A class action lawsuit filed in late March says the two biggest ski companies in the U.S., Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Company, have unlawfully inflated daily lift tickets to sell expensive multi-mountain season passes and limit competition.
New investigative reporting from online news outlet The Lever shows these issues trace back decades.
In the mid-1970s, two resorts — Aspen and Vail — tried to raise lift ticket prices from $10 to $12 in the middle of the season. This caught the attention of some Colorado officials, who accused them of price-fixing and feared they’d become monopolies and control entire towns.
“There was a chance the ski industry could exert undue power in the towns that they operate in to run them sort of like the company towns of the old West,” said John LaConte, the Vail reporter who wrote the story for The Lever.
In response to the outrage over the price raises, LaConte said U.S. Sen. Floyd Haskell (D-Colo.) pushed a bill in Congress to prevent companies from buying multiple resorts, give the Forest Service more regulatory power and strengthen environmental oversight. But the bill didn’t get passed until Sen. Malcolm Wallop (R-Wyo.) resurrected it in the mid-1980s.
“Now the pendulum has swung the other way and there's a lot of deregulation happening,” LaConte explained.
Lawmakers stripped the bill of regulations, instead making it so companies could have 40-year leases for thousands of acres of public land and buy multiple resorts without congressional oversight.
LaConte said this legislation paved the way for two companies, Vail and Aspen-linked Alterra, to control the majority of ski lifts in the country. Now, they face litigation for suppressing competition and coercing customers into buying multi-mountain passes, such as the Epic and Ikon passes, by hiking up day ticket prices.
According to Vail Daily, a Vail Resorts spokesperson said in a statement that the claims in the March lawsuit are “without merit.” An Alterra spokesperson declined to comment.
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.
