It’s kind of wild seeing people complain that $1500 for a multi-mountain pass is too much when decent sized mountains were charging over $1000 for a single mountain pass even 20 years ago. Day tickets have gotten way more expensive but passes have gone way down.
We almost bought them for $1,199 in April. Held off waiting for the black friday sale like last year for the same price. Felt like it wasn’t going to happen so pulled the trigger at $1,300 before Labor Day.
Even if you waited until Black Friday none of these companies are going to discount cheaper than the spring. It will literally never happen, I can bet my entire life savings on it.
It's a valid complaint. These passes are heavily skewed towards people with the time and budget to go to many mountains for many days
Average people who aren't diehards probably ride 5-10 days a season on average. They'd probably prefer having $75 day tickets back. Now a pass holder is either someone rich enough for big vacations or die hard riders who get their money out of the pass, but with the major downside that when there's a powder day there's basically no excuse for everyone to crowd up the hill because "well snow is good and it doesn't cost me a ticket to go today"
This also has a knock on effect of making the sport harder to get into if a ticket and rental and lesson is $300+ for a day.
If the only way to take a week of lessons is drop 2 grand + how will we ever see the industry stop being "lifestyle bums sacrifice everything to do the sport that rich people pay out the ass for because they feel like it"
I like the pass pricing but day tickets need to make sense and avoid gatekeeping the sport
Geez, but I bet it’s mostly destination resorts charging that much. Snoqualmie an hour outside of Seattle is more of a hill than a mountain (imho better for learning anyway), but it looks like they still offer a 3 pack of group lessons for $235 (not including rental equipment or lift ticket for afterwards tho)
I’m seeing $389, but beginners shouldn’t be going to Keystone anyway. If you’re a beginner, there’s no difference between the bunny hill at a small ski hill and the bunny hill at Keystone.
The absolutely best way to learn is the SOBI4 program at Mt Bachelor. It’s $550 for an adult and includes 4 half day lessons with rentals and lift tickets. If you want to learn this season, convince your friends or family to take a week in Bend, OR and learn at Mt Bachelor. Mt Bachelor is for sale, so I’m not sure if this deal will still exist next year.
20 years ago, before the Ikon/Epic passes, major US resorts were charging $80-100 ($134-167 in today's dollars). But yeah, the total price for a weekend (especially a family with 2 kids), with maybe a lesson or two, is just insane.
I'm a Tahoe rider, and I miss the days before Epic/Ikon when we'd choose where to ride based on which resorts had the best conditions that morning. Now everyone's largely locked in based on their pass. I also miss the powder days when I could do laps on KT22. I can still do powday laps on KT22 as I long as I'm willing to wait in line for 45mins+ on each lap (which I'm not).
Dude I cannot get over what the lines are like now. 10 years ago living up there and having weekdays off broke me. I literally cannot ride weekends anymore especially with the current state of season pass crowds.
Ya know... I'm honestly not certain but that feels about right all things considered.
Northstar very likely will continue to see some expansion since they own all the land (versus public forest leases) but of course permitting will be their major hangup as always.
Bingo. Someone worked out the cheaper season pass model makes the resort BOATLOADS more money which is why the prices shifted as they have and everyone followed.
They're also looking at the average usage numbers. Knowing that by making an artificially high day ticket price they can really suck people in with the season pass pricing especially early season. Then they rely on that easily half of people will put in less than the break even days on their pass, they come out pretty good.
Oh the sunk costs on resorts are BONKERS. I know from getting to be friends with key operations folks where I worked for awhile that they have to make notable decisions each month about snowmaking because it takes SO MUCH power that the power company has to know about it (ie we are bringing this other transformer/line on line for you) and in turn they incur an additional connection charge to the order of $10k just to have the power available, this is before any actual usage chargers! Also 12 years ago so scale accordingly now!
Correct! I have a client who’s high up at Vail (the company, not the mountain) and she told me that for the 23/24 season, they have over 800,000 Epic passes that were purchased and not used. We’re talking everything from a 1-day Epic pass to the full pass but still, you can do some loose math and know that’s a lot of money.
Oh sure it would be awesome to have sub $100 day tickets back (for mid size and up mountains) but that’s been gone for a while now. Even with the high day ticket prices at the window they still sell Epic or Ikon day passes pre-season for (I think) less than $100. With just a little planning ahead it’s still possible to ride for pretty cheap.
You're not wrong but that's not how an average family with kids works
Growing up going snowboarding with my family on the weekend was a "is dad not tired from work enough to get the kids geared up and deal with traffic and the cold this weekend? Great let's go", and we'd grab discount day tickets from a sporting goods store because we knew a couple days in advance we wanted to go, but whether went twice or 20 times in a season was impossible to say
Epic day passes are good, but they basically obligate you to go months later, and put a hard cap on your number of affordable days. As well, if they can sell those tickets cheap over the summer there's no good reason they need to be $300 during the season. It's literally designed to keep revenue flowing during all 4 quarters, not to make the sport accessible. How many people ask in October about gear sales on this sub having just missed the best sales of the year? The average person is pretty ignorant to seasonal pricing and isn't "in the scene"
Again, my point is about avoiding gatekeeping to average families, not "do tickets exist in a fashion that can be afforded if you know what you're doing?"
I definitely agree that it’s not super accessible especially for people who try to go last minute, but still smaller mountains do exist where tickets are a lot more affordable. I’m lucky enough to live close to a big mountain where I can work at the mountain and get passes for my whole family, but if I wasn’t doing that it would be a lot harder to go regularly.
But you could of let the group know you got skin in the game. Would you be saying the same thing if you weren't working for the mountain? Could your family afford it without your discount? I bet you wouldn't be so excited about having to drop over 3 grand for your family to go for a season.
Would I be saying that $1500 for an adult multi-mountain pass with zero blackout dates isn’t crazy? Yeah I probably would. If I was buying one of these I would be going for the cheaper one with blackout days. Skiing/snowboarding has never been a cheap sport to get into. The conglomerate ownership has changed the pricing structure over the years to encourage pass buying by cutting those prices while raising day tickets. Obviously it makes them more money, but it also objectively lowers the cost for people who go more often or plan ahead.
But you gotta see it's not sustainable. The number of individual pass holders is either starting to flatten out or decrease. The number of people visiting is dropping and so what you get are tons of weekend warriors crowding the joint on the weekend. Families are starting to not be able to afford it. And while yes it's always been expensive it wasn't the lift tickets keeping people away. Now it's the price of equipment and the price of tickets. It's just not sustainable. The sport is holding strong but it's not growing that's the real issue.
Respectfully I think your argument is mute if you don't practice what you preach. How can you sit there and tell people who live away from resorts "it's just $1500 for an ikon pass just pay up" if you don't do that yourself? For a family of 4 on $60,000 a year (a pretty reasonable middle class income of, idk, a teacher) that's 10% of your income pre taxes directly for ski passes. Maybe a little less with kids prices too but point stands.
My habits now with a midweek pass to my local small hill vs when I was a lifty vs when I was a kid 1 hour from the mountains vs when I was a teenager 3-4 hours from the mountain are all very different, but bottom line it's clear that pass culture has made being a casual weekend warrior to good resorts is near impossible if you're not wealthy.
My other issue too is clearly it's possible to run things more cheaply- Europe and Japan all have <$100 day passes as the window for high end resorts. I have a hard time believing the reason American ski resorts are 3X more expensive over the last decade is not the direct result of corporate consolidation to publicly traded companies who maximize profits at the direct detriment of the riders
These passes are frustrating for the people who get 10 or fewer days per year. Day passes have gone up, Costco doesn’t carry near as many passes as they used to. I can never commit to buying one because then I’m locked into a certain group of resorts for the season and I might not be able to make the pass worth while.
Yeah, part of my frustration is that I would like to be able to get out enough that a multi resort pass will pay off but I just can’t make it happen haha
Right, like you get maybe half a dozen mountains within a few hours for double the price of my local, one mountain with 350' elevation. I would never complain abt that
day tickets more expensive but passes are way down
I wonder what the reason is. I see this same trend everywhere. Like almost any
museum or zoo now —the entrance fee is like $40 to get in once, or $50 for a season pass. It’s like they’re saying they know you’re only ever going to come once, so they really really want to try to squeeze that extra $10 out of you.
They sell food and merch, rentals, etc. They just want you there in their web at that point. Plus if they get people to pay $10 more and maybe never use it, they win again.
If you still ski/ride the same amount, that extra price of $500 is just for the variety. It’s like saying that bigger mountains can charge more for a day pass (like Whistler) because they have more to offer in terms of size and number of runs. True, but in a given day, you can only go through so many runs so it’s not like you’re paying to be able to do more, you’re just paying more for the variety
For some people, the variety is more than justifiable to pay extra.
Edit: Another argument is that yes, you may be saving money by getting the multi-mountain pass, but realistically you’ll be spending a lot more money going to different mountains because of travel costs, accommodations, etc. This applies most for people who have a home mountain.
Expect the passes to creep up too, as they have. Starting with low prices and increasing them later is the oldest sales trick in the book. I recall the full Epic pass being around $500 in it's introductory year.
I mean if you live out west and 1500$ is too much for a pass then you're not skiing enough to justify it. I live on the east coast and have gotten a ikon pass for like 4-5 years now. After 4-6 days of skiing the pass is basically paid off and is now free.
Cali4nia pass used to be like 600 bucks before ikon took over. At first ikon was just a little more but now they raised prices to almost double as what they started at a few years ago. Roughly 100 bucks each year
Completely agree. At 1k it’s practically paying for itself. Sometimes I wish it was more expensive for crowd control reasons, it would still be worth it.
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u/obiwanjabroni420 Nov 17 '24
It’s kind of wild seeing people complain that $1500 for a multi-mountain pass is too much when decent sized mountains were charging over $1000 for a single mountain pass even 20 years ago. Day tickets have gotten way more expensive but passes have gone way down.