TOUGH CHOICE
HAVE MULTI-RESORT PASSES CHANGED THE WAY YOU SKI?
Have multi-resort passes changed the way you ski?
Few innovations have disrupted—and reconfigured—the cost of ski holidays, and indeed how we choose where to ski, quite like Vail’s Epic Pass, Alterra’s Ikon Pass and the Mountain Collective membership. According to the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), more than a million of us in North America bought either an Ikon or Epic pass, accounting for an estimated one in nine skiers, with Vail saying roughly half its ticket revenue now comes from its prepurchase pass programs.
Effectively, that’s a million skiers who paid $1,500 for an Ikon Pass or US$979 (roughly $1,400 with exchange rate and credit card foreign currency charges) to go Epic and ultimately become de facto season pass holders at not just one, but dozens of different ski resorts across Canada, the U.S. and well beyond.
What the Epic and Ikon passes have done is greatly expanded what might be called the “aspirational reach” of the urban skier. For as low as $1,089, a skier in, say, Ontario would receive an unrestricted Blue Mountain season pass in Collingwood, or a Quebec skier at Tremblant. But their Ikon base passes are also good for a limited number of days at 43 ski areas, including some truly A-list western resorts like Revelstoke, Banff/Lake Louise, Jackson Hole, Aspen, Taos, Snowbird, Alta, Squaw Valley/Alpine Meadows and Mammoth, as well as eastern skiing like Killington and Sugarbush, even Zermatt in Switzerland, Chile, Japan and five Down Under.
What these passes have done is favour corporate loyalty over “localism” (think of Vail Resorts as closer to Microsoft than a town in the Colorado Rockies). Until the pandemic hit, cheaper flights, the rise of owner-rentals like VRBO and Airbnb, and highly accurate stormtracking weather forecasts, a trio of skiing
buddies might decide to blow out of the city on Thursday morning and fly to the mountains for a long weekend—and do similar trips to another province or country several times over the season.
With the Epic introduction, the cost of a season pass dropped significantly at big resorts like Whistler, while overall numbers of pass holders increased dramatically. Which is fine until weekend sun is predicted after a stormy week of powder and village lift lines become part of the Hwy 99 queue from Vancouver.
There’s no lack of online chatter from socalled “locals” of North American mountain towns (even if they’re just there for the season van-camping in a parking lot), calling out urban dilettantes who, of course, can “never be core.” As an example, in mid-2019 Vail Resorts purchased a ton of small “feeder resorts” in the East and Midwest. Now Epic passholders at Hunter Mountain outside of New York City (or the ironically named Afton Alps in Minnesota) can get their skiing fix locally, while gaining unlimited/no-blackout access to superb western resorts like Crested Butte and Keystone/ Breckenridge. That same pass buys 10 “nonpeak days” (i.e. Christmas through New Year’s is a no-go, as well as Martin Luther King Day and mid-February’s Presidents’ Day weekend) at Vail’s big three: Vail, Beaver Creek and Whistler Blackcomb.
Now, what about those smaller, independently owned “little areas that rock”? Well, there’s even an Indy Pass that provides two free days of skiing at each of 52 different resorts for only US$199. The challenge is that you probably haven’t heard of half of the American ones, and they’re definitely a bit of a haul from major towns and cities. But in Western Canada, your Indy Pass will get you to some fantastic skiing at Sasquatch Mountain (80 minutes east of Vancouver), Apex Resort (near Penticton) and Castle Mountain (southern Alberta). At SC’s press time, no eastern Canadian Indy resorts had yet signed on. Perhaps Indy Pass’s tagline “Get America Skiing” sounds too much like “Make America Great Again.”
Finally, there’s the Mountain Collective. For US$469 (or roughly C$640) you get two “free” days at some pretty Canadian A-list resorts such as Lake Louise, Banff/Sunshine, Revelstoke,
Sun Peaks and Panorama—which makes the Collective an ideal choice if you want to road trip with a few friends for 10 days or so in Western Canada. Collective passholders also get a nice bonus of a 50 per cent discount on any additional days.
Thanks to COVID-19, we don’t know what the 2021 ski season will look like. The operational challenges of social distancing in lodges and gondolas didn’t stop resorts both large and small (Whistler, Grouse, Blue Mountain, Mont-Sainte-Anne...) from opening during the summer months. Come winter, however, sharing billions of molecules of steaming mouth vapours while crammed inside a cabin with a group of “Live Free or Die” anti-maskers from Florida or Texas doesn’t sound likely.
The ski industry thrives on adaptability and resilience, and skiers are intrepid. Active people hate being cooped up indoors, and so there will likely be plenty of pent-up demand, even if social-distancing restrictions are in place. Still, resorts are enormously fickle businesses; they depend on both a robust economy plus blessings bestowed by the weather gods of snow and sunshine. Coronavirus fallout may result in more skiers vacationing closer to home mountains this season—only time will tell. Then again, a lot more of us may have fresh powder and smooth corduroy past 10:30 a.m.