A-basin to open 2017-18 season Fri Oct 13

One short WROD and Epic Passes = a perfect storm. I'm guessing the longer run and lesser crowds at Loveland will be more attractive even if it's a little later. It should still be October for those who are counting months.
 
Still 30 minutes before they open.... Just one or two people in line :shock:

abasincam1 (1).jpg
 
Another picture that was supposed to be taken just before opening. Liftline goes more than halfway up the face. Supposedly it went down after lift opened, but laps took about 30 minutes. Also note the line of people buying tickets so not everyone was on a Vail pass.
abasincam2.jpg

Picture and some of the info from pugski.
 
Why do they honor season passes with the extremely limited terrain? Blackout days can be a good thing for all. They could also try requiring a paid validation to enable a pass.

And I really don't understand why they would honor Epic passes at this point in the season.
 
egieszl":3sz5jogg said:
Why do they honor season passes with the extremely limited terrain? Blackout days can be a good thing for all. They could also try requiring a paid validation to enable a pass.

And I really don't understand why they would honor Epic passes at this point in the season.

Not sure what a "paid validation" is?

And they do it for $$. They get $ for every new person who gets scanned on each ski day. So doesn't matter if you are scanned 50 times or only once, A-basin will get some $$ from every different Epic pass holder that registers a 'ski day'.
 
A paid validation is where you must pay something to activate your pass for the day. It might be a $10 charge or $25 charge. It can be at any price point. You can also put other restrictions like having to purchase it in advance or limiting the sales. It's a crowd control measure. It's basically the same as having to buy a ticket on a blackout day.

Mammoth Mountain had a pass in the early 90s where you had to buy a validation each day you wanted to ski. The pass was like $80 and then you paid each time you went skiing, but the validation price was significantly discounted. The break even point was 3 or 4 days.

Epic pass revenue has to be the lowest revenue per cap for the resort. If they were to blackout out the Epic passes early season I suspect most wouldn't go, but a percentage would still come and pay full price. I'd be willing to bet that the revenue generated from those full price ticket sales would exceed that of all the Epic passholders that scanned.

A Basin should preference they're own passholders over Epic passholders.
 
I'm guessing that the Epic Pass revenue, even if it's only $10 a head (which I heard somewhere, maybe EMSC), in the early/late seasons is a major part of A-Basin's cash flow.

A management decision to limit ticket sales to control skier congestion is relatively rare in the ski world. Snow Summit used to have a ticket limit that was low enough in the 1980's and 1990's at least that it was wise to buy in advance for a weekend days. I don't recall needing to do that in the 2000's, so perhaps the limit was was more related to lift capacity and got raised once high speed lifts were installed. I do know that Snow Summit's limit was stricter in early season, but again I suspect it was a function of open lifts not open terrain. I read somewhere that there is no longer a ticket limit at Big Bear under Mammoth's management.

Hey, I'm all for it. If the lemmings want to pay the resorts to stand in line in early season and ski one or two WRODs, that's more revenue for them to stay in business and make improvements (developing the Beavers in A-Basin's case) that I can appreciate during a more sensible part of the season.
 
I actually don't know the detailed numbers, but can only suspect that the # of ABasin only passholders is pretty small. The vast majority of pass holders have either Epic or RMSP+ style products out this way. I'm not fully privy to the Vail revenue sharing details but my general understanding is that there is sliding scale of what each scan day is worth.

To use an example lets say the scale ranges from $15-$40/day depending on your pass #. Vail would pay out to Abasin at the bottom end of the scale as the season is going along. Then true up at the end of the season based on each pass #'s 'true' value. The skier hitting 100 days would be worth $15/day the skier only using the pass a total of 10 times a season would be worth say $40/day (BTW those two end points are only representative, not the actual amounts). Something along those lines. A bit complex, but also fairly reasonable in the end game.

The vast majority of people on opening day are gong to be high usage, lower value per day types, but you saw what the volume looked like. Many many hundreds (probably >1000 I'm sure). So still worth it for ABasin to begin to recover the snowmaking costs at least - especially on a random day in October when everyone else is closed.
 
Yes, I was not aware it was a complex calculation at the individual pass level. I had always assumed it was a flat rate.
 
Tony Crocker":37848v1r said:
Yes, I was not aware it was a complex calculation at the individual pass level. I had always assumed it was a flat rate.
I assume that it's the same in Europe at massive interconnected ski areas/regions, where numerous landowners split up ticket receipts based on scanned lift use.
 
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