Days on Ski Season Passes May Be Resold Like Sports Tickets, Court Rules
“This is the ski industry’s Stub Hub moment”
On Monday morning, Randy Williams booted up in the Keystone parking lot, slung his skis over his shoulder, and walked directly to the River Run Gondola. A common routine for an Epic Pass holder, maybe, but Williams does not own an Epic Pass. Nor does his job as an artisanal canoe designer allow him to afford the resort’s $232 walk-up lift tickets. Instead, he bought his ski pass on LiftTickets.com for $22.50.
“I bought lift tickets every day for the next two weeks, and the most I paid was $34 for a day,” said Williams. “This is incredible. I only skied once last winter, and I had to sell my dog to afford the two-day lift ticket to Steamboat.”
Williams is among the first skiers to take advantage of a recent federal court ruling that ski season pass holders can sell their unused ski days on a secondary ticket exchange.
In issuing his decision, Judge Reginald P. Ackerson IV, of the 17th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver, likened a ski area season passholder to a sports team season ticket holder.
“When a fan purchases season tickets to all 41 Denver Nuggets home basketball matches, those tickets are his to dispose of as he pleases,” Judge Ackerson wrote. “He may attend the contests, he may sell individual game tickets to friends or to strangers, or he may feed them to his horses if he so desires. But one thing is absolutely clear: the Nuggets forfeit rights to the fate of those tickets at the point of transaction. That the franchise should retain control of said tickets is the dubious claim brought before us by the Plaintiffs, and which this court soundly rejects.”
Several online ski ticket exchanges materialized in the wake of last week’s ruling. As of this writing, April lift tickets were available at 47 U.S. ski areas - including Palisades Tahoe, Big Sky, and Vail Mountain - for prices ranging from $999 to just 99 cents for one day of lift access.
The circuit court’s decision, and the online exchanges that materialized in its wake, are expected to deeply impact the ski industry, which had largely stabilized over the past decade following a shift from snow-dependent day ticket sales to season passes purchased in the spring.
“This is the ski industry’s Stub Hub moment,” said Juanita Corroso, a consumer rights attorney based in Salt Lake City. “Once sports teams lost control of the ticket market, we saw a massive correction in favor of the consumer – both the purchaser, who could shop for better prices, and the seller, who could skip a game without having to eat the loss or deal with shady street scalpers.”
The case had wound its way through lower courts after police arrested Julius “Shred” Morrow for trying to access Winter Park’s Super Gauge Express lift with another skier’s Ikon Pass in March 2022. The City of Denver, which owns the ski area, sued Morrow for theft of services. Morrow’s lawyers countered that their client had in fact purchased his lift access, bartering for one day of usage on Joshua “Iggy” Kilgore’s season pass.
According to court documents, Morrow pled his case in this way: “We were rippin’ bongers over to Fat Mike’s crib, and he was like ‘Brah you wanna shred tomorrow,’ and I was like ‘Brah I wanna but I don’t have a pass and lift tickets cost like two bills,’ and Iggy was there and was like ‘Brah you can borrow my pass if you give me a rip of ah that somethin’ nice,’ and I was like, ‘Brah don’t you wanna shred tomorrow?’ and he was like ‘Brah I picked up a shift at the Wax Shack tomorrow,’ and I was like ‘Rad Brah it’s a deal.’”
While Judge Ackerson cited “compelling precedent” in the ski resort’s argument that all passes are sold as “non-transferable,” he ultimately sided with the defendants, citing far older Common Law definitions of legally binding contracts.
“While a ‘bong hit’ may be a non-traditional form of payment, it is a form of payment nonetheless,” Judge Ackerson wrote. “For centuries, the courts have recognized trade as legitimate recompense for goods and services. Are we to revise the entire historical record to declare, for instance, that Ms. Susan Davenport’s trade of two chickens to a Sir William Strattfordshire for the yoking of her oxen in 1457 be void simply because it did not involve the trade of government-minted lucre? I should think not.”
Notified of the online ticketing marketplaces, several skiers lined up to purchase lift tickets at Keystone’s River Run Village pulled out their phones and bought them from a third-party site instead.
“Wow, I haven’t skied for less than $20 in 25 years,” said Julia Webster, a llama therapist who moved to Summit County from San Jose Obispo in 1989. For several years, Webster said, she had purchased an Epic Pass. But last year, after one of her llamas, Antonio, needed an emergency tonsillectomy, she had to forgo the annual splurge. She had hoped to ski a handful of days, and even took out a third home equity line of credit on her Subaru to purchase a lift ticket on a midweek powder day. She still couldn’t afford an Epic Pass for the 2025-26 ski season. But now, Webster said, she didn’t need one.
“At these rates, I can ski 10 days for the price of one,” she said.
Ski industry representatives seemed shaken on Tuesday morning. “These fucking potheads,” said one official for a large ski company who asked not to be identified for fear of retribution. “They stink up our gondolas. They fucking put stickers fucking everywhere. They sleep in their Goddamn pickup trucks in our parking lots like we’re living in the fucking apocalypse and there’s no such thing as inside. And now, they’re ruining our perfect business model. Just when you figure out how to charge a family of four $1,500 for a day of skiing, they come along and fuck it all up.”
A lawyer representing the large ski area operators pointed out on Tuesday that the ruling was severely flawed in at least one respect: it did not specify that an Ikon Pass holder, whose pass granted them season long access plus several days each at dozens of ski areas, would be limited to selling one ticket per day.
“Say it’s a powder day in Colorado, and everyone wants to go skiing,” said Candice Moreno, a lawyer for the law firm Moreno Moreno Alfonso Moreno and Alfonso. “What’s to stop an Ikon Pass holder from selling lift tickets to Arapahoe Basin, Copper Mountain, Winter Park, Eldora, and Aspen to different skiers? The passholder wouldn’t even have to be located in Colorado – only in possession of an Ikon Pass and an internet connection.”
Moreno said that her clients planned to appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court, the last available pathway to reverse the circuit court’s decision. Until then, she said, “expect chaos” across the ski industry.
For now, skiers can immediately list unused ski days from their Epic, Ikon, or other ski season passes on any of the following third-party ticketing sites:
This post is fake news. April Fool’s. A day of skiing still costs either five cents or $5,000 depending upon how far in advance you are willing to plan your ski day, how frequently you ski, and how good you are at shopping.
Hate to admit it but I made it to the tonsillectomy for Antonio the llama before I realized what day it was.
Oh, dang. NOW I know what day it is! I think citing the medieval precedent was what finally woke me up.