Been looking through the Vail annual reports. In FY 2010 Season/Epic passes were 35% of ticket revenue, FY 2019 it was 47%, FY 2021 61%. I think your theory has legs.
It’s also an intentional strategy by Vail to shift sales into season passes. A day pass is incredibly expensive, $229 at the ticket window. For about $600 you might as well buy a season pass just in case you get to use it a bit. They are taking a page out of the gym membership model.
It's really the theme park model that they are learning from. Disney and Universal are in an arms race perfecting this science. A lot of people end up buying annual passes from Disney or Universal since you end up ahead after a couple visits. If you are local that's pretty easy to do. Suddenly you are in the park more often, in arms reach of their $14 entrees and merchandise shops in every corner. Having you in the park/skilodge more often means more chances they can upsell you on stuff they make some real money on, like $12 beer on a 10x markup. Even if you show up every single day and really milk your season pass to these sorts of places, the resort still ends up ahead due to all the other sales you might make for them. Gotta take a break for food at some point when skiing or going to disneyland no matter what.
Thanks. I've been a skier for a long time and have a market / data mindset and I have been watching the changes on ski mountains/communities over that time.
For me personally the hyper cheap passes have a had a positive effect in getting people into skiing that wouldn't be able to afford the commitment. It has, unfortunately, lowered the quality of skiing as on good weather conditions the volume of runs you can get / time spent in line has dropped significantly. That and the quality of snow decreases (ie more people chew up the snow faster). That is admittedly only a concern for skiers/snowboarders who are at a certain level of ability to take advantage of those conditions (most people don't care).
I think one of the unintended consequences of the ski industry doing this is that they have (and probably don't really care) made it skiing worse for locals (via higher housing costs, more competition for resources (snow, food), congestion. Maybe it has helped the local business owner, and maybe there are more jobs but I would wager the jobs are not career jobs but more like dead end jobs. It is an age-old problem between corporate ownership of ski mountains and crusty locals -- the power dynamics lie in the favor of the corporates.
The model plays well for the traveling skier type who is willing to travel and stay on mountain accommodation. They lower the costs of acquisition and recoupe on spend on site. To everyones point - the disney model / theme park model.
Theres lots more to it - but probably as far as I am willing to think about it at this point :)
That's also because vail has been buying up mountains. The epic pass even works for the little podunk midwestern ski slopes I used to ride on, since vail bought them within the past decade or two.
The epic pass works in places outside the US as well so some Europeans buy it if they are planning one US trip and some days in the areas in the Alps that are covered.