How the Ski Business Got Too Big for Its Boots
In 2016, I was hired to teach skiing at the Park City resort, in Utah. The ultimate fun job: For one winter, I would get paid to do and share my favorite activity.
But I soon realized that although the piste conditions might be great, the working conditions were poor. An early clue was a training video that Vail Resorts, Park City’s owner, showed to employees. It bragged about how the company’s charity organization was helping local residents. The only problem: One of the charity cases was a Vail employee. In other words, the company was obliviously broadcasting how underpaid its own workers were.
That video came to mind last month when I heard that, starting December 27, Park City’s ski patrollers were going on strike to demand higher wages and better treatment. “We are asking all of you to show your support by halting spending at Vail Resorts properties for the duration of this strike,” the union said in an Instagram post. “Do not use Vail-owned rental shops or retail stores. Do not stay in Vail-owned hotels.”
For those unfamiliar with the industry, the union’s decision may have seemed puzzling. People who work on skis tend to love skiing, so why would they want to stop? They’re called ski bums, after all, not ski laborers. But for anyone who has been employed by Vail—and navigated the housing crises that plague resort communities—the union’s pleas are entirely comprehensible. The Park City strike illustrates just how distorted the American ski business has become, both for workers and for visitors. Central to the malaise is one trend: monopolization.
For much of skiing’s history, mountains were locally owned and operated. But over the past few decades, that has changed. In the 1990s, ski resorts began buying other ski resorts. Private-equity firms got in on the act. Soon, these conglomerates were gobbling up one another, creating a small clique of businesses that had control over the industry. Independent mountains still dot the country, but most major resorts now are either owned by or associated with one of two giant corporations: Vail and Alterra.
This consolidation is perhaps the main reason the sticker price of skiing, never cheap, has become exorbitant. With fewer competitors, Vail and Alterra have been free to jack up prices. In 2000, when Mount Snow (where I learned to ski) was owned by a smaller company, the cost of a day pass was about $93 in today’s dollars. Today, the Vail-owned resort charges approximately $150. The pricing at Park City is even steeper. Twenty-five years ago, you could get a three-day ticket for $308 in today’s dollars. Now you’re paying $850.
As a result, skiers tend to buy either Vail’s Epic Pass or Alterra’s Ikon Pass, season tickets that, depending on category, afford varying levels of access to a selection of the companies’ resorts (and, particularly for Ikon, of affiliated ones). These passes offer a better deal than day tickets; in some circumstances, they give better value than the season passes of earlier eras. But they also represent an intricate form of price discrimination filled with disadvantages. Skiers must purchase them before the winter begins. Many of the passes come with restrictions. And, as a lump sum, they’re hardly cheap: The Epic “Northeast Value Pass,” for example, is about $600, and has blackout dates on Vail’s marquee northeastern-U.S. properties. Only the full Epic Pass, priced at roughly $1,000, is limit free.
This new economic model means that visitors have fewer affordable ways to hit the slopes—especially if they ski only on an occasional basis. For instance, newbies may find themselves obliged to buy season passes just to spend a few days learning how to ski. The season-pass imperative also forces skiers of all levels to commit to one of two ecosystems, Epic or Ikon. This constrains people’s choice of where to ski, and makes planning trips with friends harder. What it does allow is conglomerates to keep people ensconced at company properties, buying overpriced food, lodging, and equipment.
Naturally, this strategy has worked well for both Vail and Alterra. Vail’s revenues have increased by 50 percent since my brief spell with the company in 2017. Alterra, a smaller company, is privately held and does not disclose its financials. But Big Ski’s business model works well enough at Alterra’s scale that, last year, it purchased a new ski area in Colorado for more than $100 million.
The system has not worked as well for staff, who remain underpaid. Vail set its minimum wage at $20 in March 2022, after facing staffing shortages and an earlier strike threat by ski patrollers. But that hourly figure is set against the extremely high cost of living in resort towns: In Park City, the median monthly rent is $3,500, which is about what a Vail minimum-wage employee makes working full-time. Meanwhile, Vail’s charity arm continues to brag about helping staff with “hardship relief.”
This is what happens when companies don’t have to compete for labor. Thanks to industry agglomeration, ski-resort workers have only a small number of potential employers, making it harder to switch jobs if they don’t like the way a particular resort treats them. And supervisors can afford to be high-handed. During my tenure, for example, instructors would sometimes have shifts added to their schedule without permission; at other times, they would have shifts canceled after arriving at work—meaning that they’d driven to the mountain only to get sent home without pay.
At the Park City resort, Vail owns a formidable collection of lodges and rental properties, but none of it was allocated to employees in my time. In 2022, the company began working with a separate development to help lease out discounted units for 441 of its staffers—but Vail has hundreds more employees at the resort, so those dormitories and apartments are nowhere near enough to make a very expensive town remotely affordable for most workers. In fact, according to a 2023 University of Utah study, only 12 percent of the community’s workforce live in Park City itself. This housing crisis is one of the main factors behind the strike. To help explain the picketing, Quinn Graves, one of the union’s officials, told New York magazine that most of his colleagues don’t live locally.
Most of the visitors who fly in to ski at Park City probably do not think much about these issues. They are, after all, there for a vacation, not for field research on economic injustice. But this season, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to ponder that: Because most of the resort closed during the patrollers’ strike, visitors had to wait in freezing lines for hours for brief runs down the few slopes Vail managed to keep open with supervisors and patrollers drafted from other mountains. Many of these guests, sick of Park City’s high costs, came down on the side of the strikers. Online, angry customers blasted Vail for refusing to give staff a raise. One person filed a lawsuit against the company in which he bemoaned how ski-ticket prices have risen “exponentially” over the past 10 years. In person, guests chanted “Pay your employees” while waiting to get on lifts.
On January 8, the company listened. It struck a deal to increase average pay for patrollers by $4 an hour and offer better leave policies. “This contract is more than just a win for our team,” Seth Dromgoole, the union’s lead negotiator, said in a statement. “It’s a groundbreaking success in the ski and mountain worker industry.” Other Park City employees, including instructors, have similarly cheered, hoping that the bump will eventually extend to them.
The outcome may encourage other ski-resort workers to organize. The idea of unionizing was bandied about by ski-school workers when I was there, and labor-organization rates have spiked at ski areas. The rationale is compelling: To get a fair deal in the face of corporate consolidation, workers may have to consolidate themselves.
For now, however, what’s on offer to skiers is governed by the unfortunate logic of mountains and monopolies. America has only so many ski areas, and as long as they’re controlled by a couple of conglomerates, the whole experience will continue to go downhill.