So the groundswell of locals’ negative public opinion against VR has built up and continues to make national news. The Steven’s Pass anti-VR petition on Change.org has 48,000 signatures and has become a National “Hold VR accountable” campaign - the push is to have folks cancel the AutoRenew option on Epic Passes.
https://www.change.org/p/vail-resorts-h ... ccountable
Vail will surely try a PR and Marketing campaign to sway opinion as Epic Passes come up for renewal in the next few months
IKON passholders on chat rooms and Facebook groups are speculating that some Epic passholders May switch to IKON for next winter. As a result, Would IKON resorts get swamped next winter ? The new CEO Lynch was formerly Chief Marketing officer so surely she would try marketing tactics? The impact on IKon passSales and by association - skier volume at Killington and other IKon ski areas - is what we’re all watching.
VR had mediocre earnings -and revenue and skier metrics were mediocre - in their Jan. 14 earnings release. The release reads like a bunch of corporate Mumbo jumbo with very little details by geography
https://investors.vailresorts.com/news- ... on-date-23
In December, Vail Daily had an analysis of Wall Street’s opinion on Vail Resorts’ stock MTN for investors.
https://www.vaildaily.com/news/wall-str ... ts-issues/
From their 10K Annual Filing,
MTN has about $2 Billion in long-term debt but much of the debt does not come due until after 2025 so they may not have a cash crunch for a few years even if Epic Pass sales tank.
The Resorts and Real estate businesses combined kick out about $500 Million in cash flow (EBITDA) per year.
And here’s a key excerpt from the December Vail Daily article from the Truist Wall Street analyst:
The big question cited in the report is what will be the financial impact from customer dissatisfaction with the ski experience.
“To be clear, we are hardly saying the sky is falling and we are not about to reduce earnings estimates yet, rather it is not out of the question that these labor issues may have some financial impact, though extremely difficult to quantify, on MTN’s revenues and margins,” Truist wrote. “We see the best case scenario for MTN is that these labor-related issues get sorted out sooner than later and customers give it a ‘pass’ this year and the issues do not reduce the likelihood of one (re)purchasing an Epic pass for next season.”
But Truist did say it is possible that MTN loses some pass holders to IKON or nonrenewal.
“MTN may need to bite the bullet and raise wages even higher in order to bring the quality of the product back to its historically excellent levels,“ Truist wrote.