1-Day Lift Tickets to Hit $299 at Vail

Stuart Winchester of the Storm Skiing Journal has published a stunning article on walk-up peak-day lift ticket price in America. Clearly a single day pass is no longer affordable and not being positioned as an option.

Peak 23/24 lift ticket prices at American ski areas:

$299: Park City, Vail, Beaver Creek
$289: Deer Valley
$279: Palisades Tahoe, Steamboat, Breck
$269: Northstar, Keystone
$259: Heavenly, Mammoth, Copper
$255: Jackson
$249: Big Sky
$244: Snowmass, Aspen, Aspen Highlands, Buttermilk
$229: Powder Mountain
$225: Mt. Bachelor, Telluride
$220: Winter Park
$219: Stowe

Stuart writes that the differential between walk-up lift ticket prices and season pass prices is one of the dumber dynamics that he’s aware of. He focuses on the US industry as a whole however Ski The World is republishing Stuart’s rant on Vail.

This is Stuart’s take on Vail’s policy:

Even though they sell them, Vail does not want you to pay $299 for a lift ticket. If you visit Vail Mountain’s lift ticket sales page, a screen-width billboard wards you off like a head planted on a pike at the edge of a savage kingdom:

There are so many amazing things about this: the 60 percent price differential between the two equal-access products; “no additional perks” listed where a consumer may expect to find this product’s perks; the are-you-sure-you-want-to-do-this vibe of the whole experience (less amazing: the Epic Day Pass price is wrong; the current price of an unrestricted, all-resorts Epic Day pass is $125). Even if you ignore this talisman and charge through to the date-specific lift ticket page, the my-God-don’t-do-it messaging follows you around:

But the real clincher happens when you click “add to cart”:

Just for fun, I tried it again with a seven-day lift ticket starting on Dec. 26:

That’s a lot of money. For anyone. If Vail has sold more than zero lift tickets for the 2023-24 ski season, then someone needs to stop drinking while they online shop.

Vail has a clear, publicly stated, oft-repeated incentive to get you to stop buying lift tickets: the company’s goal is to move as many people as possible to “frequency products,” i.e. Epic Passes. And yes, Epic Day Passes count as Epic Passes. The goal is seventy-five percent of all skier visits, and the company hit 61 percent as of its March investor presentation (page 22). The company has also fashioned a clear, attractive alternative to date-specific lift tickets in its three-tiered Epic Day Pass, which is one of the most outstanding values anywhere in skiing.