In 2016, I was hired to teach skiing at Park City Resort, Utah. Last fun job: For one winter, I got paid to do and share my favorite activity.
But I soon realized that while the track conditions might be great, the working conditions were bad. An early clue was a training video that Vail Resorts, the owner of Park City, showed employees. He bragged about how the company’s charity was helping local people. The only problem: One of the charity cases was a Vail employee. In other words, the company was carelessly broadcasting how unpaid its workers were.
That video came to mind last month when I heard that, starting Dec. 27, Park City ski patrollers were going on strike to demand higher wages and better treatment. “We are asking all of you to show your support by stopping spending at Vail Resorts properties for the duration of this strike,” the union said in an Instagram post. “Do not use Vail-owned rental or retail stores. Do not stay at Vail owned hotels.”
To those unfamiliar with the industry, the union’s decision may have seemed strange. People who work in skiing tend to like skiing, so why would they want to stop? After all, they are called skiers, not ski workers. But for anyone who has been employed by Vail — and lived through the housing crises that plague resort communities — the union’s pleas are completely understandable. The Park City strike illustrates how twisted the American ski business has become, for workers and visitors alike. At the heart of the disease is a tendency: monopolization.
For most of skiing’s history, mountains were locally owned and operated. But over the past few decades, that has changed. In the 1990s, ski resorts began buying up other ski resorts. Private equity firms swung into action. Soon, these conglomerates were gobbling each other up, creating a small clique of businesses that controlled the industry. Independent mountains still dot the country, but most of the big resorts are now owned or affiliated with one of two giant corporations: Vail and Alterra.
This consolidation is probably the main reason that the price of ski climbing, never cheap, has become exorbitant. With fewer competitors, Vail and Alterra have been free to raise prices. Back in 2000, when Mount Snow (where I learned to ski) was owned by a smaller company, the cost of a day pass was about $93 in today’s dollars. Today, the Vail-owned resort costs roughly $150. The price in Park City is even steeper. Twenty-five years ago, you could get a three-day ticket for $308 in today’s dollars. Now you are paying $850.
As a result, skiers tend to buy either Vail’s Epic Pass or Alterra’s Ikon Pass, season tickets that, depending on the category, offer varying levels of access to a selection of the companies’ (and, especially for Ikon, affiliated) resorts. These passes offer a better deal than day tickets; in some circumstances, they provide better value than seasons from previous eras. But they also represent a complex form of price discrimination fraught with disadvantages. Skiers should buy them before winter sets in. Many of the permits come with restrictions. And, as a general rule, they’re nowhere near cheap: The Epic “Northeast Value Pass,” for example, costs about $600 and has blackout dates at Vail properties in the northeastern US. Only the full Epic Pass, priced at roughly $1,000, is unlimited.
This new economic model means visitors have fewer affordable ways to hit the slopes—especially if they only ski occasionally. For example, beginners may find themselves forced to buy a season pass just to spend a few days learning how to ski. The cross-season imperative also forces skiers of all skill levels to commit to one of two ecosystems, Epic or Ikon. This limits people’s choice of where to ski and makes planning trips with friends more difficult. What it allows is conglomerates to keep people trapped on company properties, buying expensive food, lodging and equipment.
Obviously, this strategy has worked well for both Vail and Alterra. Vail’s revenue has grown 50 percent since my brief stint with the company in 2017. Alterra, a smaller company, 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 it bought a new ski area in Colorado for more than $100 million.
The system has not worked so well for staff, who remain unpaid. Vail set its minimum wage to $20 in March 2022 after facing staffing shortages and an earlier strike threat by ski patrollers. But that hourly figure is set against the extremely high cost of living in resort towns: in Park City, the average monthly rent is $3,500, which is about what a Vail minimum wage worker makes working full time. Meanwhile, Vail’s charitable arm continues to boast about helping staff with “hardship relief.”
This is what happens when companies don’t have to compete for labor. Thanks to the clustering of the industry, ski resort workers have only a small number of potential employers, making it more difficult to switch jobs if they don’t like the way a particular resort treats them. And supervisors can afford to be high-handed. During my tenure, for example, instructors sometimes had shifts added to their schedules without permission; in other cases, they would cancel their shifts after arriving at work – meaning they would travel up the mountain only to be sent home without pay.
At Park City Resort, Vail has a wonderful collection of lodges and rental properties, but none of them were shared with employees in my time. In 2022, the company began working on a separate development to help provide discounted rental units for its 441 employees — but Vail has hundreds of other employees at the resort, so those dorms and apartments aren’t that close. enough to make a very expensive city remotely affordable. for most workers. In fact, according to a 2023 University of Utah study, only 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 help explain the picketing, said Quinn Graves, one of the union officials New York magazine that most of his colleagues do not live in the country.
Most visitors who fly to ski in Park City probably don’t think much about these issues. After all, they are there for vacation, not for field research on economic injustice. But this season, they’ve had plenty of opportunity to think about it: Because most of the resort was closed during the ranger strike, visitors had to wait in freezing lines for hours for short runs on the slopes. the least Vail managed to keep open with the supervisors. and patrols drawn from other mountains. Many of these guests, sick of Park City’s high costs, sided with the strikers. Angry online customers slammed Vail for refusing to give staff raises. One person filed a lawsuit against the company in which he complained that ski ticket prices had risen “exponentially” over the past 10 years. In person, guests chanted “Pay your workers” as they waited to board the elevators.
On January 8, the company heard. He struck a deal to raise the average pay for patrolmen by $4 an hour and offer better vacation policies. “This contract is more than just a win for our team,” Seth Dromgoole, the union’s chief negotiator, said in a statement. “It’s a groundbreaking success in the ski and mountain worker industry.” Other Park City employees, including instructors, have similarly cheered, hoping the lumps will eventually spread to them.
The result may encourage other ski resort workers to organize. The idea of unionization was brought up by ski school workers when I was there, and worker organizing rates have increased in ski areas. The reason is compelling: To reach a fair deal in the face of corporate consolidation, workers may have to consolidate.
At the moment, however, what is offered to skiers is governed by the unfortunate logic of mountains and monopolies. America only has so many ski areas, and as long as they are controlled by a few conglomerates, the whole experience will continue to go downhill.
