In 2016, I was hired to teach skiing at the Park City, Utah resort. The ultimate fun job: for one winter, I would be paid to do and share my favorite activity.
But I quickly realized that although the track conditions were excellent, the working conditions were poor. A first clue was a training video that Vail Resorts, the owner of Park City, showed to employees. The company boasted about how the company’s charity helped local residents. The only problem: One of the charity cases was a Vail employee. In other words, the company was unconsciously broadcasting how underpaid its own workers were.
This video came to mind last month when I learned that starting December 27, Park City trackers were going on strike to demand higher wages and better treatment. “We are asking you all to show your support by stopping spending at Vail Resorts properties for the duration of this strike,” the union said on Instagram. job. “Do not use Vail-owned rental or retail stores. Do not stay in Vail owned hotels.
For those unfamiliar with the sector, the union’s decision may have seemed confusing. People who work on skis tend to love skiing, so why would they want to stop? After all, they’re called ski bums, not ski workers. But for anyone who has been employed by Vail — and lived through the housing crises plaguing resort communities — the union’s arguments are entirely understandable. The Park City strike illustrates how distorted the U.S. ski industry has become, for both workers and visitors. At the heart of the malaise is a trend: monopolization.
For much of skiing history, the mountains were locally owned and operated. But in recent decades, things have changed. In the 1990s, ski resorts began buying up other ski resorts. Private equity firms got in on the act. Soon, these conglomerates swallowed up each other, creating a small clique of companies that controlled the industry. Independent mountains still dot the country, but most major resorts are now owned or associated with one of two giant corporations: Vail and Alterra.
This consolidation is perhaps the main reason why the price of skiing, never cheap, has become exorbitant. With fewer competitors, Vail and Alterra have been free to raise their prices. In 2000, when Mount Snow (where I learned to ski) was owned by a small company, the cost of a day pass was about $93 in today’s dollars. Today, the Vail-owned resort charges about $150. The price in Park City is even higher. Twenty-five years ago, you could get a three-day ticket for $308 in today’s dollars. Now you pay $850.
As a result, skiers tend to purchase either Vail’s Epic Pass or Alterra’s Ikon Pass, memberships that, depending on the category, offer different levels of access to a selection of the companies’ resorts (and, especially for Ikon, affiliated stations). These passes offer a better deal than day tickets; in some circumstances, they offer better value than season passes of previous eras. But they also represent a complex form of price discrimination, fraught with drawbacks. Skiers must purchase them before the start of winter. Many passes come with restrictions. And, as a lump sum, they’re hardly cheap: The Epic “Northeast Value Pass,” for example, costs about $600 and has blackout dates on Vail’s flagship properties in the northeastern United States. United. Only the full Epic Pass, priced around $1,000, is limitless.
This new business model means visitors have fewer affordable ways to hit the slopes, especially if they only ski occasionally. For example, beginners may find themselves having to purchase season passes just to spend a few days learning to ski. The season pass imperative also requires skiers of all levels to commit to one of two ecosystems, Epic or Ikon. This limits people’s choice of where to ski and makes it more difficult to plan trips with friends. What this allows is for conglomerates to keep people settled in company properties, buying overpriced food, housing and equipment.
Naturally, this strategy worked well for both Vail and Alterra. Vail’s revenue has increased 50% since my brief stint with the company in 2017. Alterra, a small business, is privately held and does not disclose its financials. But Big Ski’s business model works well enough at Alterra’s scale that last year the company purchased a new ski area in Colorado for more than $100 million.
The system has not worked as well for staff, who remain underpaid. Vail set its minimum wage at $20 in March 2022, after facing a staffing shortage and a threatened ski patrol strike. But that hourly figure compares to the extremely high cost of living in resort towns: In Park City, the median monthly rent is $3,500, about what a Vail minimum wage worker earns working at full time. Meanwhile, Vail’s charitable arm keep bragging about helping staff “relieve difficulties”.
This is what happens when businesses don’t have to compete for workers. Thanks to industrial agglomeration, ski resort workers have only a small number of potential employers, making it more difficult to change jobs if they don’t like the way a particular resort serves them. deals. And supervisors can afford to be bossy. During my tenure, for example, instructors sometimes had shifts added to their schedules without authorization; at other times, their shift was canceled after they arrived at work, meaning they drove to the mountain only to be sent home without pay.
At the Park City resort, Vail has a wonderful collection of lodges and rental properties, but none of them were assigned to employees in my day. In 2022, the company began work on a separate development to help rent discounted housing for 441 of its employees, but Vail has hundreds of additional employees at the resort, so those dorms and apartments are far from enough to make a very expensive city remotely affordable. for most workers. In fact, according to a 2023 study by the University of Utah studyonly 12 percent of the community’s workforce lives in Park City itself. This housing crisis is one of the main factors behind the strike. To explain the picketing, Quinn Graves, one of the union leaders, said new York magazine that most of his colleagues don’t live locally.
Most visitors who come to Park City to ski probably don’t think much about these questions. After all, they’re there for a vacation, not to do field research on economic injustice. But this season they had plenty of opportunities to think about it: Since most of the resort was closed during the patrol strike, visitors had to wait for hours in freezing queues for brief descents on the few leads that Vail managed to keep open with the supervisors. and enlisted patrolmen in other mountains. Many of these guests, fed up with Park City’s high costs, sided with the strikers. Online, angry customers criticized Vail for refusing to give staff raises. A person has filed a lawsuit against the company, complaining about the “exponential” rise in ski ticket prices over the past ten years. In person, guests chanted “Pay your employees” while waiting to board the elevators.
On January 8, the company listened. He made an agreement increase the average patrol officer salary by $4 an hour and provide better leave policies. “This contract is more than just a win for our team,” Seth Dromgoole, the union’s lead negotiator, said in a statement. “This is an unprecedented success in the ski sector and mountain workers.” Other Park City employees, including instructors, also cheered, hoping the situation would eventually spread to them.
The result could encourage other ski resort workers to organize. The idea of unionizing was mentioned by ski school workers when I was there, and the rates of work organization having doped in ski areas. The reasoning is compelling: To get a fair deal in the face of corporate consolidation, workers may need to band together themselves.
But for the moment, the offer offered to skiers is governed by the unfortunate logic of mountains and monopolies. America only has a limited number of ski areas, and as long as they are controlled by a few conglomerates, the experience will continue to deteriorate.