Patrick Scholes is living with his decisions.
On the plus side, his family decided to spend its holiday ski vacation this winter at a resort not named Park City Mountain. On the minus, more than a year ago the lodging and leisure analyst for Truist Securities issued a recommendation for potential investors in Vail Resorts (MTN) stock: Buy it.
Scholes now cringes over that pick. Park City Mountain — one of Vail Resorts’ 40-plus properties — buckled when roughly 200 members of the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association walked out Dec. 27 in frustration over stalled contract negotiations. Throughout the holiday break, when the mountain was hit by a series of storms, Park City Mountain operators opened a fraction of its terrain. Meanwhile, guests waited in lift lines for up to an hour and reported slow response times by the patrollers who were on the mountain.
Off the mountain, things went arguably even worse for the company. Vail Resorts has been bludgeoned in both mainstream and social media over the holiday chaos. In particular, Vail Resorts was taken to task for what appeared to be reluctance to agree to one of the union’s stated primary demands: raising the starting patroller wage by $2 an hour, from $21 to $23. The company’s stock price took a tumble, falling by 6.5% on Jan. 2, though it has rebounded somewhat in the weeks since.
The resort and the union settled contract terms Jan. 7, but the negative connotations around the company remain. Disgruntled skiers have even filed a proposed class-action lawsuit against Vail Resorts, arguing that the company should have warned guests about the potential impacts of the strike.
Scholes knows that in the current climate, his advice to pick up Vail Resorts’ stock isn’t looking very prescient. But he’s also not changing it. This fight, he and other financial analysts and historians told The Salt Lake Tribune, won’t be the end of Vail Resorts. Not unless it’s handled badly.
“Sometimes things don’t always, in the short term, go as we would like,” said Scholes, who clarified that his support of the stock does not necessarily reflect his opinion of the union. “... So I’m not trying to sugarcoat something that’s not unicorns and fairy dust at the moment.”
In a report published Jan. 6 by Truist, Scholes pointed out just how bad the situation is for Vail Resorts right now. He noted that it has been more than 50 years since any ski workers went on strike and that the action probably took Park City Mountain operators by surprise. He also said “with high certainty” that the strike and the ensuing negative publicity will weigh on Vail Resorts’ earnings this year and possibly beyond. Families will think twice before booking their 2025 holiday stay. Some season pass holders may switch to a competing Ikon or Mountain Collective passes.
However, the greatest risk to Vail Resorts’ financials, according to Scholes’ and others’ analysis, was agreeing to the union’s terms. Because those terms may then become the terms for the entire workforce across all 42 of its ski areas.
“That’s why Vail is playing hardball,” Colin McGrady, a private equity investor for Cedar Springs Capital, wrote while dissecting the issue on LinkedIn before the strike’s resolution. “It’s not about being greedy; it’s about basic financial survival. They’re not just fighting the Park City ski patrol; they’re fighting the potential for a massive increase in labor costs across their entire empire.”
McGrady said online workups he’d seen indicate that with pay raises and benefits, the union’s package would result in nearly a 30% increase in pay per patroller, on average. If that led to a 20% effective raise to all Vail Resorts workers, then the company’s profits would drop by roughly 35%.
A spokesperson for Park City Mountain said that because Vail Resorts is publicly traded, the company can’t comment on how it expects to perform in the future other than during its quarterly shareholder reports.
Three other Vail Resorts ski areas have unionized ski patrols: Colorado’s Breckenridge Resort, Keystone Resort and Crested Butte Mountain Resort. All of them are either in or about to begin contract negotiations with the parent company.
The ripple effects of the agreement may even stretch to competitors’ resorts. On Monday, the ski patrol at Colorado’s Arapahoe Basin, which was purchased in November by Vail Resorts’ main competitor, Alterra Mountain Resorts, voted to unionize. It follows the path tread by Solitude Mountain Resort’s ski patrol, which became the first at an Alterra-owned property to organize. Plus, as the Vail Daily pointed out, “history shows that collective bargaining is always followed by higher pay for ski area workers and, interestingly, those gains often benefit workers not threatening to strike.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Park City ski patrollers officially go on strike early Friday, citing unfair labor practices and marking the latest chapter in the union’s negotiations with Park City Mountain and its owner, Vail Resorts on Friday, Dec. 27, 2024.
During the nine months of negotiating before the strike, Vail Resorts and the Park City Professional Ski Patrol Association had come to a tentative agreement on 24 of the 27 contract articles. The remaining three concerned pay and benefits. After the storm blew over, the union won the bump in starting wages and the commensurate compensation for experience and expertise it had sought. It also walked away with parental leave and educational benefits.
Requests for holiday pay and health care stipends for months worked, however, were left on the negotiating room floor.
A Jan. 8 news release by Park City Mountain confirmed what McGrady suspected. It said that when Vail Resorts makes decisions about pay, it considers the ramifications for employees across all of its resorts.
Also in that statement, Bill Rock, president of Vail Resorts’ Mountain Division, said the contract “is consistent with our company’s wage structure for all patrollers, nonunionized and unionized, while accounting for the unique terrain and avalanche complexity of Park City Mountain.”
Quinn Graves, a business manager for the ski patrol union, said negotiators came away with the impression that Vail Resorts did have its employees in mind while negotiating — mostly that it wanted to show them who is in charge.
“We don’t think it was truly about money,” she told the Tribune. “It was about Vail Resorts holding onto the power of being a publicly traded organization and saying they don’t have to listen to workers even though they know we deserve a better wage and far outnumber the people at the top.”
In addition to the resort, the strike and ensuing hubbub took its toll on Park City residents and businesses. Jace Peck, general manager for Cole Sports, an outdoor retail and rental shop with two locations in Park City, said unhappiness on the mountain led to unhappiness in stores.
“Business is harder to come by year after year, and the conditions don’t help,” he said. “And the disgruntled customer landing on your doorstep is a variable that we’re not super happy about.”
John Zenes, owner of the car service company Park City Passport, told the Park Record that bookings last week were down 50%. He attributed that to fallout from the strike.
Still, the patrollers seemed to have public opinion on their side. In 12 days, they raised more than $300,000 through their GoFundMe page to cover living expenses. Bars held fundraisers and residents brought food for patrollers on the strike line.
On Instagram, Bluesky and X, people vowing to dump their Epic Pass next season could be found by the dozens.
“Salt Lake getting dumped with snow this morning but can’t go skiing cuz Vail’s incompetence, not going to waste my time on 2 hr lift lines,” wrote @LoganBD5 on X on Saturday. “Ikon will be the move next year. Screw Vail/Epic!”
On Thursday, Vail Resorts made a peace offering to disgruntled guests. It announced that it would credit holders of its nonrefundable Epic Day Passes half of what they paid for passes they used between Dec. 27 and Jan. 8. Those credits can be applied only to 2025-26 Epic passes of equal or greater value.
Season pass holders will also receive a credit for each day they skied or snowboarded at Park City Mountain during the strike for up to eight days total. The minimum discount they will receive on a comparable 2025-26 season pass would be 25% of the amount they paid for their current season pass.
“We are committed,” Deirdra Walsh, Park City Mountain’s chief operating officer, said in a press statement, “to rebuilding the trust and loyalty of our guests by delivering an exceptional experience at Park City Mountain this season and in the future.”
In a letter to The Salt Lake Tribune, one holiday visitor called the mea culpa “insulting” and “too little too late.”
Jeremy Brown of Dallas said the 50% discount pales in comparison to the total amount he spent on the four day, three night family trip. Plus, he wrote, the offer of a future discount came off like a marketing ploy.
“It feels,” he wrote, “like you are still trying to get more money out of me by dangling a carrot, that in comparison with the total cost of a trip, is laughable.”
Brown added that he plans to pay attention to whether the next resort he visits is owned by Vail Resorts.
That may be how people feel in the moment, but history shows that kind of sentiment rarely sticks, said Michael Childers, an associate professor of history at Colorado State University. Childers, who wrote “Colorado Powder Keg: Ski Resorts and the Environmental Movement,” said just as people attended the 2002 Winter Olympics in Utah despite a bribery scandal swirling around it, he expects most skiers and snowboarders will be lured back to the slopes of a Vail resort.
After all, Vail Resorts will continue to have some of the cheapest season pass prices in the country paired with many of the best-known resorts.
“Skiing is that popular and that ingrained into our culture here in the Rocky Mountain West,” Childers said, “that I don’t see a labor dispute changing it too much.”
(Francisco Kjolseth | The Salt Lake Tribune) Park City skiers crowd the slopes as patrollers officially go on strike early Friday, citing unfair labor practices and marking the latest chapter in the union’s negotiations with Park City Mountain and its owner, Vail Resorts on Friday, Dec. 27, 2024.
Scholes shares that mindset. He thinks Vail Resorts will struggle for a year or two. Still, he likened Park City Mountain’s holiday disruptions — on a much less consequential and dire level — to the turmoil the cruise industry found itself in during the COVID-19 pandemic when guests became stuck on virus-infected ships for months and some died. At the time, people swore they’d never step foot on a cruise ship. Cruise line stocks tanked.
“Today,” Scholes said, “cruise lines are the hottest sector in travel. Everyone wants to go on a cruise.”
“If you can turn it around and make your customers happy,” he added, “they’ll eventually forget.”
Inevitably, snow will come, and so will holidays. Then skiers and snowboarders and stakeholders will have to make a decision about how and where to spend their winters. And they’ll have to live with it.
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