Here’s where we are when measuring the impact of the worst ski season in a half-century:
- Skier visits collapsed with the steepest annual decline in decades to the lowest showing since 1991-92.
- Spending plummeted in mountain towns, marking the first annual decline since the pandemic-plagued 2020-21 ski season. Taxable spending in the 18 large and small mountain communities tracked by The Colorado Sun was down 5% from December through March compared with the 2024-25 season.
- Vail Resorts, the largest operator in North America, endured one of its worst years ever, with visits down 12.5% — the decline was twice that at its ski areas in California, Colorado and Utah. The company, which owns 42 ski areas in the U.S, Canada, Australia and Europe, reported 14.8 million visits at its 42 ski areas in the 2025-26 ski season, down from 16.9 million in 2024-25. That’s the steepest year-over-year decline in visitation in the company’s history.
Let’s look a bit closer at Vail Resorts, which is often used as a barometer for resort industry health because it’s the only resort company that publicizes its finances.
The company’s earnings from mountain operations through the third quarter of its fiscal year — which includes all of the 2025-26 ski season — fell 9.5% compared with the 2024-25 ski season. Earnings from its lodging properties fell 52.8%. But the money coming from selling season passes and lift tickets — its largest source of revenue — fell only 3.5% to $1.4 billion, indicating the strength of its nearly 20-year strategy to shift the risk of bad winters onto the shoulders of skiers who buy season passes long before the lifts start turning.
Those are the impacts now. What rippling effects from the “winter that wasn’t” are waiting for mountain towns grappling with dwindling tourism taxes? That’s a story we are watching at The Sun.
And how about the resort industry? Will skiers still buy those mega-passes — like the Epic and Ikon — after such a lousy season?
So far they are not. In an earnings call last week, Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz told investors that the hangover from “one of the most challenging winters in history” was lingering. The company has seen a 10% decline in early-season sales of its Epic passes and advance-purchase lift tickets. That’s the steepest downturn in early-season pass sales since Katz launched the industry-shifting Epic Pass in 2008, delivering unlimited access to all the company’s ski areas.
The first 14 years of early-season sales of the Epic Pass saw spectacular annual growth, with increases ranging from 6% in 2023 to 37% in 2009. All but a handful of years saw double-digit percentage growth as the pass found traction among millions of skiers. Katz hopes the slowdown in spring sales is temporary. The last time the company endured a bad winter, in 2011-12, spring sales lagged a bit but picked up in the fall, he said.
“We do not think this is about people saying that they are not going to ski next year. We think it is about people not willing to make that commitment today,” Katz said June 8. “And yeah, obviously, an unprecedented season that we just went through. So hard to say how it will play out when we get through the fall.”