Roberto Ferdman

Coming up... Some years you would make money when the snow was good.

Some years you would not make very much money when the snow was bad.

Thank you for having me.

It's nice to be here.

So season passes are not novel, but what Vail did, which changed the notion of how a ski mountain can collect money and when, is they said, what if we didn't just sell a season pass, we sold a season pass that people could use across all of the mountains that we own, and we sold it at a very low price.

The only catch, the only thing that you had to do for us was you had to buy it before the ski season starts.

Their bet was twofold.

One was it would be meaningful for their business to an extent that it was just worth it to collect money ahead of time in like one fell swoop, as opposed to the way in which it worked up until then, which is that some years you would make money when the snow was good.

Some years you would not make very much money when the snow was bad.

And that was very difficult.

I mean, that led to lots of mountains closing throughout the United States.

The second part of this is they bet that if we offered this incredible deal, we would get just more people to commit to skiing at Vail and do that in bulk.

it has turned Vail into a behemoth.

Vail, over the past almost two decades, has gone from owning six resorts to now owning 42 resorts around the world.

So there's now competition.

There's Icon Pass.

It can be used at places like

Aspen and Big Sky and many others, not just throughout the country or continent, but the world.

And it has also pushed the price of individual lift tickets, the lift tickets that you buy at the booth when you come day of, up a lot.

I mean, if you take Vail Resorts, for instance, the peak of a day of lift ticket back in 2008 when Epic Pass was introduced was maybe around $100, just shy of $100.