Name: The Business of Ski Resorts
Uploaded: 2021-06-10T13:00:00.000Z
Duration: 14 min 2 s
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There are few sports as expensive as skiing.

A daily lift-ticket alone typically costs more than $100 with top resorts, such as Vail,

After all, all those $209 are getting you is access, along with thousands of other people,

to one of 32 lifts between the hours of 8:30 am and 3:30 pm.

Does it really cost that much for a resort to run a few lifts?

With the most common design, chairs, each with a capacity between one and eight, are

connected to a continuously rotating cable, pulled by motors at the top or bottom of the

Between all the redundancies and safety systems, though, they end up being fairly complex machines,

While it varies wildly depending on length, capacity, specifications, and location, costs

for the construction of a new lift alone regularly reach $10 million, and most large ski resorts

In Vail's case, once again, they have 32.

That means that, even if they were all the kinds of lifts that cost $10 million, which

they're not, that would total to $320 million.

Those $320 million are divided by a lift lifespan of a few dozen years, then divided further

by the hundreds of thousands of yearly visitors who are each paying up to hundreds of dollars

per day, and you can start to see pretty quickly that it is not because of building lifts that

The paradox of ski resorts is that buying and installing ski lifts, which are their

primary physical assets, only represents a small proportion of their costs.

Actually running ski lifts is trickier, but for a slightly unexpected reason.

Between working the line, scanning tickets, helping riders load, and manning the terminal

to stop the lift in case of an accident, a good number of workers are needed to operate

Then, when you add in all the restaurants, ticket sales, rental shops, stores, hotels,

activities, and everything else a large resort has, it needs thousands of employees, but

getting such huge numbers of workers is quite tough.

The nature of the majority of these jobs is that they're low-wage and seasonal.

That means that a resort needs to find a subset of people who are willing to move to the mountain

for five or six months and work for not much.

There are not many people who want to do that and, among those who are, they're typically

young people who will only work a season or two before entering a longer-term career.

Running a ski resort is an enormous and never-ending recruiting mission and many are unable to

fill all their positions, even when touting significantly better benefits than most other

entry-level jobs, at least in the US, like healthcare, transit passes, 401k's, and

This labor scarcity has pushed wages up for ski jobs, but even with higher wages they

The nature of the ski resort economy is that the towns that ski resorts are in need to

be able to accommodate a seasonal doubling or tripling or quadrupling of their population.

Couple that with the fact that resorts tend to be nestled in the mountains where there

is little flat or semi-flat land where one can build cheap housing, and the urban geography

Aspen is home to four ski areas, all operated by the Aspen Skiing Company, and therefore,

in the winter, the greater Aspen area is also home to thousands of seasonal workers.

Many of these workers are paid the company's base wage of $13.50 an hour, however, Aspen

also happens to be one of the world's most expensive real estate markets.

The reason for that is, as usual, a byproduct of supply and demand.

Housing supply is quite low as the town is nestled at the end of a mountain valley with,

Housing supply for small apartments is even lower.

The average price per square foot of a home in Aspen is nearly $1,700.

In comparison, in Manhattan, New York, it's under $1,400.

Of course, no matter how much they pay, Aspen Skiing Company isn't going to get workers

While prices decrease as one descends down-valley, for the most part, there would be no chance

of housing thousands of low-wage workers using the free market, so Aspen Skiing Company's

solution is to provide subsidized employee housing at prices that all their workers can

So, while a ski resort may be able to pay their employees $13.50 an hour, their employees

There is, however, another unique byproduct of the ski-town labor market.

The masses of seasonal workers often don't bring cars with them, so they need ways to

Now, the US is not known for its public transportation systems, and it's known even less for its

rural public transportation systems, but American ski towns are often an exception to this.

Many have public-transportation systems that rival those of big cities.

Colorado, home to many of the US' most popular ski resorts, leads the nation in terms of

ridership on its rural transportation systems.

Of these, the system with the highest ridership is Aspen's, with more than 5 million passengers

That's remarkable for a town of 7,000, even though the system extends far beyond, and

its core routes have busses every 12 minutes or more—again, rivaling many routes in big

This system, much like those of all of Colorado's ski towns, is crucial to get workers in and

out of the area and it represents the symbiotic relationship ski resorts and the towns they're

Ski resorts need their ski towns to set themselves up in a way that's accommodating for their

workers and guests, while ski towns need ski resorts in order to stay ski towns.

But here's something strange: most big ski resorts, at least in the US, don't actually

It's government land, and the resorts only hold permits to use the land.

This means that the land upon which one skis is public land and so, with some restrictions,

anyone can use the land regardless of whether or not they have a lift ticket.

At American resorts sitting on US Forest Service land, of which there are 122, people legally

can and do hike uphill and then ski down without a pass.

Therefore, technically, what the resorts are selling is access to the lifts themselves,

Despite this, though, people obviously wouldn't pay to ride those lifts up unless the skiing

down was good, so resorts spend huge amounts of money building and maintaining the downhill

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The Business of Ski Resorts

crucial

essentially

access

physical