Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass sales are down for 2024-25, but about even with 2022-23

With the sales window now closed, Vail Resorts officials on Monday said the company sold 2% fewer pre-purchased lift passes than last year, but the total sales dollars on those passes was 4% higher due to the rising cost of passes. 

Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten Lynch told investors at the company’s 2025 first-quarter earnings call that despite the decline in new pass holders, the company’s Epic Day Pass achieved unit growth driven by the strength in renewing pass holders. The Epic Day Pass allows guests to pre-purchase passes for a limited number of days, as opposed to Vail Resorts’ Epic Pass or Epic Local Pass, which provide unlimited access all season long. 

“We saw growth among our renewing pass holders, and that growth was across all of our geographies,” Lynch said. 

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Vail Resorts operates 42 ski resorts in nine different states in the U.S. and four countries, including Canada, Australia and Switzerland. 

The majority of people who renewed their lift passes renewed into the same pass product as the season before, Lynch said.

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Lynch said lapsed guests — those who have visited a Vail Resorts property in the past, but did not ski last winter — came back in increased numbers. 

“Where we saw the decline, year over year, was on prior year lift ticket guests, which was really driven by the size of that audience being smaller after very a tough weather season and industry normalization,” Lynch said. 

Vail Resorts has previously stated that across all of its properties last season, challenging weather conditions resulted in a 9.5% decline in visitation. 

The idea of “industry normalization” is a reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, which forced the 2019-20 season to be cut short by a month, but is also cited as a factor in the record visitation North American ski resorts then saw during the 2022-23 season, once the pandemic had ended. 

Vail Resorts also saw a decline among what it calls “prospect guests,” guests who are new to the company. 

The 2.3 million pre-purchased passes sold are nearly identical to the number of passes sold for the 2022-23 season. 

Many of the pre-purchased passes for this year were purchased near the close of the selling cycle, Lynch said, which means they may not have been “pre-purchased” at all, in the traditional definition of the term. As resorts like Vail were getting bombarded with snow around the Thanksgiving holiday period, the 2024-25 pass sales window was still open, meaning a guest could buy an Epic Day Pass and use it that same day. Vail Resorts cut off pre-purchased pass sales on Dec. 2.  

“If you look through the cadence of our selling cycle this year, we definitely saw renewers as well as new guests delaying decision-making later into the selling cycle,” Lynch said. 

That’s why, Lynch added, “between September and December, we saw improvement in the growth rates during that late part of the selling cycle.”

Lynch said bookings at hotels in resort towns are higher than pre-COVID numbers for the upcoming holiday period, and “pretty consistent with prior year” bookings. 

At Vail Resorts-owned hotels, “bookings patterns seem to be strengthening as we get closer” to the holiday period, which Lynch suspects is happening because “people are seeing the snow conditions are strong.”