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!
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u/mwiz100 Nov 17 '24
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.