Multimountain Ski Pass Membership, Led by Indy, International, Surges in 2024
U.S.-based passes add 59 partner mountains, 34% increase over 2023 | 2024-25 season preview, part 3
I’m often asked some version of this question: what will you do with the podcast after you’ve interviewed the leader of every ski area?
My answer is always the same: I will never run out of ski areas. Their stories evolve and leadership turns over and unless my robot clone keeps this enterprise going for the next 500 years, I will probably expire before skiing does. But even if none of that were true and I just recorded one ski area interview per week, it would take me around 115 years to work my way through the world’s 6,000-ish ski areas. I’ve had a hard enough time getting through 2024, let alone contemplating life in 2139.
With so many ski areas out there, I think we’re just moving past the oil-bubbling-out-of-the-ground phase of multimountain pass building. All the obvious stuff, the Whistlers and Vails and Mammoths, has been staked and flagged and scribbled across UltimateSkiPass marquees. But we’re far from the fracking phase, where we need to blow water through shale layers to summon dirty oil to the surface; we just need to dig a little. And in 2024, the six national U.S. ski passes, along with Mountain Capital Partners’ Power Pass, went digging.
They turned up 59 new Alpine partner mountains, a 34 percent increase over the 44 partner mountains the same passes added in 2023 (click through for higher resolution; best viewed on desktop):
This membership surge is remarkable for several reasons:
Most large ski area operators’ properties and most major U.S. ski areas have already been locked onto megapass rosters for years.
At the beginning of the year, 227 U.S. ski areas – approximately 45 percent of the nation’s 509 ski areas – already belonged to a multimountain pass.
Subtract America’s 43 private ski areas and 72 surface-lift-only public ski areas that lack multimountain pass membership, and the percentage of the 394 aerial-lift-served public U.S. ski areas that have joined a megapass rockets to nearly 58 percent.
This membership surge is not an anomaly – megapass rosters increased by 44 members last year and 52 members in 2022, adding up to a three-year total of 155 new additions in just three years. That means that 43 percent of the 362 Alpine ski areas sitting on U.S.-based multimountain pass rosters have joined in the past 36 months.
So what does this steady megapass growth mean? Probably three things:
Normalization: Operators of all sizes have accepted that multimountain pass membership delivers tangible benefits, reorienting these products permanently from an experiment into an element of the lift-served ski experience as immutable as chairlifts and snowguns. Only seven ski areas left multimountain passes in 2024 and failed to join a new coalition – and six of them exited the free-exchange Powder Alliance and Freedom Pass coalitions. Only Powder Mountain, a major ski area in the midst of massive experimental change, left a revenue-generating pass (Indy), and declined to join a new one (though the mountain could have its pick).
Globalization: Even as we approach the point where a majority of U.S. ski areas claim multimountain pass membership (the current number is 250 out of 509, or 49 percent), and a large majority of public, aerial-lift-served ski areas (243 out of 394, or 62 percent) do the same, the revenue-generating U.S. passes (Ikon, Epic, Mountain Collective, Indy, Power), are growing more comfortable mining international markets to build their armies. For the first time ever, in 2024 international ski areas (31) accounted for more new megapass members than U.S. ski areas (27).
Disruption: The Indy Pass, with 181 full Alpine partners and eight Allied partners (I’m no longer tracking the pass’ cross-country resorts), is, and has for several years, been the largest ski pass in the world by number of members. Of the 155 aforementioned megapass joiners since January 2022, an astonishing 103 of them (67 percent), are new Indy Pass mountains. This scrappy little disrupter has redefined what a multimountain pass can be, from scale to membership to speed of growth.
I wrote earlier this week that ski area consolidation slowed to its lowest level in a decade in 2024, and even claimed that the multimountain pass model works best when underpinned by the scale of large operators such as Vail and Alterra. Here a seemingly contradictory story emerges: the multimountain pass universe continues to expand at Big Bang rates even as the uniting of mountains that sparked the most successful business model in the history of skiing slows. And isn’t that strange? Here’s a deeper look at the trends driving this year’s megapass additions, and why this buffet-of-ski-areas business model is likely to continue growing into 2025 and beyond: