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No snow, no problem: Ski resorts push season passes over pay-as-you-go tickets to secure sales

Season passes have long been part of the ski industry, but resorts are increasingly leaning on them as a source of revenue to get money locked in before the season starts.

To hedge their bets against warm weather, resorts want customers to pay up front

Paula Duhatschek · CBC News(Paula Duhatschek/CBC)

Rival businesses responded by launching their own multi-resort passes — products that give skiers access to multiple resorts and go on sale well before the season starts.

The Mountain Collective, a group of independent ski resorts, launched its own pass in 2012. It was followed by Alterra Mountain Company's Ikon Pass in 2018 and the Indy Pass, run by another group of small, independent ski areas, in 2019.

A growing number of resorts throughout Canada are captured by these passes, from Mont Tremblantand Blue Mountainin the east to Revelstokeand Marmot Basinout west.

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"It absolutely is the direction the business is going," Burnette said. "We're all continuing to see growth around passes."

The growth in multi-resort passes helps reel in international customers who would have otherwise stayed close to home, said Pete Woods, president of SkiBig3, which represents ski resorts in Banff and Lake Louise, Alta.

"It allows people that maybe have a season pass to a local mountain in Colorado, or potentially in California or in Utah, to then be able to come use that for essentially free, to come here," said Woods, whose resorts participate in the Ikon and the Mountain Collective passes.

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Buying ahead has pros and cons

Beyond inspiring direct copycats, the introduction of the Epic Pass spurred other shifts in the industry.

Paul Pinchbeck, president and CEO of the Canadian Ski Council, said ski areas large and small have mimicked Vail's strategy by dropping the price of their own season passes and raising those prices at a slower pace relative to window tickets.

The share of season passes sold in Canada relative to lift tickets has grown from 40 per cent to 50 per cent in the last two decades, he said.

(Precise data about pricing trends is hard to come by; Statistics Canada doesn't track the cost of lift tickets, and ski areas are largely private businesses reluctant to share this information.)