Overcrowding and too much traffic means the ski industry is struggling? (I guess I'm taking struggling to mean "not doing well"... though I guess you could have meant "struggling to better serve customers".)
The topic is the ski industry for years and years has been declining skier visits and increasing age of average skier, which last I remember reading was in their 40’s.
This problem is overlaid by the ‘flocking’ that occurs to specific resorts on specific days or what I would say is “overconsumption of premium conditions” (powder days), which is not something that makes a ski area operator more money but costs them bad press. Remote work, which I have taken advantage of to ski on those precious Tuesdays for years and years, is now something that makes any premium day just another overconsumption day.
Having said that, go into a local bike shop right now. 2 years ago you’d wait a week or more for basic service and it wasn’t because of a lack of techs, it was because of demand. I walked into my LBS shop needing a tire mounted on a new rim and I was out the door in 15 minutes with techs sitting around no bikes on the stands being serviced. This late spring, from my injured perch, looks like it has had significant demand suppression due to raising interest rates. The bike industry is in significant retraction for the same reason (as least as I hear from the inside and can observationally correlate at the local level).
One thing I am keenly aware of, working now 7 years for tech startups, is that we had 14 years in the golden age of printing free money. That’s not meant to be political, it is just a reality that people had far more money in their pockets than they are going to have going forward. Both Epic and Ikon were launched during this Gilded Age and we don’t know what the impact will be on the seemingly endless expansion of those passes when the average skier is going to have a
lot less money to spend on skiing. If you think about this Gilded Age starting in 2008, the entire lifespan of the iPhone has been in the age of free money. I started skiing in 2010, so I have never skied outside of this period.
It’s going to have a major impact, unless we are all affluent older folk, which gets back to the problem statement at the top of this post.