Vail Resorts Cuts Lift Ticket Prices 30-Plus Days in Advance at 12 Ski Areas

Company ramps up Turn In Your Ticket offer for 2026-27 Epic Passes to $175

OK I’m going to try something new today. Instead of wandering into the philosophical backrooms of pre-industrial Euro violence or the merits of couches or claims that maps aren’t real, I’m going to get right to the news. Not because I’m out of ideas, but because I’m in New Hampshire and I want to go skiing this morning. This is the view from my room:

Oh hi Loon Mountain. Dang this place is blowing up like a Fourth of July fireworks show. It’s impossible to overstate the investment in this bump over the past half decade. But since I’m guessing that an endorsement of their Ikon competitor is not what Vail Resorts had in mind when they gave me advanced access to today’s news, I will also note that I spent yesterday at their lovely Mount Sunapee, where mountain-pasting snowgun brigades were also at work and the views are always just like dang:

OK I did it again with the rambling. Sorry. The news: after simplifying Epic Pass buddy tickets to a half-off-every-day formula and promising to take additional “decisive steps that we believe will rebuild lift ticket visitation” in September’s end-of-year earnings report, Vail is offering discounts “averaging over 30 percent off” lift tickets at 12 North American destination ski areas for skiers who buy 30 or more days in advance. Here’s what that translates to (Whistler prices are in Canadian dollars; Epic Day Pass is no longer on sale):

Best viewed in desktop. View in Google Sheets.

Ticket-buyers will then be able to flip up to $175 of their purchase into a 2026-27 Epic Pass via Vail’s long-extant but until-now-secretive Turn In Your Ticket program.

And right now you may be thinking “wow that’s still a lot of money for one day of SnoSportsSkiing I remember when they’d throw in a free lift ticket with a can of green beans at King Soopers.” But to be fair the average Storm Skiing Journal reader already has ski trips planned through 2034 and you are not the target demographic here. The target is Atlanta Al and Atlanta Alice who have three kids and two SUVs and good jobs at Corporate Incorporated and have never heard of the Epic Pass. And when they decide in December to book their spring break ski trip and discover that a week of Colorado lift tickets costs as much as grad school, they decide instead to take their children, Kimball, Doak, and Cyon to France for the week where lift tickets are pegged to the price of crepes and include a liter of wine.

So offering 30-percent-ish discounts for vacation-planners is a good next evolution of the American big-mountain lift ticket for a number of reasons. It affirms Vail Resorts’ commitment to reimagining its lift ticket business under returned-CEO Rob Katz, who, with aggressive acquisitions tied to its low-cost Epic Pass, transformed the company from a regional operator into a global ski power in the space of a decade. It builds upon the half-off Epic Friends program announced earlier this year, proving that Vail is not out of ideas and is willing to experiment and dare the rest of the ski world to do the same. It is the strongest signal yet that skiers have had it, that we have reached peak lift ticket, that no one wants to pay $356 for one day of skiing and that almost no one is going to, and that we are likely entering a period of day-ticket experimentation following a 15-year-long recalibration of the season pass as skiing’s feature access product. And the emphasis on Vail’s Turn In Your Ticket program begins to aggressively knot the season pass and one-off ticket worlds together in a way that feels less punitive to people who do not realize in March that they will probably want to go skiing next February.

No this does not fix America’s broken big-mountain lift ticket market. And yes this was all Vail’s fault to begin with. And yes these lift tickets are still expensive: Vail Mountain’s hypothetical, inflation-adjusted 2024-25 peak-day lift ticket price would have been $115 based upon the 1999-2000 winter’s $61 top rate – and that would still be more than the current rate to ski at most top European ski areas.

But as Vail Resorts looks to re-ignite financial growth without compromising the Epic Pass model, a price concession to less-engaged skiers who could probably be nudged into the passholder ecosystem is a good next step. The timing is interesting here: Epic Pass sales ended Dec. 4, and Vail’s first-quarter 2026 earnings report lands tomorrow. That means the earliest that discounted lift tickets are available is Jan. 5, leaving the last-minute Christmas Week crowd with coming sticker shock in what is so far a very slow early winter across the West.

I’ll have more to say on Vail’s evolving lift ticket strategy in the coming days. For now, I’m going skiing. And you should too.