Skiers are an admittedly unsympathetic crowd. At least the jetsetters who fly around the country chasing the toniest resorts like Park City. Local skiers, on the other, might not earn the same incomes as the jetsetters, but nevertheless must pay the same, lofty lift prices. Setting aside the welfare of locals, one can partly understand why antitrust enforcers have largely looked away as Vail Resorts gobbled up nearly 40 North American resorts in the last two decades.
- Breckenridge Ski Resort, Colorado: 1997
- Keystone Resort, Colorado: 1997
- Heavenly Mountain Resort, California: 2002
- Northstar California Resort, California: 2010
- Kirkwood Mountain Resort, California: 2012
- Afton Alps, Minnesota: 2012
- Mt. Brighton, Michigan : 2012
- Canyons Resort, Utah: 2013
- Park City Mountain Resort, Utah: 2014
- Wilmot Mountain Ski Resort, Wisconsin: 2016
- Whistler Blackcomb, British Columbia, Canada: 2016
- Stowe Mountain Resort, Vermont: 2017
- Crested Butte Mountain Resort, Colorado: 2018
- Mount Sunapee Resort, New Hampshire: 2018
- Okemo Mountain Resort, Vermont: 2018
- Stevens Pass, Washington: 2018
- Paoli Peaks, Indiana: 2019
- Hidden Valley Ski Resort, Missouri: 2019
- Snow Creek Ski Area, Missouri: 2019
- Attitash Mountain Ski Area, New Hampshire: 2019
- Crotched Mountain Resort, New Hampshire: 2019
- Wildcat Mountain Ski Area, New Hampshire: 2019
- Hunter Mountain, New York: 2019
- Boston Mills Ski Resort, Ohio: 2019
- Brandywine Ski Resort, Ohio: 2019
- Mad River Mountain, Ohio: 2019
- Alpine Valley Resort, Ohio: 2019
- Jack Frost Ski Resort, Pennsylvania: 2019
- Big Boulder Ski Resort, Pennsylvania: 2019
- Roundtop Mountain Resort, Pennsylvania: 2019
- Whitetail Resort, Pennsylvania: 2019
- Liberty Mountain Resort, Pennsylvania: 2019
- Mount Snow Resort, Vermont: 2019
- Seven Springs Mountain Resort, Pennsylvania: 2021
- Hidden Valley Resort, Pennsylvania: 2021
- Laurel Mountain Ski Area, Pennsylvania: 2021
Vail’s acquisition of Breckenridge, Keystone, and Arapahoe Basin in 1997 raised the ire of the DOJ, which compelled Vail to sell off Arapahoe Basin. (Arapahoe Basin was operated independently until it was acquired by Alterra, another firm engaged in a roll-up strategy, in 2024.) Park City and its neighbor resort, The Canyons, were rolled up by Vail in 2013 and 2014, respectively. If you can get over the ickiness of assisting wealthy skiers and see them instead as consumers, then there is a good policy basis for intervening in these markets.
Your intrepid reporter took his son to Park City in the first week of the New Year, only to be hit with the vacation crowds and a ski patrol strike. Thursday was bearable, at least until the early afternoon. By Friday, the resort imploded, with massive lines, protesting crowds, skiers hiking up the mountains, all leading to a social media avalanche. I was fortunate to have been interviewed by New York magazine on the indignities of Big Ski. The New York Times covered the strike ably, reporting on such nuggets as the 70 percent vacancy rate in Park City.
There are at least two problems with permitting ski monopolies. The first is that lift ticket prices will soar to astronomical levels, in this case over $300 for a weekend pass at Park City. The resort recognizes that jetsetters, after having purchased their flights, equipment, and hotel rooms, are not going to turn around and fly home because the ticket is $50 or $100 more than they expected. (The technical term is low elasticity of demand with respect to price.) Resorts have also figured out that higher lift prices drive the demand for season passes (a form of a bundle), which now fetch nearly $1000 per year. For a class paper, two of my students plotted the price of a Vail lift ticket against its acquisitions, and it’s pretty clear inflation took off around the time Vail acquired Park City and the neighboring Canyons circa 2013.
The second problem with a monopoly ski resort is that there is no constraint on the number of skiers and snowboarders in a given day. If several neighboring resorts competed against each other, then perhaps competition could break out on this non-price dimension (the time waiting in lift lines). The lack of any market discipline, however, leads to overcrowding at Park City, which can create safety hazards, as ski-patrol (when they are being paid competitive rates) can’t patrol every inch of the resort, and skiers (and snowboarders in particular) need space to avoid collisions. Unlike a sports venue, where the seats are limited by the capacity of the stadium, there is no constraint for a ski resort. And because skiers (consumers) bear the external costs of congestion, the resort cannot be counted on to regulate admissions.
Sam Weintraub details Utah’s visitation spikes and the associated infrastructure strain. He attributes part of the congestion problem to the fact that “resorts have not been able to properly handle” the demand from the unlimited passes. Regarding safety risks, some skiers at Park City “have claimed that they’ve had to step in to help injured skiers due to unacceptable response times, and that even in certain cases when patrol has arrived, they’ve come solo and without adequate transportation equipment down the mountain.”
Now an astute neoliberal might point out that the two problems identified here are in conflict, in the sense that higher (monopoly) lift prices are a way to combat the congestion problem. But the massive crowds (and crowding) at Park City during the holidays proves that the price, however inflated, is not pricing the externality correctly. And even if the higher price does address congestion in part, there is no reason why we must live this way. It would limit skiing to the super wealthy. And it would be tantamount to saying that environment regulation can be disregarded so long as we allow massive consolidation (and the attendant monopoly pricing) in the energy industry. (Per DealBook, “More M.&A. in the energy sector seems probable, given Trump’s support for the industry.”)
The solution to this clear market failure is two-fold. An antitrust authority, whether federal or state, or a group of private enforcers, should bring a case against Vail, seeking divestiture of those properties that contribute to Vail’s monopoly power over skiers and its monopsony power over workers or both. Economist Florian Ederer noted that for the first time in a while, output as measured by skier visits, has declined at Vail Resorts, which is consistent with the exercise of monopoly power. It bears noting that the FTC recently brought a case against a private equity firm in Texas that rolled up nearly every large anesthesiology practice under a similar scheme. (Two of my now settled cases, Varsity and UFC, entailed a roll-up of rival platforms as part of the challenged conduct.) An obvious bone of contention will be whether the relevant geographic market is local (under the theory that local skiers only visit neighboring resorts) or national (under the theory that jet-setters are willing to fly across the country). But given the massive roll-ups by both Vail and Alterra (owners of Deer Valley, Steamboat, Winter Park, among others), the ski markets are concentrated even at the national level.
The second solution is that some outside authority, whether the state, municipality, or the Forest Service—fun fact, Jimmy Carter ordered the Forest Service to stop regulating lift-ticket prices—should regulate the number of visitors (lift tickets plus pass holders) in a given day. Before you scream “communism,” note that restaurants and other local establishments must abide by capacity constraints, to prevent against overcrowding and the attendant safety risks. Hat tip to Jordan Zakarin for the analogy! A cap on the number of attendees would support a lower price for lift tickets, and thereby allow for a more diverse skiing clientele.
The alternative to my suggested interventions is to do nothing, and allow the market to dictate outcomes. It’s true that a strike broke the will of a stubborn monopsonist, causing it to cave on the ski patrols’ wage demands. But should we really depend on strikes to compel employers to pay a fair wage? Or bad press caused by overcrowding to discipline the actions of a monopoly ski resort? Why should we resort (pun intended) to such last-gasp methods—which cannot be invoked until we’ve reached a boiling point—when we have better tools in the anti-monopolist toolkit?
The status quo, with labor strikes, spiking lift prices, and congestion, is clearly not socially optimal. Skiing is becoming unaffordable for many. In avoiding an intervention that might be perceived as assisting the wealthy, antitrust authorities might be inadvertently limiting skiing to a niche sport for the wealthy.