How monopoly and price discrimination are transforming an industry
can drive many people mad. At the bottom of the Imperial chairlift in Breckenridge, a mountain resort in Colorado, at 10 o’clock in the morning on a sunny Saturday, at least 200 people are queuing to get up. The chairlift is not yet carrying people, but the crowd is patient. There is, after all, a show to watch. Up the mountain, men in red jackets are trying to set off avalanches. Explosions ring out every few minutes.
With the Epic Pass, Vail has changed the offer. Skiers can now get unlimited skiing at a whole pack of resorts cheaply, but only by committing before the season starts. The result, says Stuart Winchester, who runs the Storm Skiing Journal, an industry blog and podcast, is that for the first time in decades skiing in America is reliably profitable. But it has come at a cost to competition. “Everyone else is swimming around. Vail is buying everything,” he says.
Yet the transformation is not entirely popular. As the number of people with passes grew, “locals started losing their shit at all of these people coming into town,” says Mr Winchester. On a-Bar drag lift at Breckenridge, Vince, a paramedic who has been skiing there since the 1980s, says that Vail “is the evil empire”. With far more people skiing, the lift queues have grown, especially on the best snow days. A skiing culture that catered to locals has changed into a mass business.