LIFT TICKET RE-SELLING WEBSITE SHUTS DOWN

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SAM Magazine—Lakewood, Colo., Mar. 12, 2013—SlopeXchange.com, which aimed to help skiers and riders re-sell their day lift tickets in resort parking lots, came to a swift end after NSAA threatened to sue the site.

Early this year, slopexchange.com hit the Internet with what its founders thought was a clever idea: help skiers and riders re-sell the unused time on their daily lift tickets. The site's founder explained it thusly in an email to Ski Areas of New York (SANY):

“I'm just a lowly Internet entrepreneur, so my means are limited. It occurred to me: sometimes I know people who buy full day lift tickets and only use them for 3 or 4 hours. I should try to buy the leftover time on those people's lift tickets cheap, so I can get a few hours of skiing in inexpensively. So I created a website called SlopeXchange that lets people do just that—find each other for sharing day passes and multiday passes. I added mobile functionality to the site, so people can also use their smartphones to sell their tix while they are on the mountain.”

Understandably, SANY was less than thrilled; lift tickets are universally non-transferable. So SANY contacted NSAA, which responded to the site founder on Feb. 8 with a “cease and desist” letter, explaining that the re-selling plan constituted theft, unfair competition and deceptive trade practices, tortious interference with business, and fraud. The letter demanded that the website shut down immediately or face legal action.

The site shut down Feb. 24.

In an unrelated but similar vein, Wedge2Edge, an independent, unauthorized private-lesson provider that claims to operate at several resorts in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont, has reportedly been asked to cease and desist its operations.