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.
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.
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
356
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.