How the ski industry became too big to meet the demand for its boots
Updated January 12, 2025 at 2:08 pm ET
In 2016, I was hired to teach skiing at a resort in Park City, Utah. The ultimate fun job: Over the course of a winter, I get paid to do and share my favorite activities.
But I quickly realized that while the piste conditions might be great, the working conditions were poor. An early clue was a training video shown to employees by Park City owner Vail Resorts. It touts how the company's charitable organizations help local residents. The only problem: One of the charity cases involved a Vail employee. In other words, the company is inadvertently advertising how poorly its workers are paid.
I was reminded of this video last month when I heard that Park City ski patrollers were going on strike starting December 27th to demand higher wages and better treatment. “We are asking everyone to show support by refraining from spending money at Vail Resorts hotels during the strike,” the union posted on Instagram. “Do not use Vail-owned rentals or retail stores. Do not stay at Vail-owned hotels. “
For those unfamiliar with the industry, the union's decision may seem confusing. People who work in skiing tend to love skiing, so why stop? After all, they are called ski bums, not ski laborers. But to anyone who has ever been employed by Vail and solved the housing crisis plaguing the resort community, the union's plea is perfectly understandable. The Park City strike shows how twisted the U.S. ski industry has become for workers and tourists alike. At the heart of this discomfort is a trend: monopoly.
For much of skiing history, the mountains were locally owned and operated. But over the past few decades, things have changed. In the 1990s, ski resorts began acquiring other ski resorts. Private equity firms are also getting in on the action. Soon, these conglomerates swallowed each other up to form a conglomerate of small businesses that controlled the entire industry. Independent mountains still dot the country, but most major resorts now either belong to one of the two giant companies, Vail and Altra, or are affiliated with them.
This consolidation is perhaps the main reason why ski sticker prices (never cheap) have become exorbitant. With fewer competitors, Vail and Alterra can raise prices as they please. In 2000, when Snow Mountain (where I learned to ski) was owned by a small company, a day pass cost about $93 in today's dollars. Today, Vail-owned resorts charge about $150. Pricing in Park City is even higher. Twenty-five years ago, at today's prices, you could buy a three-day ticket for $308. Now you need to pay $850.
As a result, skiers tend to purchase Vail's Epic Pass or Alterra's Ikon Pass, which, depending on the category, provide varying levels of access to select company resorts (particularly Ikon-affiliated resorts). These passes are a better deal than day passes; in some cases, they are more valuable than earlier season passes. But they also represent a sophisticated form of price discrimination fraught with disadvantages. Skiers must purchase them before winter begins. Many passes have restrictions. And, as a one-time payment, they're not cheap: The Epic “Northeast Value Pass,” for example, costs about $600 and has blackout dates for Vail's large properties in the Northeast. Only the full Epic Pass is free and costs around $1,000.
This new economic model means that there are fewer ways for tourists to ski affordably, especially if they only ski occasionally. For example, a newbie might find themselves having to buy a season pass just to spend a few days learning how to ski. The necessity of a season pass also forces skiers of all levels to commit to one of two ecosystems: Epic or Ikon. This limits people's choice of ski spots and makes planning trips with friends more difficult. It does allow conglomerates to house employees on company property, paying for exorbitantly priced food, lodging and equipment.
Naturally, this strategy worked well for both Vail and Alterra. Since my brief tenure at the company in 2017, Vail's revenue has grown 50%. Alterra is a smaller company that is privately held and does not disclose its financials. But Big Ski's business model works well at Alterra's scale, and last year it bought a new ski area in Colorado for more than $100 million.
The system doesn't work well for employees, who remain underpaid. Vail set the minimum wage at $20 an hour in March 2022 after facing staffing shortages and an earlier strike threat from ski patrollers. But that hourly figure is set against the resort town's sky-high cost of living: In Park City, the median monthly rent is $3,500, about what Vail's minimum wage worker makes working full-time. Meanwhile, Weir's charity continues to brag about how it helps employees “ease their hardships.”
This is what happens when companies don't have to compete for labor. Due to industry agglomeration, the number of potential employers for ski area workers is small, making it difficult for them to switch jobs if they don't like how they are treated at a particular area. Regulators can use heavy-handed tactics. For example, during my tenure, instructors sometimes had shifts added to their schedules without permission; at other times, they came into work and had their shifts canceled—meaning they drove to the mountains only to be sent home without pay.
Vail owned a large number of hotels and rental properties at the Park City Resort, but in my day, none of these were assigned to employees. In 2022, the company began working with a separate development to help rent discounted units to 441 employees, but Vail Resorts also has hundreds of employees, so the dorms and apartments are nowhere near remotely affordable in a very expensive town. for most workers. In fact, only 12% of the community's workforce lives in Park City itself, according to a 2023 University of Utah study. This housing crisis is one of the main factors behind the strike. To help explain the picketing situation, one of the union officials, Quinn Graves, told New York The magazine said most of her colleagues don't live locally.
Most visitors who fly into Park City to ski probably don’t give these issues much thought. After all, they were there for a vacation, not to conduct on-the-ground research into economic injustice. But this season, they've had plenty of opportunity to think about it: With most resorts closed during patrol strikes, visitors had to wait hours in icy lines to hit the few slopes that Vail managed to keep open with supervisors A short run. There were also patrols recruited from other mountains. Many guests, fed up with Park City's high costs, sided with the strikers. Online, angry customers criticized Vail for refusing to give employees a raise. One person filed a lawsuit against the company, in which he lamented the “exponential” rise in ski ticket prices over the past decade. Guests chanted “pay your employees” as they waited to board the elevator.
On January 8, the company listened to the comments. The company reached a deal to raise average patrol officer pay by $4 an hour and provide a better vacation policy. “This contract is more than a win for our team,” Seth Dromgoole, the union’s chief negotiator, said in a statement. “This is a breakthrough success for the ski and mountain worker industry.” Other Park City employees, including coaches, are similarly cheering, hoping the buzz will eventually trickle down to them.
The results may encourage other ski area workers to organize. While I was there, ski school staff were spreading the idea of unionizing, and rates of labor organizing at ski resorts were rising dramatically. The rationale is compelling: To get a fair deal in a corporate integration, workers may have to integrate themselves.
However, the services currently offered to skiers are governed by the unfortunate logic of mountains and monopoly. There are only so many ski areas in the United States, and as long as they are controlled by a few conglomerates, the entire experience will continue to go downhill.
This article originally misused the male pronoun of Quinn Graves. In fact, Graves is a woman who uses female pronouns.