know, set money they know they're going into the season with. They don't have to worry necessarily about day-to-day visitor numbers. They just have to worry about driving those people to actually book longer trips, to buy food on the mountain, to buy gear from Vail. Vail has a sales goal of achieving over 75% of its revenue in advance commitment, which puts a very big onus on skiers. For a lot of hardcore skiers who can visit lots of resorts and ski a lot of days, these passes actually save them cash. The problem is that if you're just a casual skier or have a whole family that wants to ski, the alternative to those passes isn't much of an alternative at all. The price of day lift tickets has soared in recent years, and that is a major part of the strategy. The prices of the day tickets and the season passes are interconnected. If you raise the price of the day tickets, it starts to make the season package look affordable. Now, it's anything but. They've gotten the season package up to around $1,000 a year now, but that starts to look affordable because they're raising the price of what I call the outside option or the standalone daily price into the, just say, $300 range. In 2011, a lift ticket at Park City Mountain cost $90. This year, it hit $327, a 263% increase. The price to enter the sport is so staggeringly high that unless you are coming from a place of privilege or unless you have family members who are incredibly dedicated to getting you out on the slopes, it's really hard to start skiing or start snowboarding. If you're able to swing that upfront price for a pass and manage to visit a ski resort several times a season, the system is a good deal. Unless you're skiing during peak times. A steady line of cars led to long lines of people at two Utah ski resorts. Got people? With all those pass holders having access to the same number of mountains, more skiers are showing up to more resorts more often. And in most cases, the ski areas are just not big enough for all of them to enjoy it comfortably. So as a result, you have a really massive overcrowding at these resorts. No one's minding the store, and I don't think we can count on the resort owner. The resort owner, you know, just wants as many people as they can get there. This congestion is born entirely by the customers, right? So we stand in the line, you know, it ruins our time, but it doesn't do anything to the profits of the firm. Meanwhile, Vail is focused on capturing a lot of non-skier dollars too. From transportation to gear rentals, food to lodging. I got an email from Vail saying 15% off if I buy their lodge, you know, alongside the lift tickets. If the person who's assembling the bundle has control and monopoly power in one of the inputs here, the resort, it's possible that you could raise the standalone price and create basically a fake or a phantom discount off an inflated standalone price to get consumers to overpay for the bundle. So where is all this money going? One of Vail's stated goals for the coming year is expanding the resort network. Along with strengthening their North American market, they are looking at further expansion into Europe and Asia. I think it's just showing what the priority is. The priority feels like it's on acquisition instead of maybe operation. We all know that there's money flowing in here. What's the disconnect? How are you just extracting all of this money and sending it back to shareholders in Colorado or whoever owns mountain stock? A lot of folks that I used to know lived around here. Most of the time, the person who owned their house decided to sell it. And then the new buyers didn't want to rent it or they wanted to rent it for much more. And it just became like untenable economically. Here in Park City, the medium home sale price in December 2024 was $2.9 million despite a 60% vacancy rate. Ski towns are experiencing extreme housing shortages as resorts build more and more hotels and apartments and houses are transformed into Airbnbs to accommodate visiting pass holders from out of town. It's tough for locals and workers alike. There is a sense of not necessarily recognizing the town that they grew up in. It's not super common for folks who work in Park City to live in Park City. Julia lives far outside of Park City in a rural town that is at least a 45 minute drive and a short snowmobile ride away. For me, incorporating a drive has made it so Park City is a destination for work and for groceries, less of a community that I belong to. Lou lives a bit closer. Welcome to employee housing. This is the communal living area. We have kind of a small kitchen space, regular refrigerator here. There are eight of us that live in this unit. Four on one side over there, four on this side. Lou lives in employee dorms, which are made available to a slice of Vale workers. He pays $660 a month during the ski season for a small room. And believe it or not, he's one of the lucky ones. Some of the other guys are in triple bedrooms, so sharing a room with two other people. I can show you the single right over here. Your regular, not so soft bed. A little armoire, some seating and a mini fridge in this room. Not too much to it. Pretty simplistic, pretty institutionalized. Park City Ski Patrol unionized several years ago, fed up with the low wages and difficult living conditions that now plague ski towns and workers. I just think that less and less workers are willing to degrade themselves and see themselves as dirt bags when they're providing a luxury product. I'm not proud of having slept on a couch in somebody's studio apartment for a whole winter just to like go skiing and be able to do something I'm passionate about. At the end of 2024, after weeks of failed negotiations and during one of the busiest ski weeks of the year, Lou and his fellow ski patrollers went on strike. The wages weren't right and workers just didn't feel respected. It's kind of, yeah, like a kick in the knees. The cost of an employee meal went from $5 to $8 due to inflation or whatever excuse there is. But the hourly wages did not change based on inflation. Large parts of the mountain terrain were shut down due to the lack of staffing. Lift lines were out of control. People were pissed. A lot of the businesses in Park City and smaller family-owned, community-owned places really supported us because they know that we are the ones trying to live in town here and that want to support them. The union won the strike, dinging Vail's stock price and earning big pay raises. Other ski patrol unions at Vail-owned resorts are looking for new contracts as are unions at resorts owned by Altera. With our strike, people are starting to notice that the business model of just trying to get as many people to the resort as possible might not be always the best option. And there are other options. Right now, we're rolling some stuff up the hill in our small snowcat. So we got beach chairs, skis, beer, and firewood. That's just about all you need for a good time. Eric Mogensen is the CEO of Entobeni Systems, a company that provides data for independent ski resorts across North America. I think early on, we were looking at the data and a lot of these independent resorts don't have a product to compete with the mega multi-pass offering. You know, obviously these small places have a season's pass and those types of things, but there really wasn't a good ability to go around and have a single product that would give you access to different independent resorts. In 2022, Entobeni Systems acquired IndyPass. IndyPass gives users two days at each of its member mountain resorts, providing them access and new customers without succumbing to overcrowding. What it does is it gets people to go to places they wouldn't go otherwise. It gets people, you know, out of a narrow menu of ski area options and gives them some real geographical and terrain diversity that they may not have otherwise. 85% of the pass revenue goes back to the resorts and gets split based on a ratio between their average daily ticket price and the amount of visits that they get on the pass. Especially the small independents, they need a path forward and a lot of the systems, a lot of the solutions out there to solve those problems are built for either industries outside the ski industry or for very, very large players in the industry. One of the resorts on IndyPass is Black Mountain in New Hampshire, a beloved local hill that couldn't keep up with the big operators. So Entebeny bought Black Mountain temporarily with the intent of turning it into a co-op owned by members. You know, everybody likes to complain about the mega operators and the mega corporations and the mega companies and regardless of industry, but it's really easy to complain and it's another thing to do something about it. And so I woke up the next morning and I said, we're going to do something about it. One thing I've always been so inspired by in skiing is that everybody really feels that they have an ownership piece of their little mountain. They've parked in the same spot for 20 years. They have family memories on this trail. They have their mug at the bar. There really is a sense of ownership and that's really what brought me to making sure that everyone could own a piece of this mountain. Co-ops take a long time to build and a thriving independent scene is critical. But the sheer dominance of the big two still presents challenges to most skiers nationwide. The problems are numerous and it seems like an intervention or many interventions are warranted here. If we had more competition, you know, we kind of broke up some of these conglomerates and we had independence. The independents would compete with each other. It doesn't seem that Vail is expanding so that they can open up skiing to more people and become a more inclusive industry. It seems that they're expanding so that they can continue to have a return on investments that they've already made. It's not really to spread a love of skiing or a love of spending time in the outdoors. It is profit extraction. I think that there is a responsibility, whether it's to society or to your shareholders or to your customers, to do things right and for the right reasons. And I think you inherently have to take care of your employees. You have to take care of your customers and you have to look at your time spent in this industry as more than transactional.