VAIL SLASHES EPIC PASS PRICES FOR NEXT SEASON
The duel between ski industry titans over season pass sales took a stunning turn Wednesday when Vail Resorts announced that prices for next season’s Epic Passes will be 20% lower than what it charged for those passes this season.
The Epic Pass for next season, which went on sale March 24, is priced at $783. That’s $196 less than the 2020-21 Epic Pass when it went on sale a year ago, and $216 less than rival Ikon Pass is charging for a comparable 202122 season pass. Ikon announced its 2021-22 prices on March 11.
The more limited Epic Local Pass is priced at $583, which is $146 lower than last year’s price of $729. Ikon is charging $729 for its comparable 2021-22 product, the Ikon Base Pass.
Both Vail Resorts and rival Alterra Mountain Co. (Ikon Pass) are headquartered in metro Denver, and there was no immediate response from Alterra to Vail’s escalation in the season pass wars. Epic passes haven’t been this cheap since the 2015-16
season, when the Epic Pass was good at only 11 U.S resorts. Now it’s good at six resorts in Colorado alone, and more than 70 destinations around the world.
“The main driver here is, we want to move ticket buyers to a pass,” Vail Resorts chief executive Rob Katz said in an interview. “That has been a strategy of ours going all the way back to the introduction of the Epic Pass back in 2008. We’ve made huge inroads on this front. We started looking at some of our learning over the last couple years, and we thought we could actually reduce the price, bring more people into the program, and actually have it be profitable and a good decision for the company.”
Katz said Epic Pass sales for the 2020-21 season were strong, helping the company withstand the challenges that came with COVID-19 capacity restrictions and the reservations system it employed to control numbers on its mountains. That helped drive the price cut for next season’s passes.
“We’re not cutting the price of a lift ticket,” Katz said. “We’re cutting the price of a pass, which means you have to buy it before the season. That, we believe, is the crux of how you ensure stability and economic prosperity for the entire skiing and riding ecosystem.”
Katz said Vail Resorts sold 1.4 million Epic Passes for this season. That meant lots of money in the bank before the first snowflake fell.
“That triggered us to say,
‘We’re doubling down on this strategy,’ ” Katz said. “We think skiers and riders can be the beneficiaries. It’s actually making a great trade with our guests to say, ‘Hey, we’re going to keep providing you more and more value to help us make this business and this industry more successful.’ ”
Vail Resorts business declined this season because of the pandemic, which included operating lifts at 50% capacity or less. Katz sent a letter to pass holders last week, saying the company does not plan to use a reservations system next season.
“Obviously this year was not as good as previous years,” Katz said. “But given the environment that we were operating in, and all the challenges that we all faced around COVID, we feel like this year has been absolutely successful. I think it’s been due to a few things. One is pass sales, which was very strong going into this year.”
Epic passes are good at all resorts owned by Vail Resorts as well as partner resorts owned by other companies. Those destinations include Telluride, Sun Valley in Idaho and Snowbasin in Utah. Ikon Passes are good at Alterra mountains, including Winter Park and Steamboat in Colorado, as well as partner resorts that include Aspen Snowmass, Copper Mountain, Arapahoe Basin and Eldora.