A group of skiers has filed a lawsuit against the ski resort industry’s four largest players, arguing the operators conspired to inflate prices at the country’s busiest ski hills, violating federal antitrust laws.
The lawsuit filed this month in Colorado’s U.S. District Court argues Colorado-based Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co., Michigan’s Boyne Resorts and Powdr in Utah — four operators who control 30 of the nation’s 32 extra-large destination ski resorts — shared confidential, nonpublic information to set “artificially high” prices for skiing and “avoid meaningfully competing with each other,” reads the lawsuit.
The complaint, which seeks class action status for the thousands of people who buy lift tickets, season passes and ski lessons at the major resorts, also names Boulder’s RRC Associates, which compiles annual reports on the state of the U.S. resort industry, and the National Ski Areas Association in Lakewood, which represents 300 ski areas that host more than 90% of the nation’s ski traffic.
This is the second antitrust lawsuit filed this year in Colorado U.S. District Court by skiers arguing Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co. are involved in an “anticompetitive scheme” that features the companies using $350 day tickets to force skiers into $1,000 season passes. The companies openly admit this is a business strategy, hoping to shift some of the risk of bad snow seasons onto skiers who buy passes before the lifts start turning.
That strategy was supported last winter, when visitation at Vail Resorts Western U.S. ski areas fell more than 20% contributing to the steepest annual drop in visits in the company’s history, but revenue from selling passes and lift tickets fell less than 4%.
Vail Resorts in June filed a motion to dismiss the first lawsuit, arguing that selling “popular season pass products at a discount … is healthy competition, not an antitrust violation.”
A third lawsuit filed Monday in Colorado U.S. District Court joined the pricing scheme complaints, only this one was filed by a Vail Resorts shareholder and names the company and its nine board members, including CEO Rob Katz.
Shareholder Gary Peterson raises the same issues as the most recent lawsuit, arguing Vail Resorts and its competitors exchange “confidential, competitively sensitive information” through the annual RRC Associates and National Ski Areas Association reports, which Vail Resorts uses to “set its prices at supracompetitive levels while sparing itself genuine competition,” Peterson’s lawsuit reads.
Peterson points to the Vail Resorts code of ethics, which includes an “Antitrust and Fair Competition” section that says information about pricing or marketing plans “cannot be exchanged or discussed with competitors, no matter how innocent or casual the exchange may be” and “there are no off-the-record discussions with competitors.”
The board members of the company “either knew that Vail was violating the antitrust laws and its one vote and failed to halt the conduct, or consciously disregarded the red flags it generated, including the participation of the company’s senior leadership in the trade association gatherings and information exchange at the center of the scheme,” Peterson’s lawsuit reads.
The ski resort companies typically do not comment on pending litigation. The National Ski Areas Association said it was reviewing the lawsuit but had no comment. A Vail Resorts spokesman said: We believe that the (Peterson) claims are without merit and will defend the company and our board of directors vigorously.”
The latest skier lawsuit also revolves around the prices for season passes and lift tickets.
Vail Resorts launched its Epic Pass — offering unlimited skiing at four Colorado ski areas and Heavenly in California — for $579 in 2008, when a one-day lift ticket at the company’s flagship Vail ski area cost $92. The Epic Pass now costs $1,089 for access to all 42 Vail Resorts ski areas and the highest-price, single-day, peak-season lift ticket for all the company’s resorts is at Beaver Creek: $392 for the 2026-27 ski season.
Alterra Mountain Co. launched its $899 Ikon Pass in 2018, with shared skiing partnerships at both Boyne and Powdr ski areas. Today, the $1,449 Ikon Pass offers access to more than 70 ski areas and a single-day, peak-season lift ticket to Alterra Mountain Co.’s flagship Deer Valley ski area runs $349 for the 2026-27 season.
The lawsuit alleges that the country’s largest ski resort operators work with RRC Associates and the National Ski Areas Association and share “confidential business information” that feeds the association’s annual end-of-season reports and economic analyses of ski areas. The lawsuit quotes heavily from the RRC Associates-compiled annual Kottke Report and an economic survey of American ski areas. The annual reports do not include visitation, capacity, pricing or profitability data from individual ski areas.
But those reports do identify trends. Like a 59% increase over the past decade in annual ticket revenue harvested from every skier, reaching $75.69 per visit in the 2023-24 ski season. And RRC Associates also works as a consultant for individual resorts, promising its clients access to the firm’s “extensive databases” as resorts set prices for lift tickets, gear rentals and ski lessons, the lawsuit reads.
The lawsuit also points to the use of the Aspenware Internet Solutions e-commerce software system — owned by Alterra Mountain Co. and Aspen Skiing Co. since 2022 — to help set prices across resorts owned by Alterra Mountain Co., Boyne Resorts and Powdr.
The U.S. ski resort industry is insular. Executives often work for different companies across their careers. The companies share visitor information for annual industry reports that are not available to the public. Two companies – Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co. – control the country’s destination resort market with 27 of the 32 busiest ski areas. All these characteristics “make the formation, maintenance and efficacy of a cartel more likely,” reads the 84-page lawsuit.
Resorts often share information around climate strategies and skier safety but that sharing should not include financial information, the lawsuit argues.
“When competitors agree to exchange competitively sensitive information only among each other, it suggests that the information sharing will benefit only the competitors at the expense of consumers, workers, or other market participants,” the lawsuit reads, quoting the U.S. Department of Justice in a 2024 statement that was part of an antitrust lawsuit in Minnesota.
The lawsuit includes several graphs charting the nearly identical annual increases in passes and lift ticket prices, rentals and lessons at resorts owned by the four operators.
The lawsuit, which the resort operators have not responded to yet, asks that the companies return profits “obtained as a result of their acts of unfair competition and acts of unjust enrichment.”
Alterra Mountain Co., Boyne Resorts and Powdr are privately owned companies that do not release any financial information. Vail Resorts, in the six fiscal years since 2020, reported $1.35 billion in net income, including $280 million in the year that ended July 31, 2025.