Understanding Vail Lift Ticket Prices and Discounts
Vail Resorts has good news. Buy your lift ticket at least a month in advance, and you can save big. Holiday tickets drop from $356 to just $249. Peak days fall from $335 to $229. Off-peak days: $307 down to $199.
“Our hope is to make the sport more accessible for guests who aren’t thinking about skiing and snowboarding until winter arrives,” CEO Rob Katz announced.
This is what passes for accessible skiing in 2025.
The Family Math Problem
My wife and I have four kids. If a family like ours wanted to try skiing for the first time during winter break, you know, when families actually have time off, that “discounted” $249 ticket would run us $1,494. Just for lift tickets. For one day.
Add off-site gear rentals at a conservative $75 per person, and you’re at another $450. Before anyone has eaten lunch, paid for parking, or driven to the mountain, the cost is closing in on $2,000 for a single day of skiing. And that’s the discounted rate for a sport that claims to be struggling with accessibility.
The median household income in America is roughly $84,000. We’re supposed to believe that spending nearly 2.4% of your annual gross income on one day of recreation, before taxes, before any other costs represents “accessible” skiing.
Who exactly is this sport for?
How We Got Here
In 1972, a day ticket at Vail cost $9 – about $66 adjusted for inflation. The actual walk-up price this season, on a holiday? $356. That’s more than five times what inflation alone would justify.
Prices tracked inflation until the 1980s. Then resorts consolidated. Markets concentrated. By 2008, when Vail introduced the Epic Pass, the playbook became clear: lock customers into season passes purchased months in advance, then make walk-up tickets expensive enough that buying one feels like punishment.
It worked. For 15 consecutive years, Epic Pass sales grew. Last season they declined 2%. The model is cracking.
The problem isn’t just Vail. It’s the duopoly that dominates American skiing. Vail Resorts controls roughly 36% of the U.S. ski market. Alterra, its main competitor, holds another 15%. Together, they own roughly half the industry. In a normal market, that kind of concentration invites regulatory scrutiny. In the ski industry, it invites price increases.
Between 2000 and 2017, the number of active skiers in America stayed relatively flat. Day pass prices increased 200%. That’s not supply and demand – that’s pricing power.
What Vail Is Actually Doing
Let’s be clear about what this “discount” really represents. It’s not about accessibility. It’s about revenue recovery.
Vail’s CEO mentioned wanting to “fill the gap” between Epic Pass holders and walk-up ticket buyers. What this means is: nearly 75% of Vail’s visitors already have season passes. Less than 2% buy tickets at the window. Everyone else – the remaining quarter of visitors – exists in an awkward middle: people who won’t commit $1,000 to an Epic Pass but also won’t pay $356 for a single day.
That’s the gap Vail is trying to capture. Not families trying skiing for the first time. Not middle-class households stretching their budgets. People who can plan a month ahead and drop $249 without flinching.
The requirements make this clear:
- Must purchase four or more weeks in advance
- Non-refundable
- Can’t combine with other discounts
- Applies only to specific resorts
Even with the discount, Vail’s holiday rate exceeds what many independent resorts charge at full price. It’s not that Vail is making skiing affordable. They’re just offering a slightly less punitive option for people who can afford to plan ahead.
This is optimization, not accessibility. The company is refining its pricing tiers to extract maximum revenue from a shrinking base of customers who can afford to ski at all.
Who Gets Left Behind
The median skier age has climbed from 24 to 35 – a 50% increase since the 1950s-60s boom years. Participation has been stagnant for 25 years even as prices rose 500%.
Middle-class families, the demographic that built American skiing, are increasingly priced out. European resorts charge under $100 for world-class skiing. American resorts charge three to four times that. The difference isn’t snow quality. It’s market structure.
As one publication put it plainly: skiing has always skewed wealthy, “but there may have been an attitudinal difference when the middle class was alive and well.”
If families can’t afford to introduce kids to skiing, where do future skiers come from? The industry’s answer seems to be: charge existing skiers more. That strategy has an obvious endpoint.
The Language Problem
Words mean things. “Accessible” used to mean available to regular people. “Value” meant you got more for less. “Discount” meant the price went down in absolute terms, not just relative to an inflated baseline.
Vail’s announcement mangles all three. Calling a $249 lift ticket “accessible” requires accepting that $356 was ever reasonable. It’s circular logic dressed up as customer service.
The tell is in what they’re not saying. Vail didn’t lower prices because skiing was too expensive. They created a new pricing tier because Epic Pass sales declined for the first time in 15 years and they need to capture revenue from somewhere. The “discount” is a response to a business problem, not a social one.
Consider what $249 represents: nearly two days’ gross pay for someone earning $15 an hour. More than three days for someone at $10. And that’s just the lift ticket. The real cost – gear, food, lodging, travel – pushes skiing further out of reach for households already stretched thin.
This isn’t accessible. It’s marginally less inaccessible, which is not the same thing.
What We’ve Accepted
The depressing part isn’t that Vail charges $249 for a discounted holiday ticket. It’s that we’ve normalized a baseline that makes $249 look like a deal.
Vail didn’t invent expensive skiing. But they perfected it. The Epic Pass model turned skiing from a risky, weather-dependent business into a cash machine funded by non-refundable advance purchases. Brilliant corporate strategy. Also fundamentally incompatible with broad-based participation that keeps a sport culturally relevant across generations. The $249 “discount” won’t fix that. It’s just better pricing on the same problem.
