- Four skiers sued Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company over lift ticket prices.
- A University of Utah analysis identified winners and losers as skiing costs have changed.
- Increased season pass sales could account for crowded slopes and traffic congestion.
A recent lawsuit filed against the two largest ski resort companies in North America raises questions about the cost of season passes and daily lift tickets, an issue amplified amid one of the worst seasons ever in the West.
Prior to the lawsuit, data scientists at the University of Utah’s Marriner S. Eccles Institute for Economics and Quantitative Analysis looked at whether Vail Resorts’ and Alterra Mountain Company’s domination of the industry is good or bad for skiers and snowboarders.
In the United States, those companies now own or are affiliated with more than half of the total lift capacity in the country, effectively creating a duopoly, according to the analysis.
“It’s complicated from the perspective of consumer welfare and the perspective of a lawsuit,” said Adam Looney, an economics professor and executive director of the institute who, along with student Travis Swiger, conducted the study in 2024.
Vail fundamentally changed the ski industry when it began offering its Epic Pass in 2008. The multi-mountain season pass provides access to what are now 42 Vail-owned ski areas and another 30 it contracts with around the world. Alterra followed with its Ikon Pass in 2018 for 18 resorts it owns plus another 70 it has deals with.
The concept lowered the cost of season passes. For example, a season pass at Stowe in Vermont ran $2,313 in 2016-17. The next season, after Vail acquired the resort, the price dropped to $899.
At the same time, resorts jacked up the price of daily lift tickets — now more than $350 a day at top-tier ski areas on some days — to push skiers and snowboarders toward a season pass.
For the 2025-26 season, a full Epic Pass sold for $1,051, while a full Ikon Pass went for $1,329. Locals-only season passes run a little cheaper.
In Utah, the Epic Pass is good at Park City Mountain, while the Ikon Pass is good at Alta, Snowbird, Brighton, Solitude, Deer Valley and Snowbasin.
The pass commits skiers and snowboarders to buy before the season starts, not knowing whether it will be a good snow year or not. It provides resort operators a reliable income stream regardless of the weather. Vail takes in nearly $1 billion before the lifts start spinning.
Winners and losers
Economically, industry consolidation and price changes created both winners and losers, according to the analysis. Vail and Alterra are clearly benefiting from the increase in ticket sales and ability to fine-tune the prices charged for the season versus walk-up tickets. But does that necessarily imply that customers are worse off?
“Our sense is that most skiers have benefitted financially from the new regime, particularly those who ski or ride multiple days,” according to the analysis.
Looney said a season pass is worth more now because it can be used at multiple resorts and pays for itself in a few visits.
“The season pass got more valuable and it got a lot cheaper and way more people bought season passes as a result. And so I think, by and large, that meant people who buy season passes are a lot better off than they used to be,” he said. “It’s really cheap to ski now relative to what it was like in the early 2000s or even the ’90s, if you’re buying a season pass.”
But occasional or beginning skiers who face 60% higher prices than in the 1990s for day passes are worse off.
“These skiers either pay more or decide that the high price is not worth it and choose not to ski altogether. In fact, the number of unique skiers has declined in recent years even as the number of total visits to ski resorts has increased,” according to the analysis. “This trend reflects increasing concentration in the customer base. There are fewer skiers overall, but a subset of those skiers (season, Epic and Icon pass holders) are putting in a lot more days on the slopes.”
Crowded slopes, congested roads
Season pass sales have skyrocketed over the past nearly two decades. Vail Resorts, a publicly traded company, sells about 2 million Epic passes a year. Privately-held Alterra sells an estimated 1 million Ikon passes annually.
Looney said the impact of that is obvious in every ski town in America: crowded slopes, long lift lines, traffic congestion, parking issues.
“That is why there are huge lines at the lift and that’s why there is congestion in the parking lots and on the roads. It’s obvious in Big Cottonwood and Little Cottonwood (canyons). It’s obvious in Park City, but it’s also obvious in Stowe, Vermont, and it’s obvious in Vail, (Colorado) and it’s obvious in Crystal Mountain (Washington),” he said.
But the fundamental economic problem causing the congestion isn’t that resort operators are conspiring to keep prices too high, per the study, but that the new regime has made season pass prices so low.
“Many more people find these passes a good deal, and for these skiers and boarders, an additional day of skiing is free — that’s why it’s so crowded," according to the study.
Vail CEO Rob Katz contends there are always moments of crowding at any resort but it hasn’t become worse, because in recent years ski lifts have become bigger and faster and wait times have gone down.
“There is, I think, a little bit of a concern that if we make the sport more accessible and more come that it will be overcrowded,” he told the Wall Street Journal. ”In our minds, the way you deal with crowding is that you’re investing in the lifts, you’re investing in infrastructure, you’re investing in parking, you’re ensuring that actually you’re providing a better experience for people when they come."
Skiers sue Vail Resorts, Alterra Mountain Company
Three skiers from Colorado and one from Massachusetts disagree that Epic and Ikon passes are a good deal. The lawsuit they filed in federal court in Denver last month accuses Vail and Alterra of engaging in pricing practices that violate anti-trust laws. It argues that lift tickets for ski areas within the Epic and Ikon ecosystems are priced in a way to “coerce” people into buying them.
“Skiers and snowboarders are led to believe they are making a cost-conscious decision in buying the Epic or Ikon mega pass, but in reality, and as a result of Vail Resorts’ and Alterra’s respective anticompetitive schemes involving bundling, they are in fact being forced into buying a mega pass, which is itself maximally (over)-priced up to the point where it looks like a good deal when compared to the over-priced lift ticket. In short, both the lift ticket and the mega pass are over-priced,” according to the complaint.
Vail and Alterra say the lawsuit is without merit.
“We launched the Epic Pass in 2008 to make skiing and riding more accessible, reducing the price of a season pass by 60%,” according to a Vail spokesperson, who added that it’s still one of the best values in the industry, especially following its further 20% price reduction in 2021.
Looney said he feels like the ski industry has just modernized its pricing and caught up to practices widely used in other industries such as travel. Hotels, flights and cruises all cost less for customers who book in advance. “If you show up at the airline desk and say, ‘I’d like to fly on the next flight,’ you’re also going to get taken to the cleaners,” he said.
With skiing and snowboarding, there’s always a risk of not having enough snow. But the burden of that now falls on skiers and snowboarders.
“If you buy a pass and it doesn’t snow and you don’t get to ski very much, like this year, then the consumer is holding the bag. In the past, it used to be the resort that lost the revenue,” Looney said.
While the analysis says the problem is complicated and involves tradeoffs, it offers at least a partial solution.
“One thing that would help — more terrain. There has been almost no growth in the number of resorts in the U.S. over the past 25 years, and relatively little expansion in terrain at existing resorts."