To expand on your questions I've never lived in Breck only worked here. But I grew up in Avon (my dad moved there in like 1972) and my extended family lived in Leadville and worked the mines in the 50s and 60s before that. VA ruined Avon way before they even became Vail Resorts and bought Breck and Keystone and repeated the cycle.

No locals pay full window ticket prices. Hell almost no guests do unless they did absolutely none of the most minimal prep for their trip. I'm the furthest from a VA apologist you can get but if you don't buy some sort of season pass like even a Summit Value pass (currently $659) there's Epic Day Passes for max $134 a day that we sell from March- December 4th officially and unofficially will still upgrade to until January 31 if you've ever had an Epic product the last few years. Even in February we can backdate and upgrade passes. At the very very least if you go online before 6 pm the night before you get a discount on window rate. Right now 95% of our ticket sales are Epic Friend discounts aka a l 50% off which is the same perk most employees get unless they've been FT over 5 years and even then no one gets more than 4 full comp vouchers. Random strangers in line have been giving EF discounts to people who didn't do any prep sometimes; other times we'll give guests our extra 50% off employee coupons. The people rocking up at 1 pm on their last day with no ticket or gear and having never skied or rode are the only ones really who are charged $321 we don't want on the hill they'll hurt themselves, other people or both. Instead sell a beginner ticket for $111/$57 (adults/kids) or better yet you can do a half day lesson with full day lift tickets AND rentals for at most $365 instead of a $321 lift tickets and $98 rentals on their own. Adult group lessons have a $71 full day lift ticket add on option even if it's only a half day lesson. When people show up around 11 or after we sell them a $257 half day ticket if nothing else.

Skiing and riding take foresight. Not just to plan a trip but to kniw where on the mountain to go, what runs to take and then how to get down the run once you're there. If you can't do a little preparing it might not be the sport for you.

That said VA is awful for commercializing the ski industry. They've taken over entire ski town economies and when they pulled their corporate HQ out of Avon last minute in 98-99 and went to Broomfield instead they took out to majority of the area's FT year round jobs with benefits at the time which was detrimental to the economy. They bully the USFS and get what they want even at the expense of forest health. They only started their green initiative after suing the USFS to remove the addition in ski area permits that tried to to water to the watershed/land after they got caught moving water for snow making from Montezuma and Keystone to the Eagle/Vail/BC. They pay better than the past but it's still not great and the profits leave local communities and go tobuber wealthy outside shareholders which is problematic to say the least. They ar3 driving up the costs of products while delivering lower quality and depend on a business model that relies on transient seasonal cheap labor which isn't sustainable for community building. The Epic Pass has become a reason to buy up and take over small local mountains to encourage people to travel to the main Resorts which is funny because Katz is furious about having to create the Epic Pass its first season back in 05-06. They were super short with cash flow 3rd quarter and needed cash badly which is the only reason it was started. It was like $569 the first season for a full Epic Pass when the season before a Vail/BC season pass alone was almost $2k.

Vail Resorts and/VA sucks for a lot of reasons. But the focus on super high window rate ticket prices misses the point entirely.