Vail Resorts to Skiers: Experience Matters
About time
At the risk of alienating Vail Resorts’ communications team, which is truly (sincerely) a class organization from top to bottom and coast to coast, I’m going to begin today’s story by complaining about the press release that that communications team (very kindly and unprompted) provided me several days in advance. I have tried to offset each complaint with a compliment, though in some cases the compliments are not really compliments, but just me being a smartass.
First, the “Broseph, get to the point” section of the newsletter: before complaining about the press release announcing Vail Resort’s news, I should tell readers what the news is. The news is basically that Vail is promising to do a good (better) job when you visit their SnoSportSkiing facilities with a bucket of initiatives called - surprise - “Epic Experience” that enhance food, lessons, rentals, ski school, and the My Epic app that ties them all together. Vail is also pledging to be more “aggressive” with snowmaking. And while I could gloat and say “yeah this is all the stuff I was telling Vail to do a year ago,” I’m not really I-Told-You-So Bro, mostly because for every one thing like this that I get right I have 90 dumb takes like “wow what a great idea to install a 40-year-old used gondola from Europe at Eaglecrest” (it wasn’t). Anyway let’s get to the complaining part.
Complaint #1: the best writing advice I ever got was “if you’ve heard it before, don’t use it.”
Some form of “raise the bar” appears three times in this press release. The number of times “raise the bar” should be used annually in public documents published by a $5.4 billion company is zero. I mean I’m not expecting Tolstoy but could we lose the cliches? Additional cuts include but are not limited to: “a new era”; “the next chapter”; “embarks on a journey”; and “magic of the mountains.”
Offsetting compliment #1: These quotes weren’t written by robots or turned into roadkill-by-committee.
The quotes attributed to Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz are useful. This one, for example, plainly states the company’s strategic pivot away from growth-by-acquisition:
“For years, Vail Resorts focused on building the Epic Pass model and expanding its resort network,” said Katz. “That strategy helped establish the company’s position today, but the Pass and acquisitions were not the end goal. The next chapter of growth for Vail Resorts is about delivering a guest experience that undeniably leads the ski industry and is best in class in the travel sector.”
That statement also finally acknowledges something that Vail had failed to address for years: that skier experience is the most important thing in skiing. A follow-up quote echoes this sentiment, saying that “Exceptional experience … is the standard” for Vail Resorts.
If finding useful quotes from a corporate CEO in a corporate press release does not sound impressive to you, then you probably haven’t read very many corporate press releases. The typical media release is useful for high-level news mining, but is too often 95 percent useless filler for lazy writers who repost these press releases in full rather than activating five brain cells to write an original story. And oh good job Stu, you’re now alienating not just Vail Resorts’ PR team, but every other ski area communications employee that you’ve established relationships with, as well as like 90 percent of the ski writers in the country* - which, all together, is like half your professional network - so you should clarify that bad press releases and vapid executive quotes are not ski industry-specific problems, but U.S. American ones, structural symptoms of the internet plague that devoured the once-proud profession of journalism and pooped it out as Twitter, leaving five PR professionals for every journalist, all five of whom cycle each press release draft through the five layers of bosses above them, a process as efficient as pre-industrial food storage that usually yields quotes like this: “We are so excited about this game-changing game-changer, which is the biggest news since Jesus invented the wheel, and we are going to leverage this to uniquely meet guest expectations.”
By the way, add “game-changer,” “leverage,” and “unique” to the Do Not Use list alongside (actually, above) “raise the bar.”