Wait There's a Limit to What People Will Pay to Ski 7 Hours on a Tuesday in a Highly Competitive Market?
Rob Katz, in first earnings call since return as Vail Resorts CEO, owns mistakes, underscores customer experience, and recommits to core pass strategy
Rob Katz sounded good. Confident (but humble). Measured (but committed). Clearheaded (but ambitious). In his first Vail Resorts earnings call since abruptly returning last week to the CEO chair that he had held from 2006 to 2021, Katz made a few things clear: Vail’s commitment to the Epic Pass and presale philosophy remain bedrock; guest experience matters above all; plenty of growth pathways remain. He acknowledged that the supersized-all-the-time lift ticket strategy had backfired, that the meltdown in Park City was “unacceptable,” that guest communication and marketing had not kept up with the technologies and practices of 2025.
Katz’s remarks, which included a Q-and-A with institutional investors, followed Vail Resort’s middling third-quarter 2025 earnings report yesterday. I’ll let the financial geniuses comment on the EBITDAs and EPSs and various other whatevers. The headlines: Epic Pass sales are (again) down year over year (blame macro events; no one cares); and Vail’s North American skier visits dipped three percent even as national skier visits rose 1.7 percent in the 2024-25 American winter, according to the National Ski Areas Association. That’s bad.
Katz appears ready for the challenge, ready to not only resurrect Vail’s financials and reputation, but to return the company to growth.
“I also understand that there's a narrative that the industry is mature, that there are not many strategies left to drive growth in our company,” he said in his opening remarks. “It's important to remember that that is exactly the same narrative I walked into when I became CEO in 2006.” Katz’s genius has always been in seeing new business models in a culture of knuckleheads wired from birth to explain why no new ideas will work.
A few critiques, however: not once in the 57-minute-ish conference call did Katz say the word, “snowmaking,” the tepid allocation of which I believe is at the foundation of sliding Epic Pass sales. He still sounds a little too certain that the Epic Pass needs a new coat of paint, rather than a gut renovation with a new floorplan. And the emphasis on marketing innovation felt heavy-handed and, frankly, a little condescending, as though Katz thought Vail simply wasn’t doing a good enough job showing the world how good of a job it’s doing, rather than just validating skier’s often-frustrating lived experience and promising to do better.
Here are some initial thoughts on what Katz had to say on lift tickets, guest experience, weather challenges, Epic Pass structure, building the owned and partner portfolio, Europe, a billionaire’s offer to buy Park City Mountain Resort, unions, and more:
ON DAY TICKETS
Rob Katz (boldface mine):
We want people to be on the mountain, right? And we want people to visit our resorts.
What we prefer is that people buy in advance and come to the resort on a pass product of some sort. To the extent that there are people who are not doing that, it's still our hope to convert those lift ticket buyers or people who today may not be buying a pass to a pass product.
But if we don't get them on a pass product … I do think there's also opportunities for us to do a better job on driving lift ticket sales. I mean, obviously for this year, that was obviously an area that didn't perform to where we expected them to. And it's going to be our job to really innovate and come up with approaches where we feel we can drive lift ticket sales, particularly in off-peak periods, while at the same time not really … endangering the value that we're offering from our season passes.
….
And the biggest area where we feel like we fell short was uncommitted lift tickets. And I think that obviously is someone who, they're not committed in front of the season, but they're obviously not also committed likely to skiing that season or not committed to skiing at our resort or maybe another resort that season.
And in our minds, right, that is where we need to take a different marketing approach to be able to compete and compete well in that marketplace.
What I like about this
This reframing of advanced purchase as a preference, rather than an imperative, is a long-overdue admission that window-ticket pricing maximalism is not, like, the 11th Commandment.
What I wish he’d said
Man did we fuck that one up. We got arrogant. We got foolish. We acted as though prices could just climb and climb forever. Had we just followed inflation, Vail Mountain’s $92 single-day lift ticket price for the 2007-08 season would be around $140 today. Instead, they’re more than double that. We went too far. These prices embarrass me. They embarrass our sport. They shame our founders and our town and our company. It’s time to acknowledge that even the existence of these sorts of prices and the negative attention they draw is probably alienating potential skiers from this sport. A $1,400 ski day for a family of four is probably the biggest stain on my legacy, and it’s a historic mistake that I aim to correct over the next several winters.
That said, the Epic Pass has permanently transformed the calculus around how and when skiers ski. The truth is that Vail Mountain on a peak-season powder day is a special experience, and we need to protect that experience. The same with families who spend holiday weeks with us. In these cases, very high day-ticket rates are appropriate. In fact, there are probably days that we shouldn’t sell lift tickets at all, and instead reserve the experience for the substantial passholder base that our immense wells of data (did I mention we have data?) tell us to expect.
But $300 to ski a random weekday in November or December? There is definitely room to get creative there and give casual skiers a doorway onto our mountain without endangering (and perhaps, long-term, boosting), the Epic Pass.
In fact, I’m going to make this commitment right now: we are going to aggressively expand and market our Turn In Your Ticket program, so that from point of sale to the last day of Epic Pass sales, skiers know that if they purchased a window-rate lift ticket at any of our resorts the previous winter, they can apply at least part of that value to the cost of next season’s Epic Pass.
What I hope he’s not saying
We really just need to do a better job with marketing so that skiers understand why our awesome ski areas are worth $329 for seven hours of skiing.
ON EXPERIENCE
Rob Katz:
I think on guest experience, I think it is building on the progress that we're already making. I think we've made a lot of investments in guest experience. Park City had a challenging experience, obviously, I think everybody knows, during a portion of this year.
But when you look at all of our other resorts, we actually had really good guest experience scores.
That said, the Park City experience was obviously unacceptable.
And so one of my key priorities is ensuring that all of our resorts are consistently throughout the season delivering that experience. And I think that's literally a matter of building on the track record and the investments that we've already made and just bringing them to life and executing.
I think on the marketing side, we've got incredible fundamentals and foundations in that group and terrific talent, but I think there's an opportunity for us to take what we're doing in marketing and bring it to be a little bit more current.