How did daily lift tickets at ski resorts get to be hundreds of dollars a day?
That’s the question Vail reporter John LaConte tried to answer in a story for investigative news outlet The Lever.
He uncovered what he calls a “forgotten coup,” where the alleged monopolization of ski resorts could have been prevented through a reform bill from a Colorado senator.
“If things were left the way that they were, there was a chance that you could have a monopoly in the ski industry,” LaConte said. “There was a chance that the ski industry could exert undue power in the towns that they operate in, run them sort of like the company towns of the old West.”
But LaConte said that the ski reform bill failed to regulate the ski industry, and that many of the predictions that inspired the bill have now come true. Today, Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company control a majority of ski lifts in the country.
Wyoming Public Radio’s Hanna Merzbach spoke to LaConte about the story.
Editor’s Note: This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
Hanna Merzbach: So in your story, it all starts in 1975. These two Colorado ski resorts, Aspen and Vail, wanted to raise ticket prices from $10 to $12.
John LaConte: Yeah, exactly. It happened in the middle of the ski season around the same time, and so they were accused of price fixing, by an attorney who worked in the consumer affairs division of the governor's office here in Colorado. His name's Tony Accetta, and he called them out and stopped the lift tickets price hike. And that caught the attention of a senator from Colorado, Floyd Haskell, who said, ‘What's going on here? These ski areas are operating on national lands, so does that mean that they can just raise prices whenever they want?’
He started looking into the way that the ski industry worked and realized that if things were left the way that they were, there was a chance that you could have a monopoly in the ski industry. There was a chance that the ski industry could exert undue power in the towns that they operate in, run them sort of like the company towns of the old West.
The ski industry itself also said, ‘There are some things that we don't like either in the way that the permits are done on these national lands, so maybe we could work out a compromise here, and we could revise the permitting process to give us a little more security in our investment, so we don't have to annually renew these leases. In exchange, we could do some of these reforms you had talked about.’
HM: And this triggered quite a bit of pushback from some well-known power players, including a leader at Coors beer, right?
JL: Well, right. There was this era of a lot of regulatory measures getting passed across various industries in the U.S. [Joseph] Coors had a hit list of people that he wanted to get out of Congress, and one of them was Senator Haskell, who just got completely blindsided by all this. So, then, Haskell was gone, and one of the impacts of that was this ski industry reform bill went away for a while.
HM: But about a decade later, in 1986, this bill was resurrected by Sen. Malcolm Wallop, a Wyoming Republican. He brought it back, but he changed some things.
JL: Yes, so you fast forward, the pendulum has swung the other way, and there's a lot of deregulation happening. So, now, you could have big leases, thousands of acres. They would be for 40 years, and you could have as many of them as you wanted without needing additional congressional oversight. That paves the way to where we are today, where you have a single company having 36 of these.
HM: So, eventually what passed included all of the deregulation measures and none of the regulation, which would've helped prevent this monopolistic control, clarify the U.S. Forest Service’s authority to regulate rates and consumer impacts, improve environmental oversight and give Congress some oversight. What gets passed is really just what the ski resorts want.
JL: Yeah, exactly.
HM: You talked about how some predictions, prior to the passing of the bill have now become reality.
JL: Yeah. Well, one of the big ones, I think, is that a ski area that owns the lifts in your town and thereby provides access to the national forests in your town could withhold season pass privileges from you if you speak out against the company. I've spoken to many people that this has happened to, and one of them is this local demonstrator in Vail who went and put a sign in front of the snow stake camera, and then he was not allowed to purchase a season pass the next season.
HM: Now, most of the large ski resorts in the U.S. are either owned by or affiliated with Vail Resorts or Alterra Mountain Company, which evolved from the Aspen ski company. Tell me more about what this consolidated corporate power has allowed them to do.
JL: There's two things that they've been accused of by some industry watchdogs and experts. One is being a little more fast and loose with environmental regulations, specifically when it's related to the growth of the ski resorts. When you have the majority of skiers in the U.S. going to your resorts, then you have to grow because you have to be able to accommodate all this traffic that you're getting. You're creating a greater environmental impact. That's the first thing.
The second one is labor. In these towns, the resort has been accused of being able to sort of flaunt the Fair Labor Standards Act by, I guess you'd say little things, but they really add up. If you work at a restaurant way up on top of the mountain, you only clock in once you get up the lift and make it to the restaurant. There are little ways of getting you to sort of work more than you should.
HM: Do you think there's any benefits of having these huge ski monopolies? Now, these ski resorts have these multi-resort passes, like the Epic Pass and the Ikon.
JL: I think the industry itself would tell you that it’s been able to create more stability in these ski towns by being able to get prior commitment from guests. Then when you get a bad snow year, the company doesn't take a nosedive in terms of its earnings. But the critique of that is that you don't need a $5 billion corporation, and you don't need to own 36 resorts in order to get prior commitment from guests.
HM: Tell me a little bit about the counter movement to these ski monopolies, the smaller, independent resorts trying to keep things a bit cheaper.
JL: What the smaller mom and pops, if you will, did, was they banded together and said, ‘Let's come up with a competing product of our own,’ develop this technology for the Indy Pass, and then operate like a co-op where all that money is put into one pot and divided up amongst all these mom and pops based on where it's being redeemed. So, it's really been transformational.
This story was produced by the Mountain West News Bureau, a collaboration between Wyoming Public Media, Nevada Public Radio, Boise State Public Radio in Idaho, KUNR in Nevada, KUNC in Northern Colorado, KANW in New Mexico, Colorado Public Radio, KJZZ in Arizona and NPR, with additional support from affiliate newsrooms across the region. Funding for the Mountain West News Bureau is provided in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and Eric and Wendy Schmidt.
