Skiing is an expensive sport.
I’ve talked previously about the price for a cup of coffee on the mountain.
Lift passes are another huge expense.
During busy periods, like school holidays, you can often be stood in lift queues with hundreds of other people.
It’s not long before you start thinking about just how much money all of these people have spent on their passes that day.
Back at my computer, sadly, I wanted to get a better idea of revenue resorts earn through the sale of lift passes.
Methodology
Each year the International Report on Snow & Mountain Tourism ranks the most visited ski areas based on the average annual skier visits.
I ignored the 2019/2020 season due to COVID travel restrictions, and used the 2018/2019 season for the visitor numbers taken from the report. Visitor numbers are defined as unique daily lift tickets (e.g 1 person visiting over 6 days would count as 6 visitors).
Lift ticket prices were obtained for the current 2021/2022 season.
Results
Total visitors numbers by top winter destination
France, Austrian and French resorts were home to over 51 million visitors each in the 2018/19 season. In comparison, the population of Austria is only 9 million (France is 67 million, US is 330 million).
Foreign visitor numbers by top winter destination
| Country | Total visitors (19/20) | Percent foreign visitors | Total foreign visitors |
|---|---|---|---|
| Canada | 18521000 | 12 | 2222520 |
| United States | 54250000 | 6 | 3255000 |
| Switzerland | 22274000 | 35 | 7795900 |
| Italy | 27603000 | 35 | 9661050 |
| France | 51009000 | 27 | 13772430 |
| Austria | 51700000 | 66 | 34122000 |
Austria also received the highest number of total foreign visitors. 66% of the 51 million visitors (34.1 million) were foreign.
France received the second highest volume of winter ski tourists, 13.8 million.
Winter destination lift ticket income by country
For this section I assumed lift ticket costs from one of the major resorts in each country (see improvements), to work out potential lift ticket income across the entire country based on the visitor numbers.
| Resort | Country | 6 day pass cost (EUR) | 1 day pass cost (EUR) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Montgenèvre | Italy | 143.9 | 23.98 |
| Les Portes du Soleil | Switzerland | 295 | 49.17 |
| Val Thorens | France | 280 | 46.67 |
| Whistler Blackcomb | Canada | 605 | 100.83 |
| Kitzski Kitzbühel | Austria | 253 | 42.17 |
| Jackson Hole | United States | 943 | 157.17 |
North American resorts are much more expensive than their European counterparts — you could by a whole week (6 days) in Montgenèvre, Italy (144EUR) for one day in Jackson Hole, USA (157EUR).
The visitor numbers combined with lift prices means the USA lift ticket revenue alone could have been as high as 8.5 billion EUR. Even assuming an average of half this cost for lift tickets, that’s still 4.25 billion EUR.
French and Austrian resort in comparison could have earned between 2.2 and 2.4 billion EUR, and even a conservative estimate would probably see these resorts pulling in over 1 billion from lift ticket sales.
Coffee sales income by country
Assuming each visitor (one day lift ticket) bought one coffee on that day, the resorts in France, Austria and the United States could have each earned hundreds of millions of EUR in coffee sales alone. When you start adding in meals, these numbers get significantly bigger (the average cost of a lunch at a restaurant was 20.11 GBP (24.25 EUR), per person.
Improvements
This post contains very broad estimates. I assumed lift prices for some of the most popular resorts in each country, and thus likely some of the most expensive. Doing this analysis on a resort by resort basis would make for a very interesting comparison.
tl;dr
Lift tickets are worth billions of EUR in revenue to the major snow resort countries. In the USA, it could be as high as 8.5 billion EUR from lift ticket sales alone during winter.