Will the cap on day lift at Vail improve the skier experience?

[ski diva]

Many of you probably know this by now: Vail is capping the number of daily lift tickets it'll be selling at its resorts this season. Once the tickets are sold out on line, they're gone; you won't be able to buy any at the ticket windows.

So what do you think? Do you think this will reduce crowding at Vail Resorts? Or don't you think it'll have any effect at all? Is it a good idea or a bad one? And Is it a move toward making Vail Resorts accessible only to those with season passes, or to those who buy multi-day tickets?

 

[Pequenita]

Presumably, Vail did the math and decided that whatever additional tickets it was selling at the window or online for a specific day was not worth the ire of its loyalists and bad PR of having epic lines. It sounds in part like an accounting tactic because the company will basically have much of its lift ticket income in advance, and also a potential scheme to get casual skiers to buy epic day passes, which aren’t subject to the cap, and hope they forget to use them. I don’t think it’ll really change the crowding.

I think it’s going to have the unintended consequence of making it difficult for new skiers to get into and stick with the sport in the same season. While lift tickets can probably be made part of a pre-booked lesson, at some point new skiers will want not to have a lesson as part of their ski day. If the days a newbie wants to free ski get all sold out, and passes are no longer for sale, it’s going to take another year to get someone who discovers skiing in January 2023 back on the slope the following year with a pass,

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[marymack]

I think it's part marketing strategy to drive more pass sales..."if you don't have a pass, you might miss out on a day you want to ski!" And part a low hanging fruit in terms of a change they could make that will make it look like they are doing something about the crowds, won't p.o. their pass holders (like paid/capped parking or daily reservations), and won't really impact their bottom line since so few people walk up and buy a day ticket these days (and this doesnt require hiring more staff or building more infrustructure).

They didn't announce no day-of ticket sales, just that days could sell out. They also gave no indication of what level of max capacity would trigger the ending of day tickets...so my guess is it will already be those peak/crowded days anyway. In which case the average skier won't notice a difference.

 

[ski diva]

This is interesting. It's from Vail Resorts' 2022 Investors Conference Presentation, and shows lift revenue by type of purchase (not by percentage of visitors).



So essentially, about 22% of their revenue comes from pre-purchased day tickets, and 5% from tickets purchased at the window. Keep in mind that this is revenue, not skier visits. So if you figure that visits are lower than revenue, I really don't think this is going to make that much of a difference, particularly since they're not eliminating these tickets entirely -- just capping the number sold. I really don't think this is going to do much in the way of managing the crowds. I think it's more a PR tactic than anything else.

 

[mustski]

Are they capping sales at all their resorts, large destination resorts, or just at Vail itself? If all resorts, then yes it will make a difference at some of them - those that are more local resorts will likely be less crowded. But since passes aren’t capped in any way, the destination resorts will be no different. The cost of day passes is prohibitive so most people will have purchased some form of the Epic pass.

 

[ski diva]

Are they capping sales at all their resorts, large destination resorts, or just at Vail itself? If all resorts, then yes it will make a difference at some of them - those that are more local resorts will likely be less crowded. But since passes aren’t capped in any way, the destination resorts will be no different. The cost of day passes is prohibitive so most people will have purchased some form of the Epic pass.

They're capping sales at ALL resorts.