Northeast Ski Season Pass Landscape Is Transformed

[RustyK]

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A brief history of the massive, rapid change in the Northeast season pass market

After rolling out season pass updates weekly from mid-April to late June, I’ve downshifted to a more spaced-out cadence. The last one was June 21. The next one will likely be in mid- to late-August. The reason for slowing these pass-specific newsletters down is that I’m assuming that pretty much any large ski area that is going to adjust its pass policy to accommodate Covid-19’s f-bombing of our organized civilization has done so by now.

But a moment of reflection is in order. The rate at which the Northeast season pass landscape has evolved to meet the reality of life in a Covid-19 world is stunning. When the virus materialized in March, the industry, traumatized and broken, had to contend with the twin realities of massive shutdown-related economic fallout among consumers and a stubborn disease that looked likely to return at will, disrupting every piece of the lift-served skiing experience save the skiing itself. While the industry had time to prepare operating contingencies for the distant start to the next ski season, the pandemic struck in the midst of the essential season pass sales period, during which ski areas take in an enormous portion of their annual revenue. To keep this business from crumbling, it instantly became clear that standard no-refunds-allowed, pay-in-full-up-front season pass plans would not be sufficient. Skiing would have to meet the moment.

It did, at least in the Northeast. Adjustments ranged from Vail’s grand and complicated gold-plated Epic Pass overhaul to tiny family-owned Plattekill’s promise to “make things right” in the event of another shutdown. The complexity of the various plans and their degree of generosity in some ways act as a proxy for the region’s current ski-world power structure, but not exclusively so. Some of the most comprehensive plans came from some of the smallest mountains, and the degree of thoughtfulness or carelessness behind them demonstrate as well as anything which mountains are ascendant and which are lashed to a pre-Vail 2015 business model, barnacled to unrealistic pass prices and declining to offer any sort of financial assurance by modifying their antique refund policies.