Creator: Maxinomics · Published: 2025-03-06 · Length: 9:47 · Watch on YouTube

I hit the slopes to investigate the growing crowd problem at America's top ski resorts. From packed lift lines to parking nightmares, I uncover why these winter hotspots are struggling to keep up with booming demand and what that means for the business of ski resorts. (video description)

1) Detailed outline

[0:00] The expansion of ski resorts

• No new ski resort has been built in the U.S. in 45 years, which is why Vail started buying as many resorts as it could in 1997: Park City, Breckenridge, Keystone, Northstar, Heavenly, Whistler, and small hills in the East and Midwest, including the most visited resorts in the country.
• That will likely stay true: there's no private land left to build on, and building on public land takes far too much government permitting.
• U.S. ski resorts had 10 million more visits last season than in 2016, and Vail's top properties take about 2 million more skiers every year.

[0:39] Crowds and operational limits

• More people is a problem for a ski business: unlike a game or a concert, skiing gets worse the more people do it at the same time.
• The extra skiers spread over the same land, magnifying the bottlenecks every trip hits: getting to the mountain, lift lines, and crowded slopes. Everyone can and wants to go at the same moments: after big snow, at Christmas, New Year's, and other holidays.
• At Breckenridge on a prime day, about 30,000 people show up, most at one main lift, the Colorado SuperChair on Peak 8. It carries 600 people every 10 minutes, but in the morning rush waits can easily hit an hour, a big chunk of a ski day under 8 hours, and it's only the first of two lifts to reach the top.
• To keep adding subscribers to the Epic Pass, could Vail just double the lift's speed?

[1:45] Ownership and town resistance

• Breckenridge was founded in the 1800s as a mining town; the first ski run was cut in 1961, and the resort stayed private for 35 years until Vail bought it in the 1990s.
• Vail didn't buy the town. Most of the village is owned by individuals, trusts, or businesses, and the mountain itself is owned by the U.S. government. Vail owns outright only the base area, some parking lots, and the access road, plus partnerships for overflow parking and a few lodges.
• Those pieces are valuable: bought for about $300 million in the 1990s, now worth at least a couple billion, with the road perhaps the most valuable part. But everyone else gets a say over the rest of the land.
• Doubling lift capacity would mean designing it and submitting a few hundred documents to the town council, which would ask residents whether they want twice as many people going up the mountain. Increasingly the answer is no, because more skiers need parking, beds, and food.

[3:04] The impact of subscription passes

• Breckenridge's initial expansion through 2014 overlapped with the launch of the first successful subscription ski pass, the Epic Pass, which let people ski many mountains for a fee paid before the season.
• As crowds grew each winter, locals became less keen to approve projects from Vail or other developers.
• Example: Breckenridge Grand Vacations, a 334-unit hotel and condo complex with retail, was approved in 2018 for two key parking lots in the town center, including the north gondola lot next to the BreckConnect Gondola, which is full even on a Wednesday.
• As the build date neared and the crowded COVID-era ski days rolled in, residents turned against it. The town council revisited and overturned the approval, and seven years later the project was moved off those lots and redesigned: 48 workforce beds (from zero), 190 private homes and condos, and 36 hotel rooms (down from 229), 274 units in all.
• Hotels are worth more to the resort but generate more traffic because guests come and go more often. Even the reduced project will take at least 10 to 13 years from idea to finish.
• Park City has seen two lift upgrades canceled over traffic concerns, and the town of Vail blocked Vail Resorts from building housing on land it felt it owned. Building on or around these resorts isn't impossible, but it's a huge pain, so the idea of selling ever more Epic Passes is highly suspect.

[4:46] Risks of weather and artificial snow

• Building and upgrading are bets on future snowfall, and on snow arriving in fairly specific windows: about 20% of a ski resort's revenue depends on the two weeks either side of Christmas.
• Resorts hope a season of maybe four months starts with early natural snow, a valuable, free, and volatile blessing. If it doesn't come, they buy it by turning water from local rivers, streams, ponds, lakes, and the ground into man-made snow.
• Nobody wants fake snow; it isn't why skiers go to destination resorts. It's an expensive Band-Aid that stretches the season or keeps people just happy enough, a prevention rather than a bonus.
• Costs Phil cites: one layer of skiable snow on about an acre runs $1,000 to $2,500 before equipment; each snowmaking unit costs $5,000 to $6,000, and big snow guns $35,000 to $50,000 apiece. Breckenridge has 600 acres of terrain prepared for snowmaking.
• Spending that much to fend off the weather shows how exposed resorts are.

[5:51] Vail's portfolio business model

• That risk may explain Vail's model: buy resorts in different regions across the U.S. and the world to take risk out of the business.
• Its 18 resorts in the East and Midwest are feeder resorts, small hills in places like Minnesota or the Poconos where kids learn before heading west with friends and family. "Got to get them early."
• The destination resorts are spread across snow regions (Pacific Northwest, Colorado, Sierra Nevada), and more recently Australia, which serves more as a feeder to the big mountains in the U.S. and Europe than as a destination.
• The idea: some region will get good snow each year and earn enough to carry the others, and passholders will choose trips based on where the snow is. It has worked to an extent: Vail has made money, and there have been no ski resort bankruptcies in decades.

[7:18] Challenges to future growth

• That lack of bankruptcies is new. Snow keeps resort owners up at night; one or two bad years can sink a resort or leave it unable to maintain grounds, upgrade equipment, or pay staff.
• American Skiing Company tried Vail's strategy in the 1990s, rolling up resorts onto one pass, but took on more debt than a few bad snow years could bear. Bad snow in the Northeast in 1999 and 2001, where most of its resorts were, plus bad snow in the West in 2000, made it fall apart.
• After a banner snow year across the U.S. in 2022-23 and Vail's highest-ever revenue, the next season's snow was just okay. Vail only came close to matching revenue by raising the Epic Pass price 8%, and this season it sold 2% fewer Epic Passes than the year before, the first decline ever.
• Phil asks whether the post-COVID moment, with lots of remote work, double the usual snowfall, and inflation not yet squeezing budgets, was the peak. It was also when real anger at the company took shape: people parking on roads, Instagram accounts dedicated to hating the Epic Pass, and angry blog posts from frequent skiers.
• Through the 2010s Vail's value climbed as it added resort after resort, a honeymoon of acquisitions and a new subscription model. Now the market sees how hard it is to keep growing like a tech company with annual subscriptions.
• Adding a Microsoft Office subscriber costs nothing extra; another person using Excel doesn't slow you down, and Netflix and Instagram don't make you share one road with one exit. Social apps get better with more people, but a mountain has a negative network effect: the more people, the worse it gets and the harder it is to grow, while Vail spends billions on equipment, weather defense, and upgrades so people don't go elsewhere.

2) Things mentioned

Economics, markets, and policy

• Subscription business model: the Epic Pass treated like a tech subscription, and why it doesn't scale like software.
• Negative network effect: a product that gets worse as more people use it.
• Supply constraints: no new U.S. ski resort in 45 years, no private land left, and heavy permitting on public land.
• Local land-use control: town councils and residents deciding on lifts, lodging, and parking.
• Peak-demand concentration: about 20% of revenue in the two weeks around Christmas, plus powder days and holidays.
• Weather risk and diversification: spreading resorts across snow regions to smooth results.
• Leverage risk: American Skiing Company's debt load and collapse after bad snow years.
• Pricing power limits: an 8% Epic Pass price rise followed by a 2% drop in pass sales.
• Post-COVID demand: remote work, big snow, and pre-inflation budgets in 2022-23.
• Skier visits: 10 million more U.S. visits than in 2016, about 2 million more a year at Vail's top resorts.

Companies, organizations, and products

• Vail Resorts: buying resorts since 1997 and selling the Epic Pass.
• Epic Pass: the first successful multi-resort subscription ski pass.
• American Skiing Company: the 1990s resort roll-up that collapsed under debt and bad snow.
• Breckenridge Grand Vacations: the hotel and condo project overturned and shrunk by Breckenridge's town council.
• Breckenridge Town Council: reconsidered and overturned the 2018 approval.
• Microsoft Office, Excel, Netflix, and Instagram: examples of products with no crowding cost.
• Colorado SuperChair (Peak 8) and BreckConnect Gondola: key Breckenridge lifts.
• Snowmaking equipment: snowmaking units at $5,000 to $6,000 and big snow guns at $35,000 to $50,000.

Places

• Breckenridge, Colorado: a former mining town; first ski run cut in 1961.
• Vail's resorts: Park City, Breckenridge, Keystone, Northstar, Heavenly, and Whistler, plus small hills in Minnesota and the Poconos.
• Town of Vail and Park City: towns that blocked housing or lift upgrades.
• Snow regions: the Pacific Northwest, Colorado, the Sierra Nevada, the Northeast, Australia, and Europe.
• U.S. federal land: the mountain at Breckenridge.

3) Biographies

Phil Andrews (presenter)

Phil Andrews is the producer and on-camera host of Maxinomics ("the guy in the videos and the comments"), a Morning Brew channel that explains economics, business, and geopolitics through stories. Here he reports from Breckenridge on why ski resorts can't simply sell their way out of crowding.

Vail Resorts (subject)

Vail Resorts is a Colorado-based, publicly traded ski resort operator that began as the company running Vail Mountain and grew into the largest resort owner in North America through acquisitions. It launched the Epic Pass in 2008. The video examines its portfolio strategy and the limits on its growth.

American Skiing Company (subject)

American Skiing Company was a 1990s ski resort operator, based in New England, that bought many resorts in the Northeast and West and sold them on shared passes. The video says it carried too much debt to survive bad snow years around 1999 to 2001 and fell apart.

Production credits

Producer Phil Andrews; video editor Christie Muldoon; motion graphics by Seth Laupus; director of production services Sam Wolf; thumbnail by Tom Grillo; chief content officer Devin Emery.