That should give Vail’s competitors significant pricing power as they set their 2022-23 pass prices. Chronic traffic backups, liftlines the length of I-70, closed lifts, and slashed operating hours at non-destination resorts are frustrating large numbers of the 2.1 million Epic Pass holders. You see, Vail’s cheap pass strategy forced a sleepwalking industry to innovate, but last spring they overcorrected, dropping pass prices just as a challenging labor market and mountain-town housing shortages made fully staffing and operating their ski areas an apparently unsolvable puzzle. One thing at a time Neon-Onsie Parabolic Bro. Also your skis are hopelessly dated and ( take it from me ), as likely to snap your leg in half as enable you to carve sweet turns, but your atrocious outerwear is once more in style thanks to the social media-driven rise of nostalgia and irony. So now you can buy a season pass to 450 ski areas for less than the price of a load of laundry, but taking your family skiing for one day will force you to sell your family heirloom candlesticks hand-crafted by Norwegian elves in the 14th century.
In brief, starting in 2008, Vail crushed the decades-old model of expensive season passes and cheap day tickets by inverting it, forcing everyone else to follow. Sorry Neon-Onsie Parabolic Bro, but times have changed. “Why are there eight people on one chairlift? What’s a Revelstoke? American Skiing Company and Intrawest are still fighting it out for supremacy, right? No? Wait, why does Vail own Whistler? Why does Vail own everything? And why is their season pass five dollars? And why are there 5,000 people waiting in the liftline at Okemo? And why does a lift-ticket to Steamboat cost more than an RV?” Here are some early thoughts on what the 2022-23 season-pass sales season may bring: Higher prices could be comingĪ circa 1998 skier, $1,700 mega-mountain season pass dangling from his neon onsie and rocking the latest parabolic skis, would be shocked to launch off a poached jump in the “snowboard park” and enter a wormhole into 2022. Still, it’s not too early to start guessing. resorts – Blue Mountain, Timberline (West Virginia), Perfect North, Monarch, Jiminy Peak, Cranmore, Andes Tower Hills, Trollhaugen – have already put 2022-23 passes on sale, we don’t have enough information yet to start really identifying trends. It’s hard to say what, if anything, will change in their pass suites. Within the next few weeks, I expect Vail, Alterra, Indy, Mountain Collective, and Mountain Capital Partners to release pricing and partnership details for next winter’s passes. Others - Berkshire East, Ski Sundown - ticked up a modest $20 or $25 between 20. Jay Peak has kept its early-bird season pass price steady ($829) for two seasons, as have smaller ski areas such as Pats Peak, New Hampshire ($469) and Titus Mountain, New York ($499). Full-access Ikon Pass prices have remained at $999 since 2020. Vail, with its 20 percent price drops, is the extreme example, but many other operators have hesitated to raise prices. There is no reason to think that Vail Mountain – one of the finest ski areas on the continent – couldn’t command the $2,000-plus that Telluride, Jackson Hole, and Deer Valley do for their unlimited season passes. “Hey guys, just, like, come stand here so we look super popular (and so you can buy $20 hamburgers),” Vail seemed to be saying last spring, when it cut the price of its Epic Pass from $979 to $783, and its almost-as-good Epic Local Pass from $729 to just $583. Even blockbuster shows like Friends, which probably could have demanded hundreds of dollars per ticket, have generally packed their studios in this fashion.įor the past couple years, ever since Covid rearranged our collective faces, ski season passes have felt a little like this.
Television networks, desperate to fill the studio and channel the energy of live human observers into an on-stage performance, have for decades handed out seats for free. If you’ve ever been to Venice Beach or the touristy parts of Hollywood, you’ve seen them: salesy characters, sporty and slick, California cool in their wraparound shades, sign hoisted aloft.
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