Travails Resorts

(not really of general interest except for skiers and connoisseurs of corporate obtuseness)

Skiing doesn’t typically make it into US business or economic news, and it certainly took some time with the Christmas ski patrollers’ strike at Park City, Utah (the country’s largest resort), but once it did—it took over a week—it commanded attention. The story has been well covered elsewhere (see tweets throughout from @liftblog and

Stuart Winchester

, and also Stuart’s interview with the PCMR patroller who’s union president), and I don’t have anything to add to the experts, except to make a point about the employer in question, the burgeoning mammoth Vail Resorts, which has gone from, at one time, owning just Vail to owning 42 resorts across the US (and even abroad), including Park City. It also owns Crested Butte, Colorado, where, since the settlement of the Park City strike on January 9, lift attendants have authorized a strike. And it owns Breckenridge, the most-visited ski resort in the country, where employees have complained about no heat or hot water in their company-owned housing. So January’s three ski industry controversies all concern Vail Resorts as a somewhat lacking employer.

I know little first-hand about Vail Resorts. In the US, since 1998, I have skied only in New England, and VR was never here. Once they were, I dropped those resorts—Mount Snow and Okemo (both in Vermont), Mount Sunapee (New Hampshire), and unfortunately Stowe (VT) and Wildcat (NH)—because I wasn’t going to buy their Epic pass, and the day-ticket rate jumped much too high. Plus there were, and would be, no special deals or one-offs over the course of the season: a special for Super Bowl Sunday, for instance, when no one skis, or a Sunday afternoon discount, when everyone hits the road early, or something dopey like $17 and wear green for St Patrick’s Day. I could see that a powerful marketing operation had taken over the resorts and standardized them, at least digitally. In my inbox, I would get, in the same moment, promotional emails from each of the five resorts in exactly the same format and style. Similarly, the resorts’ websites became the same. Stowe, Wildcat: these are among our most venerable, grizzled, idiosyncratic mountains. Even if it’s just the Internet, which isn’t real, their websites should be not be interchangeable. But VR executives based in Colorado knew better. Far from even their own mountains, they centralized operations that typically took place at the resort. Usually—one would expect—a ski company wouldn’t plant itself in a suburban office-park headquarters and think there wasn’t something amiss:

What prompts this post is a simple, small act of a Boston-area recreational skier looking to purchase a half-day ticket on a non-holiday January weekday at Mount Sunapee in rural New Hampshire.

I’m going to be writing somewhat carelessly, since an unpaid piece to work out some of my irritation isn’t worth a lot of fact-checking. But trust me when I say Vail Resorts has taken these historic places—what name in American skiing is more legendary than Stowe?—and homogenized them. As I mentioned, the websites are identical, barring color and (some) photography, and basically they are organized around selling and ‘fulfilling’ Epic passes: an Epic experience more than a skiing one. There is no detail too small not to be standardized across the sites so that, for instance—now comes the firsthand personal experience—when I needed to look up the simplest of things, the price of a half-day ticket for skiing, it was impossible.

Or not quite. The words (half-day, ticket) were located. But, in each case, they were buried in the drop-down menu for “Lift Ticket Info” under FAQ and, within FAQ, only as the bottom item. Here is a screenshot for Wildcat, in New Hampshire’s Pinkham Notch directly facing Mount Washington, where there has been skiing since the Civilian Conservation Corps cut a trail in 1933:

And here is the screenshot for Stowe, tucked underneath Vermont’s highest peak, Mount Mansfield, where the CCC also began cutting trails in 1933:

As mentioned, I was actually looking for Mount Sunapee’s half-day price, as that was more directly on my route to central Vermont for the next day’s skiing. Now that I was experienced, a few clicks brought me to this:

Clearly it is Vail Resorts policy to make no effort to sell, promote or answer questions about half-day tickets.* The basics are how much is the ticket, at what time of day does it start, and which days (for instance weekends or holidays) it is not available, or only available. Things like that.

Still, there was a phone number somewhere I could try. A 603 number, for New Hampshire. I suspected the alternative 1-800 number would bring me to the infamous VR call center where, I had seen from numerous accounts on Twitter, Epic passholders were baffled to encounter agents from India or the Philippines who knew nothing about skiing and not much more about the products at Vail Resorts they were managing.

You know where this is going. The 603 number didn’t ring a phone in New Hampshire that some local guy would, not that long ago (and still would, in any non-VR New England resort), pick up, and tell me what I needed to know; also maybe some useful shorthand (“Yeah, the half-day starts at 12.30, but we start selling them at noon and you can get on the lift straightaway”). 603 took me to a foreign call center, where the representatives with strong Indian accents didn’t understand my question or have a ready answer, and furthermore wanted my name first “to address you properly” before failing to help me. I tried twice on the phone and hung up when I felt I was waiting too long, sent an unanswered email to the customer service address, tried a DM on Twitter (unanswered), tried a third time on the phone, and this time, once the question was understood and I waited on hold, got the answer that should have been on the website the whole time.

I’m afraid this whole post has been about trying to find the price of a half-day’s skiing at one distant mountain as my principal response to the chaos that sank Vail Resorts when they tried to wait out ski patrollers on strike in their largest (and the US’s largest) resort over the busiest winter holiday, Christmas and New Year’s. It could have been told in a few sentences. But so could the strike at Park City have been over in a few days, or resolved even before the vacation. Something is majorly off in this company—a company that, as a thank-you to its (non-patrol) Park City employees who worked through the holiday season strike with many, many dissatisfied skiers to contend with, offered them two free lunches, which, the way they put it, seems barely a treat and no fun at all:

By the way, the price of a half-day midweek lift ticket at Mount Sunapee: $71. Not the worst in ski country, even among the independents, but nothing special either. Instead, I would forsake lake views (somewhere down there is Steven Tyler’s home) and even at the cost of an hour’s skiing go on to Middlebury, Vermont, whose “Snow Bowl” is owned by the college, and the half-day beginning at 1 pm costs $45.

(* I’ll spare you the screenshot for half-day ticket information in VR’s Colorado resort of Crested Butte.)