Dynamic Pricing For Ski Tickets

We all know that prices are important but Milton Friedman help focus us on that. Skiing is a great example of pricing and price flexibility. It shows why sellers have gone from what was once limited to Happy Hour but we now call dynamic pricing. To help you understand pricing in the ski game we start with this story from the folks at The Morning Dispatch who gave us this link to the kerfuffle over free ski passes for, it appears, eight Swiss officials and their partners. Here is the story:

As of January 1, 2025, seven Swiss ministers, the Federal Chancellor – Secretary General of the executive branch – and their partners will “give up” the annual ski pass, worth 4,234 Swiss francs (CHF) (€4,350), which entitles them to free skiing anywhere in the country’s many ski resorts.

Speaking of prices, there was a price to read the rest of the story and we were not willing to pay that. If the story is correct and the price is a little over $4,700 for two passes at today’s exchange rates then $2,350 is a premium price for a season ticket even at multiple areas. The Ikon pass without any blackout dates cost $1,259 and you get unlimited access to seventeen areas and up to seven days at over forty other ski areas. Snowshoe in West Virginia might not make your skis tingle but Ikon has a very impressive list including two big Swiss ski resorts. The point is that you can’t clone yourself and ski all the resorts at once. Thus, a season’s pass covering multiple areas is not much different in price from a season’s pass at one big area. The problem is getting the various areas to divide up the price established. Of course, our passes at Mt. La Crosse are substantially less than an Ikon because it is a small area with a fairly short season. One element of dynamic pricing is that season pass prices go up as we get closer to the season. Buying a season pass in March for the coming season is much (!) cheaper than buying it on the first day of the season.

Ski areas love season pass holders because they come and spend money on the mountain and often bring their friends. The challenge of ski areas is the excess capacity for most of the year. They try to have capacity for all the folks that want to come on holiday weeks (Christmas etc.) and peak weekends. Killington’s price chart for April is instructive. We’re not sure the link will stick as the months change so we will tell you the story. This Saturday a ticket cost you $181.44. So as we told you in an earlier post, the spring season pass at less than $400 is a great deal. It can be cheaper than a long weekend. By Monday the 29th prices are down to 68.40. Why? Because not much of the mountain will be open by then and only a few die-hards will try it.

Another difference between Killington and Mt La Crosse is that most Mt. La Crosse skiers are local while Killington gets folks from all over the world. A big part of the Mt. La Crosse revenue comes from night skiing while Killington doesn’t offer it.

Sidebar: How do areas stop folks from sharing passes? At lower tech Mt. La Crosse we show our season pass at the ticket window every day and even there our photo comes up when we get a daily ticket. Each day ticket has a different color (yes there are a limited number of colors) so it is pretty hard to reuse them and easy for the line checker to see. They also allow us to bring a friend cheaply so we don’t share a coat. At bigger areas like Killington everyone has an electronic ticket on their person connected to a picture that lets you through the gate. At one area we have a relative who compares the skiers to the pictures. If she finds a mismatch she gets a nice bounty. We don’t know if anyone has gone facial recognition yet but if it hasn’t happened it will soon. End Sidebar.

Ski areas are a great example of the usefulness of dynamic pricing. They making financial incentives for you to come week days and especially Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. We’ve come quite a way since Happy Hours and Early Bird Specials. Dynamic pricing makes it better for consumers.

Practice Or Play?

We were reading Glenn Harland Reynolds (Instapundit) Substack post The Practice Effect (There is a paywall; we don’t know if you get one for free) and almost died from boredom. We’re glad we suffered through it because he does have an important point about practice and there are related points about learning and activity.

We almost died from boredom because Glenn is a weightlifter. He says:

The same thing is true with weight training.  I pursue a more-or-less Rippetoe [a famed trainer Glenn says] like training program, though I alternate between powerlifting type stuff and more isolation/bodybuilding exercises, partly to keep from being bored, and partly because I am possessed of some degree of vanity and just want to look good.

Gawd! It is like talking to a vegan. There is nothing we want to know about what you do. Yet his points about practice and habits are more generally valid. A PE teacher we knew had a great understanding of habits. He said there were positive and negative habits. Going to the Y, the gym, or the handball courts are positive habits. Developing positive habits and limiting negative ones really improves your life.

Glenn is right you get better when you practice. Practice is the key to expertise in any activity. We will use the term like he does so practice is doing some or all of the activities. We take the grandkids skiing and they get better at it. We throw the football with them and they get better at it. For weight training, Glenn divides activities into training (focused activity) and exercise (unfocused activity). Weight training is a strange duck because, although there is weight lifting as a sport, few of the lifters are involved in it. Most people lift to support other sports while some, like Glenn, just lift for reasons that are unclear to us. In music and in sports there is practice and playing that are distant cousins but don’t quite match with Glenn’s training and exercise. We don’t know if it is true in music but it is surely true in sports that cross training helps. Skiing is a very different workout than handball is.

The question is: How do we get folks to practice some beneficial activity? The answer, as is almost always true, is it depends. There is Glenn near one end of the spectrum who wants to go to the weight room with a plan for everyday or every other day. Closer to the other end is MWG who is willing to play almost anything: baseball, football, snow skiing, water skiing, basketball, handball, etc. It is really hard to sell us on practice.

Sidebar: We see bridge as a competition rather than a sport but the division is similar. You can improve by playing in competition or you can improve by reading and classes. Both are useful and what is the best use of time depends on the individual. We like to play and we got substantially better when we played more. It also helped us understand stuff we read. End Sidebar.

Of course, it helps your game to do practice activities. We do shoulder exercises to help our damaged right shoulder and prepare the left one. We practice backwall shots because it is a weakness in our game. Until it got hit by lightning we used to practice pitch shots though our silver maple to improve our golf game. We see the need and use for practice. We do it but playing has much more appeal.

What has worked in skiing with the grandkids is lots of repetition. First on the little rope tow and then on the little chairlift. That built confidence to become an independent skier. The goal for the older one was to ski an expert trail this year. He did it on his own! That solution does not apply to everyone. Some folks will like lessons and others want to go to the top of the mountain and figure it out.

You, or Glenn, MWG, or MWG grandkids may not be the model that works for you, your friend, or your offspring. Finding a way to get them to practice and play is the key to develop good habits and skills. The right key for one individual can look very different from the right key for another. After you find the key you might even be willing to suffer through a weightlifting story.

Skiing And Athletic Mortality

We have been busy teaching the two older grand-de-Gloves to ski. There are three grandkids who care grouped as the olders or the youngers. And when we say ski or skiing we mean downhill skiing. Part of it is the joy of being with them. Another part of it is athletic mortality. It has always been true that our legs would always take us where we want to be. That doesn’t mean that we are the fastest of the fast but we have always had some speed, some quickness, and good endurance. Unlike the British soccer announcers, we are able to distinguish between speed, meaning top speed which is usually summarized by a time over 40 or more yards, and quickness, the first step or two. 

Athletic mortality is like gravity, it is always at work. Fortunately, that process is still working slowly on us. As with bankruptcy, it almost always switches to suddenly at some point and we know we are getting closer to that point. We are not sure there are any more mogul runs in our future. The joy of being with the grandkids and the fear of athletic mortality has us focused on teaching them to ski so they can get a lifetime of joy from skiing. Of course, only occasionally do our interests and the grandkids interests match ours so glorious might be the right word to describe the last two weeks. We’ve managed keep explaining that gravity is always at work and they, eventually, have internalized some form of the lesson. Yesterday they loaded on to and rode up the chairlift together as calm as could be. We were so delighted that we almost forgot to get on the next chair.

It has been worth some time away from the blog. We have tried to deal looming athletic mortality as we teach the two olders to deal with gravity. Both are ever present but, as of today, all three of us are having some success at learning how to keep them at bay.

A Bad Skiing Idiom

Arsenal beat Crystal Palace Sunday so we have one more step towards the epic relegation battle in the English Premier League that we discussed in our last post. When the games restart on April 1 there will be about ten games left with nine teams within four points. Three of them being relegated and six will survive. We, however, want to talk about idioms. No, we are not claiming expertise in English. Today Jim Geraghty’s Morning Jolt at NRO had this passage discussing our ambassador to the UN:

There is no evidence that this was Thomas-Greenfield going rogue or getting out over her skis, using a phrase or terminology at odds with the rest of the administration. Asked about the ambassador’s remarks a few days later, White House Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre said, “We have been clear with China from the beginning on the consequences and implications of providing this kind of support to Russia. We have been very, very clear about that. I’m just not going to add to — to — any more to that.” [Emphasis Added]

Kevin D. Williamson at The Dispatch also used it although we are not looking it up. Idioms often try to generalize practical advice like: Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth. We don’t all work with horses any more but as this nice post reminds you, folks can tell a horse’s age by looking at their teeth. It is good manners not to do so if the horse is a gift. In looking at the item in bold above it is clear that getting out over her skis means that the ambassador was doing something inappropriate. The problem is, getting over your skis is what a skier should do. What skiers should not do, generally, is sit back or not get over their skis. Here is one exception. Deep powder is another. It appears that the problem comes from our 44th president using the term and now we can’t get it out of our language without criticizing him. All skiers should try to help us rid the English language of this bad idiom.

We are off to Vermont for skiing on Sunday. We hope to stay over our skis because we are pretty sure we will not sign up for any pond skimming events.