Ski industry giants conspired to inflate resort prices by sharing proprietary data, lawsuit claims
A new class action lawsuit claims that ski industry giants colluded in an anticompetitive scheme to fix prices at destination resorts.
Vail Resorts, Alterra Mountain Co., Powdr Corp., Boyne Resorts, the nonprofit National Ski Areas Association and the data firm RRS Associates Inc. are named as defendants in the lawsuit brought by three skiers in the Denver U.S. District Court on Aug. 5.
The complaint alleges that the four ski companies, which own the vast majority of destination resorts across the U.S., worked with the industry trade association and data firm to share confidential revenue and pricing information.
The lawsuit claims this information sharing allowed the companies to artificially inflate prices for destination resort packages — including increasing season pass prices by about 40% and day ticket prices by 55% since 2020 — in violation of federal antitrust laws, including the Sherman Act.
“These (resort companies) were able to use the non-public, competitively sensitive business information of their competitors to set prices for destination ski packages at artificially high levels and avoid meaningfully competing with each other,” the complaint states.
Vail Resorts and the National Ski Areas Association declined to comment on the pending litigation. Alterra, Powdr and Boyne did not return email requests for comment sent Monday.
This is the second lawsuit filed against major ski companies in the past six months, alleging price fixing. Another lawsuit filed against Vail and Alterra in March claims that the two unlawfully inflated pass prices and suppressed competition. That case remains pending.
The new lawsuit argues that the four ski resort companies — especially Vail Resorts and Alterra — have cornered the market on destination ski resorts in the U.S. “This resulted from neither luck nor happenstance, but from a sustained strategy of consolidation” led by Vail Resorts and Alterra, the complaint states.
Vail Resorts owns the Epic Pass and dozens of ski resorts in the U.S., including destinations like Vail Mountain, Park City Mountain Resort, Breckenridge Ski Resort, Beaver Creek Resort and Keystone Resort.
Alterra — Vail Resort’s closest competitor — owns the Ikon Pass and destinations including Deer Valley Resort, Palisades Tahoe, Steamboat Resort, Mammoth Mountain and Winter Park Resort.
Alterra also partners with other companies to offer access on the Ikon Pass. For example, it partners with Powdr to offer access to Copper Mountain and Snowbird Mountain Resort as well as Boyne, which owns Big Sky Resort.
Beginning in about 2020, the four ski companies “faced with the twin threats of increasing climate change and an emerging global pandemic” began to work together “to charge supracompetitive prices” for destination ski packages, according to the complaint.
“Publicly available data demonstrates that the prices of resort defendants’ destination ski packages, including annual multi-mountain season passes and daily lift tickets, have increased substantially, in parallel fashion, and without proper regard for ordinary market forces,” the complaint states.
The lawsuit claims that the National Ski Areas Association worked closely with paying members, including the four major ski companies, to shape business strategy. The complaint states that the trade association hired RRC to conduct annual surveys of ski resorts and compile reports that included “granular, resort-level business data” to destination ski resort companies.
The RRC’s reports included “discrete revenue categories” and other information that is not available to the general public, such as skier visitation numbers for individual mountains, according to the complaint. The lawsuit claims that resorts owned by Alterra, Powdr and Boyne also all use the same “e-commerce platform and dynamic pricing module” known as Aspenware to set a common pricing strategy.
Because ski passes have “inelastic demand” — which means that when the price for a product or service increases or decreases, consumer buying habits remain about the same — the four ski companies were able to leverage the sharing of information to inflate prices that would have been lower had the companies instead been competing, according to the complaint.
The lawsuit claims the resort companies knowingly exchanged this information with competitors, even though sharing that information “would have been against their individual economic self-interests in the absence of coordination.”
“Because (resort companies) no longer compete on the value of the destination ski package, they have systematically reduced the quality of the experience,” the complaint states. “Overcrowded mountains, depleted rental fleets, and reduced ‘on-mountain’ staffing levels are consistent complaints from skiers and snowboarders.”
