No snow, no problem: Ski resorts push season passes over pay-as-you-go tickets to secure sales

For many skiers, the days of strolling up to the hill and buying a lift ticket are winding down, as the industry tries to hedge its bets against crummy snow conditions by locking in sales weeks or even months ahead of time.

Season passes have been around for decades, but the industry has leaned harder on them as a share of revenue following an industry-shaking decision in 2008 by Vail Resorts, Inc. to introduce a cut-rate season pass that gave skiers unlimited access to its resorts. At the time it had five, but it now has 41 mountain resorts, primarily in North America.

Since then, the company has seen its season pass revenue balloon from $78 million US in 2008 to $795 million US in 2022 — causing ski areas all over North America to mimic Vail's strategy.

The industry says the increased focus on advance passes is a win-win: Customers can get a better deal by buying early, while businesses lock in revenue that carries them through the off-season and times when it doesn't snow.

This winter has been a perfect example: Very little snow throughout Alberta and British Columbia meant iffy ski conditions during the critical holiday season.

But at Vail, which owns British Columbia's premier ski resort, Whistler Blackcomb, bad conditions meant 16 per cent fewer skier visits in the early season — although the company's lift revenue actually grew 2.6 per cent in the same period thanks to the strength of its pass sales. (Vail is one of the rare ski resort companies that is publicly traded, so it discloses more financial information than most of the industry.)

"If they never got a single snowflake in all their mountains, they would still have that pre-sale revenue, so that is absolutely bolstering their ability to not have a bigger decline," said Chris Woronka, an analyst who monitors the leisure industry at Deutsche Bank in New York.

Nabbing a pass early on can mitigate the cost of what's commonly known as one of the priciest sports around, although for newbies and casual skiers, the relatively high cost of a walk-up ticket can be another barrier.

In the words of the Denver-based magazine 5280, Vail's 2008 Epic Pass "threw a knuckleball" at the ski industry by slashing the price of a ski pass and giving skiers unlimited access to all of the company's resorts, a move that was seen as crazy at the time but has gone on to change the business.

"They did a very good job of creating a market where skiers and snowboarders that didn't necessarily live near a resort would still want to buy a season pass," said Todd Burnette, CEO of the Mountain Collective.

"Customers were basically committing to go to a Vail resort before the season started."

Rival businesses responded by launching their own multi-resort passes — products that give skiers access to multiple resorts and go on sale well before the season starts.

The Mountain Collective, a group of independent ski resorts, launched its own pass in 2012. It was followed by Alterra Mountain Company's Ikon Pass in 2018 and the Indy Pass, run by another group of small, independent ski areas, in 2019.

A growing number of resorts throughout Canada are captured by these passes, from Mont Tremblant and Blue Mountain in the east to Revelstoke and Marmot Basin out west.