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Well.
Vail Resorts is an eight point three billion dollar publicly traded company with more than seven thousand employees. It's known as the operator of some pretty legendary ski areas in Colorado in the American West, including Veil, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Whistler, Heavenly and more.
Yeah, even though it's called Veil Resorts, about two thirds of the properties it has in North America are now east of the Rockies, and this is thanks to an acquisition spree over the last seven years or so, and the highest concentration of resorts are in the northeast. One of those resorts is out of Tached Mountain. It's in New Hampshire. Hey.
Austin Carr, Bloomberg News technology reporter, drew the short straw and had the tough assignment of spending a significant amount of time at a ski resort, writing about it for Bloomberg Business Week. You can check out Austin's story on the Bloomberg Terminal and at Bloomberg dot com Slash BusinessWeek. Austin joins us now from our Boston studio. So Austin, you did go to ad Attash and spend some time
there over the last few months. But what you found is really interesting because some of the skiers there have been pretty upset with their corporate overlords over the past few years. Bring us up to speed on what's going on at at attachh and how that speaks about the Biggerville Resorts story.
Yeah, so Attached is one of the old timey New Hampshire mountains that Vale Resorts bought up a few years ago. And this is a resort that dates back to the nineteen sixties, if not earlier. You know, it's one of those sort of places in world New Hampshire that skiers obsess about. Despite the icy conditions, the rainfall, the wind, and it was very dated until Veil Resort bought it. They had a lift that was frequently breaking down. It took about twenty minutes to get to the top, at
which point people felt frozen. There was bad snowmaking, there was poor infrastructure, bad service, and everyone thought this would be totally upgraded when Vail bought the mountain in twenty nineteen, but that didn't happen at all. In fact, the sort of years that I was looking into the story and talking to people around at Attached more recently, they were upset about everything under Veil. They thought they were going to get this huge, deluxe overhaul and anything, but that happened.
They just actually ended up with pretty mediocre conditions, which you would never expect under some of that owns, breck and Ridge and Vil.
So what happened Austin? What does Vale say?
So Val basically bought the mountain in twenty nineteen. What they say is, you know what happened six months after the acquisition, COVID hit. We were still figuring out. We bought about seventeen mountains in twenty nineteen, right before the pandemic hit, and during that process they had to deal
with a huge amount of transition. There was a big global labor shortage, and when you have a labor shortage and a ski mountain, that means you don't have people to groom the mountain, to make snow, to deal with people in line scanning lift tickets, and so they just had to They basically said that they were always going to invest in these mountains, but it just took a
few years to get there. But during that time there was a massive backlash towards Vale Resort, not only at at Attach, but it mountains around New England and the northeast, from Pennsylvania, New York to Vermont, at places like snow Hey.
Can you talk Austin a little bit about Villa resorts strategy here of picking up a few dozen mountains over the last few years that are definitely not on the same level as what they have in the Rockies and in California. Yeah.
So I think a lot of people associate Veil with puder skiing big mountains out west, as you noted in the Rockies, but a lot of their are strategies now is based around these so called feeder properties. These are smaller, local, regional resorts around major metropolitan hubs in the East, and the basic idea is that people learn on these small hills and then they graduate to an expensive trip out west.
So the CEO of Veil, Kirsten Lynch, actually she grew up around Chicago, started skiing in Wisconsin, which is not a place that you'd think about for skiing, but it has a couple of small mountains, one of which they
bought up about a decade ago. And they expanded from the Midwest into the East by buying all these regional local mountains, assuming that they could sort of just take I guess some of these skiers for granted the ski pass that they offer, the Epic Pass, this seasonal pass that's much cheaper than a lot of this single mountain
season passes that you see out in the East. Yet I think there's something that happened with the expectations that Veil has brought to skiers, expecting that sort of high brow, high lux quality conditions that they never quite delivered or expected to have to deliver to these skiers out ease.
So Austin it was I was actually living I lived in Veil when they released the Epic Pass back in two thousand and eight, and it was such a big deal because a season passed to just Veil was over one thousand dollars. And then they come out with this thing that Robcatz design called the Epic Pass that gives you access not just to Veil, but to so many other mountains that Veil Resorts owned, all for a price of like half of what an of a pass just
to Veil would cost. It was, it was, it was a huge huge innovation, and a lot has happened in the ski industry since then. There's some really interesting color in your story about the way that the folks over at at Attache felt about Veil Resorts. Talk a little bit about the what happened with the map online, because I think this kind of speaks to the way they felt.
Yeah, I mean during the process, they really felt like second class citizens around New Hampshire or vermon and especially at ad Attached. One person told me look on Veil Resorts website, and of course when I went there, they have a big map of all their properties and at Attaches actually in the wrong place on the map, and it helped these locals. It's terrible people did not the executives at Vail might not have known quite where this
mountain is. It was sort of an interesting process, sort of, you know, even talking to Veil executives about these regional properties. I mean, I talked to the CEO of Veil and I was just asking her, you know, she kept saying, we want each of these local mountains to have their own identity, And when I asked her what the identity of at Attached should be, she didn't have an answer.
Just said, talk to one of the locals there, and I think that type of reception, that type of feedback from sort of higher ups in Colorado is exactly what people feel angry about around New Hampshire and why they had been pushing for so long to get more in these properties.
Well, Austin, it's a great story. I encourage everybody to check it out, and also the graphics on it are amazing, So read it online at Bloomberg dot com, Slash BusinessWeek. Austincarb, Bloomberg News technology reporter, joining us from our Boston studio