When Rob Katz took the helm at Vail Resorts in May for his second spin as CEO, the innovator of the Epic Pass he said he needed time to “listen and learn.”
“The thing I learned very quickly is there is more we can do to connect and communicate with our guests,” he told The Sun this week. “There is more innovation with our products to make skiing more accessible.”
Katz this week unveiled his first initiative as the returned CEO. The new Epic Friend Tickets program gives pass holders six to 10 half-priced lift tickets to share for the season. Skiers who use those discounted tickets can deduct what they paid — half of the ever-shifting day ticket price — from an Epic Pass the following season.
Skiers have “strong emotional connections” with their ski hills and skiing “is a social sport,” Katz said. He said his team heard Epic Pass skiers saying the company’s now-retired buddy pass program — which offered a limited number of tickets discounted as little 12% on busy days and as much as 45% on a handful of non-peak days — was complicated and the discounts were not significant. They also heard from skiers who maybe wanted to visit a Vail Resorts ski area but balked at the soaring lift ticket prices, which reached $329 during the busiest days last season.
Those high prices are designed to push skiers to buy early. A peak season lift ticket purchased long before the snow falls can be nearly 60% cheaper than walk-up tickets. The unlimited Epic Pass costs $1,075 for the 2025-26 ski season and a seven-day Epic Pass costs $708. Last season the company sold 2.3 million of those season passes and advanced-purchase lift tickets.
As the company’s industry-shifting season pass strategy — which was designed to push at least 75% of its annual skiers into buying season passes in the spring, summer and fall — nears 20 years old, it was time to overhaul the buddy pass system, Katz said.
The company’s Ski With a Friend and Buddy Pass programs were about benefits for passholders. The Epic Friend plan is about benefits for the friends of passholders.
“It’s a more creative approach to how we engage with a wider audience,” Katz said. “In our minds this is a pay it forward type of thing.”
Katz served 16 years as CEO of Vail Resorts before stepping away in 2021 to serve as chair of the company’s board and returned to the position after the ousting of CEO Kirsten Lynch in May after “a tough year on a lot of fronts,” he said. There was the patroller strike at Park City Mountain Resort over the Christmas holidays, growing strife in local communities and a tumbling stock price.
“But there were so many amazing things the company accomplished and many amazing things the company is doing,” said Katz, reiterating a concern voiced by investors in the last year that the company was not appropriately responding to a deluge of bad press.
The 58-year-old who has spent more than 30 years with Vail Resorts as either a board member or CEO, said improvements in local resort marketing are on deck. That’s a shift for a largely centralized company that has focused on selling its Epic Passes that offer access to now 71 owned and partner resorts in 14 states, Australia, Canada, Europe and Japan. The Epic Pass-first approach has left some resort communities pining for the ski area partner they once had. Expect to see the company highlighting more of its individual resorts in the future, Katz said.
“We have got to make a stronger emotional connection with our guests and elevate our resort brands individually more than we have in the past,” he said.