Skiing, social distancing and lift ticket pricing…

If you go to a restaurant anywhere in the world, expect to find no more than half the normal sitting capacity whether it’s outdoors or indoors. Yet prices have not been raised by a factor of two.

The result is that patron can enjoy a relatively safe experience for the same price. Sure, the restaurant owner will need to adjust its cost structure, mostly through smart staffing and other productivity enhancements in order to retain a modicum of profitability. Tricky, but not necessarily impossible to achieve.

Now, apply the same logic to ski resorts for the upcoming season. Absent a vaccine or a satisfactory medical solution, social distancing will reduce lift capacity by at least 50%, this include people living under a same roof and riding a lift together that may balance people riding as single on a triple chair, two skiers inside a gondola build for holding eight (has anyone thought about re-configuring the sitting back-to-back with a Plexiglas partition?), and hoping that a six-passenger chair can hold three (yet the trio won’t be 6 feet apart)!

This said, the drop in uphill capacity will create lines that weren’t there before and will therefore account for a significant loss of value to the skier or snowboarder.

Who will bear that burden? The user, the operator, or a little of both? Big questions, deep silence, no idea at all as to which kind of product ski resorts will offer, as deadlines to purchase season passes on the best possible terms are looming...