I take it you haven't been to Vail in a while. The walk-up day ticket price is between $102.00 and $105.00. Most walk-up tourons don't know anybody with an EpicPass to get the friends discount. Vail tries to lock the entire market into their EpicPass products. A 7-day EpicPass is $529. That keeps the tourons from going to Copper or Winter Park.Highway Star wrote: Vail has excellent price controls and limited deals. Aside from the early season pass pricing. If you're a visitor you're going to pay about $75 per day for a ticket and then probably throw done some cash for food, parking, etc at minimum. Adds up quick. Their overal yield per visit is probably north of $100 at this point.
From state sales, meals, lodging, and alcohol tax data, the entire town of Killington does about $100 million (more like $80 million last year) and the ski resort does about half of that. Maybe 650,000 skier visits generates about $50 million. I'd put the yield at more like $70-$75. From Killington's retail sales numbers, I'll bet day ticket sales were off 25% so the yield was worse last winter. They were offering promotions that they don't usually offer and still weren't generating all that many skier visits.
If you want to look at the numbers from the state, the fiscal year preliminary report for July 1, 2011->June 20, 2012 is up for sales & use tax and food, lodging, & alcohol.
http://www.state.vt.us/tax/statisticsm&rmult.shtml
One take-away from a glance at the numbers was that April was awful.