The trails at the Park City Mountain Resort should have been wide open over the holidays with plenty of fresh powder for the skiers and snowboarders who came to Utah’s Wasatch Mountains during one of the busiest times of the season. Instead, riders were forced to wait in line for as many as three hours to get on one of the few lifts that were actually open thanks to a labor strike against the Vail Resorts empire, which is worth more than $6 billion.
On December 27, the union representing 204 ski patrollers and safety workers on the mountain went on strike against Vail, which owns Park City. Among its demands are an increase in the hourly base rate of members from $21 to $23. For comparison’s sake, a cheeseburger on the mountain costs $25. Stuck in the middle are some of the nation’s richest vacationers who spent thousands of dollars on hotels, airfare, and lift tickets to stand in the cold at the bottom of a mountain.
Many of the waiting skiers have been sympathetic to the crews tasked with keeping them safe, chanting in line for Park City to “pay your employees” as the strike lingers into a second week. Others, though, have taken to social media to complain that $20,000 trips have been ruined by the waits. (Non-union ski patrollers have been brought in to service the open trails and lifts.) One surgeon from Los Angeles said he won’t be returning next year owing to the inconvenience. Other vacationers are considering a class-action lawsuit against Vail Resorts for the luxury problems they had to endure. After a wealth manager on X complained of his bad day out, people made fun of him until he deleted his account.
Quinn Graves, a fourth-year ski patroller at Park City and a business manager in the Park City Professional Ski Patrollers Association, is sympathetic. “That sucks genuinely that they spent all this money and time to come out here and they’re having a horrible experience. And what we’ve said is we want to be working. We feel that Vail has forced our hand into this strike.” She claimed that Vail Resorts delayed bargaining and canceled meetings throughout contract negotiations as well as contacted some ski patrollers about crossing a picket line — all leading to the strike against unfair labor practices. In a statement, the chief operating officer for Park City, Deirdra Walsh, said that the resort is “committed to reaching an agreement that demonstrates our respect for them.” She also pushed back on some of the union’s demands, like the $2 base-rate pay increase, which she claimed actually equates to a $7 hourly rate increase. The union argues that its members aren’t paid a living wage for their specialized skills and that many cannot afford to actually live in their expensive ski town. (Graves noted that the majority of ski patrollers live at least 45 minutes away.) Management argues that the base pay bump in 2022 from $13 to $21 an hour — plus a 4 percent pay increase and $1,600 each season for equipment — is a sufficient offer. Negotiations, which began in March, remain ongoing under the watch of a federal mediator. The Professional Ski Patrollers Association has expanded in recent years to 12 resorts across the country.
One challenge facing the angry skiers was that simply choosing to ski at a resort owned by someone else in Utah is not as easy as it used to be. If you ski or snowboard in North America, there’s a good chance you’re doing it at a Vail resort. Over the past 15 years, Vail Resorts has been on an acquisition spree, scooping up over 40 mountains throughout the U.S., Canada, and Switzerland. In 2014, the company bought Park City, the largest ski resort in the country; the next year, to ensure there was no nearby competition, it bought the neighboring Canyons Village. In 2016, Vail made its biggest purchase yet, dropping over $1 billion for Whistler in British Columbia, the most-visited ski resort in North America. From 2017 on, Vail bought out many of the small icy hills in the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic. If you’re not skiing on a Vail mountain, you’re probably on a lift owned by one of its competitors in the race to buy America’s mountain towns, like Alterra (18 resorts) or POWDR (nine).
As Vail’s stock price soared through the late 2010s and after the pandemic, skiers have less choice than ever about which big conglomerate they are going to give more of their money to. Vail has jacked up the cost of day-trip skiing, beginning with a steep increase around 2010. In 2011, a Park City one-day pass cost $90. This season, skiers can pay as much as $326 for a lift ticket. There was a plan behind the sticker shock — to shift skiers and snowboarders toward an annual-pass model that serves as a more reliable source of income for the company. Introduced in 2008, Vail’s Epic Pass now costs about $1,000 and offers nearly unlimited access to its mountains. But if skiers miss the window in the fall to purchase the pass, they have to pay full price at the mountain.
In a coincidence fit for an episode of a public-radio program, economist and University of Utah professor Hal Singer was among those waiting in line at Park City last week. Singer, who researches antitrust and consumer protection, suggested the only way out of the ski-slope arms race is government intervention. “We’ve allowed the market to become so concentrated that we can no longer count on competition to constrain these guys,” he said. “So you either have to go in and unwind the acquisitions, which is kind of like what the Federal Trade Commission was trying to do with Facebook and Instagram, or you have to consider regulation.”
But Trump’s FTC pick has already suggested he would relax restrictions against non-tech companies in the U.S. As for regulation, the federal government got out of the game in the Carter era, and state and local governments are increasingly reliant on the revenue that Vail and companies like it bring in. Singer had another point on this. “The clientele is not the most sympathetic,” he said. “If you’re trying to galvanize popular support to protect these guys flying their families out to Salt Lake City, they are not the group that really tugs at the heartstrings.”
