So the money comes into a pot. Each skier visit yields an amount paid by Icon. Ski resorts that don't get any skier visits get nothing or a small amount. Meanwhile the money left over goes to ICON or pays out as a dividend to some of the mountains or maybe all. Someone tries to keep track??
My guesses:
Doesn't work that way, there's no pot. This accounting is NOT like a family's monthly budget, where you take income that directly pays for the expenses of the month. If you must use a personal finance analogy, i's is more of a advanced macro accounting with multiyear goals and lifetime goals factored in where you can use debt and loans and other big things like having a child, retirement, mortgage, college, death and estate planning.
For owned parts of the company every component of every resort tries to hit particular targets, if they do better or worse, it isn't divied up from the sales, it's just factored into next years' budgets.
The real "pot" is ALL the money, which includes money management of the corporate debt, lines of credit, and bonds and so on to buffer everything. The pass and lift ticket money is just one source of revenue (along with all the other revenue streams) that feeds into that big pot.
The business units can analyze all the numbers and decide as a whole what the entire strategy is for everything, which might involve losing some money in the short term.
In general, remember that whole concept of the multi-resort and season pass instead of independent resorts and daypass business model is to hedge against weather where one area might do poorly for a season; and another does well. It smooth out feast and famine for some consistency. As a consequence, none of these plans that depend solely on 1 year results or single resort results; the whole point is the winning resorts will support the ones that got skunked and vice versa. You don't necessarily get your slice of the pie just because you did super well 1 year.
For the partner resorts, I bet each deal is separate and unique. There's still a countable number of resorts , so each deal probably is custom fashioned.
A premier resort may get paid a bunch, money back. Perhaps on the flip side a feeder resort might have to pay in to get in on the pass.
They probably do have a general framework. and I expect it would have some parameters of payout based on usage and per pass with a cap as mentioned above.
There may also be some minimums of payments a fixed slice of the pie or other guarantees to satisfy whatever issues and concerns are needed (same explanation as above with multiresort season-pass multiyear model).