Most Expensive Season Passes
December 23rd, 2009Posted in Skiing Everywhere
I live near Jackson Hole and every year I toy with the idea of buying a season pass there, but I balk at its price tag, this year it is $1970. If I took advantage of its summer price discount I’d pay only $1675. If I skied 50 days I’d end up paying about $33 bucks a day- not too bad. If my goal was to ski a lot at a challenging mountain where there is a lot of powder I’d have to consider wintering at Snowbird where I’d spend $999 in the summer and each of my 50 days would end up costing me $20!
Just for fun I checked out other Rocky Mountain resorts season pass prices and learned that Jackson is the second most expensive. Sun Valley at $1999 is the winner. No doubt Sun Valley has a great ski mountain and lots of high speed lift and a ton of snowmaking, but so does Vail where a season pass to Vail which includes season long skiing at Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone and Arapaho is only $599!
Here are three more resorts with the next highest season pass prices: Telluride $1850, Deer Valley $1840, and Aspen $1799.
In this top five group, Dear Valley is the ringer because it is not located like the other four in a fairly remote location with little competition from other ski areas for season pass sales. The other four are pretty much the only game in town when a skier living in the vicinity decides to spring for a season pass. This raises the question, are these other four resorts being smart businesses by taking advantage of there markets to maximize profits, or are they price gouging the locals, just because they can? Are they offering significantly superior skiing experiences compared to other similar large resorts like the Vail resorts, Whistler-Blackcomb, Snowbird, Steamboat, The Canyons, Crystal Mountain which offer season passes for many hundreds less?
We all know that these price leaders offer shelter for other resorts to up their prices and appear to offer reasonably priced passes in comparison, so the higher these resorts go, the more we’ll all end up paying for season passes at other resorts.
Is there a bright side to these high prices? Backcountry ski makers must love them! Which is great. The more people who give up paying these high prices in favor of hitting the backcountry, the less able will the resorts be to raise prices as they see diminishing returns from their season pass sales.
powderjunky commented:
nice, I used to sack up and pay 1400 for a week day pass at Jackson, but then they got rid of that in effort to make me pay more. Sorry marketing department, I bought a snowmobile instead with my 1400 and now can access uncrowded terrain and then snowmobile should last more than one year. I am all for charging high prices for tourists, but give the locals a break, the figure heads always say that the locals don’t really bring them much income any way so, why not give them significant discounts and at least you will get us to the hill where we will buy really expensive beer…just a little christmas rant…
snowman commented:
Jackson’s pricing is hard for me to understand. Sure they spent heavily on a big tram, but they charge tourists a lot to ride it in the summer and I think I recall reading that they get more than a 100,000 riders in a summer. So their summer business will surely pay off a big chunk of the cost of the tram.
Beyond the tram they have the gondola and two high speed chairs on Apres Vous, the rest are older fixed grip chairs. Their snowmaking coverage isn’t particularly big. Their 2500 acres of skiable terrain isn’t more than a lot of other places these days. All in all their on-mountain skier infrastructure isn’t superior or even up to snuff with a lot of places charging less for either passes or lift tickets.
They can be expected to charge a little more for their higher than average avalanche protection costs and probably a bit extra for offering their big vertical on a continuous fall line, but in reality, how often does anyone ski the full vertical? Most people hang out on the upper mountain’s slow chairs where the snow is better. On days when the snow is good top to bottom, the tram is the answer, but even the newer and bigger one can only manage a few hundred riders an hour.
Like many, I get an affordable Targhee pass and cherry pick the really deep powder days at Jackson. This way I still get the best days there- plus all the rest of the powder days at Targhee and end up spending less than half the cost of a Jackson pass while enjoying skiing every powder day all season.
snowman commented:
Today I learned first hand of Sun Valley’s loss of a loyal skier due to the resort’s high season pass prices. A friend told me his father, a retired dentist and long time resident of Sun Valley no longer buys a pass. He just thinks it is too much money- and he can afford it. He’s been an avid skier there for decades.