Speaker 1: You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Messer and
Speaker 1: Tim Stenebeck on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 2: Well.
Speaker 1: Vail Resorts is an eight point three billion dollar publicly
Speaker 1: traded company with more than seven thousand employees. It's known
Speaker 1: as the operator of some pretty legendary ski areas in
Speaker 1: Colorado in the American West, including Veil, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Keystone, Whistler,
Speaker 1: Heavenly and more.
Speaker 2: Yeah, even though it's called Veil Resorts, about two thirds
Speaker 2: of the properties it has in North America are now
Speaker 2: east of the Rockies, and this is thanks to an
Speaker 2: acquisition spree over the last seven years or so, and
Speaker 2: the highest concentration of resorts are in the northeast. One
Speaker 2: of those resorts is out of Tached Mountain. It's in
Speaker 2: New Hampshire. Hey.
Speaker 1: Austin Carr, Bloomberg News technology reporter, drew the short straw
Speaker 1: and had the tough assignment of spending a significant amount
Speaker 1: of time at a ski resort, writing about it for
Speaker 1: Bloomberg Business Week. You can check out Austin's story on
Speaker 1: the Bloomberg Terminal and at Bloomberg dot com Slash BusinessWeek.
Speaker 1: Austin joins us now from our Boston studio. So Austin,
Speaker 1: you did go to ad Attash and spend some time
Speaker 1: there over the last few months. But what you found
Speaker 1: is really interesting because some of the skiers there have
Speaker 1: been pretty upset with their corporate overlords over the past
Speaker 1: few years. Bring us up to speed on what's going
Speaker 1: on at at attachh and how that speaks about the
Speaker 1: Biggerville Resorts story.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so Attached is one of the old timey New
Speaker 3: Hampshire mountains that Vale Resorts bought up a few years ago.
Speaker 3: And this is a resort that dates back to the
Speaker 3: nineteen sixties, if not earlier. You know, it's one of
Speaker 3: those sort of places in world New Hampshire that skiers
Speaker 3: obsess about. Despite the icy conditions, the rainfall, the wind,
Speaker 3: and it was very dated until Veil Resort bought it.
Speaker 3: They had a lift that was frequently breaking down. It
Speaker 3: took about twenty minutes to get to the top, at
Speaker 3: which point people felt frozen. There was bad snowmaking, there
Speaker 3: was poor infrastructure, bad service, and everyone thought this would
Speaker 3: be totally upgraded when Vail bought the mountain in twenty nineteen,
Speaker 3: but that didn't happen at all. In fact, the sort
Speaker 3: of years that I was looking into the story and
Speaker 3: talking to people around at Attached more recently, they were
Speaker 3: upset about everything under Veil. They thought they were going
Speaker 3: to get this huge, deluxe overhaul and anything, but that happened.
Speaker 3: They just actually ended up with pretty mediocre conditions, which
Speaker 3: you would never expect under some of that owns, breck
Speaker 3: and Ridge and Vil.
Speaker 2: So what happened Austin? What does Vale say?
Speaker 3: So Val basically bought the mountain in twenty nineteen. What
Speaker 3: they say is, you know what happened six months after
Speaker 3: the acquisition, COVID hit. We were still figuring out. We
Speaker 3: bought about seventeen mountains in twenty nineteen, right before the
Speaker 3: pandemic hit, and during that process they had to deal
Speaker 3: with a huge amount of transition. There was a big
Speaker 3: global labor shortage, and when you have a labor shortage
Speaker 3: and a ski mountain, that means you don't have people
Speaker 3: to groom the mountain, to make snow, to deal with
Speaker 3: people in line scanning lift tickets, and so they just
Speaker 3: had to They basically said that they were always going
Speaker 3: to invest in these mountains, but it just took a
Speaker 3: few years to get there. But during that time there
Speaker 3: was a massive backlash towards Vale Resort, not only at
Speaker 3: at Attach, but it mountains around New England and the northeast,
Speaker 3: from Pennsylvania, New York to Vermont, at places like snow Hey.
Speaker 1: Can you talk Austin a little bit about Villa resorts
Speaker 1: strategy here of picking up a few dozen mountains over
Speaker 1: the last few years that are definitely not on the
Speaker 1: same level as what they have in the Rockies and
Speaker 1: in California. Yeah.
Speaker 3: So I think a lot of people associate Veil with
Speaker 3: puder skiing big mountains out west, as you noted in
Speaker 3: the Rockies, but a lot of their are strategies now
Speaker 3: is based around these so called feeder properties. These are smaller, local,
Speaker 3: regional resorts around major metropolitan hubs in the East, and
Speaker 3: the basic idea is that people learn on these small
Speaker 3: hills and then they graduate to an expensive trip out west.
Speaker 3: So the CEO of Veil, Kirsten Lynch, actually she grew
Speaker 3: up around Chicago, started skiing in Wisconsin, which is not
Speaker 3: a place that you'd think about for skiing, but it
Speaker 3: has a couple of small mountains, one of which they
Speaker 3: bought up about a decade ago. And they expanded from
Speaker 3: the Midwest into the East by buying all these regional
Speaker 3: local mountains, assuming that they could sort of just take
Speaker 3: I guess some of these skiers for granted the ski
Speaker 3: pass that they offer, the Epic Pass, this seasonal pass
Speaker 3: that's much cheaper than a lot of this single mountain
Speaker 3: season passes that you see out in the East. Yet
Speaker 3: I think there's something that happened with the expectations that
Speaker 3: Veil has brought to skiers, expecting that sort of high brow,
Speaker 3: high lux quality conditions that they never quite delivered or
Speaker 3: expected to have to deliver to these skiers out ease.
Speaker 1: So Austin it was I was actually living I lived
Speaker 1: in Veil when they released the Epic Pass back in
Speaker 1: two thousand and eight, and it was such a big
Speaker 1: deal because a season passed to just Veil was over
Speaker 1: one thousand dollars. And then they come out with this
Speaker 1: thing that Robcatz design called the Epic Pass that gives
Speaker 1: you access not just to Veil, but to so many
Speaker 1: other mountains that Veil Resorts owned, all for a price
Speaker 1: of like half of what an of a pass just
Speaker 1: to Veil would cost. It was, it was, it was
Speaker 1: a huge huge innovation, and a lot has happened in
Speaker 1: the ski industry since then. There's some really interesting color
Speaker 1: in your story about the way that the folks over
Speaker 1: at at Attache felt about Veil Resorts. Talk a little
Speaker 1: bit about the what happened with the map online, because
Speaker 1: I think this kind of speaks to the way they felt.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean during the process, they really felt like
Speaker 3: second class citizens around New Hampshire or vermon and especially
Speaker 3: at ad Attached. One person told me look on Veil
Speaker 3: Resorts website, and of course when I went there, they
Speaker 3: have a big map of all their properties and at
Speaker 3: Attaches actually in the wrong place on the map, and
Speaker 3: it helped these locals. It's terrible people did not the
Speaker 3: executives at Vail might not have known quite where this
Speaker 3: mountain is. It was sort of an interesting process, sort of,
Speaker 3: you know, even talking to Veil executives about these regional properties.
Speaker 3: I mean, I talked to the CEO of Veil and
Speaker 3: I was just asking her, you know, she kept saying,
Speaker 3: we want each of these local mountains to have their
Speaker 3: own identity, And when I asked her what the identity
Speaker 3: of at Attached should be, she didn't have an answer.
Speaker 3: Just said, talk to one of the locals there, and
Speaker 3: I think that type of reception, that type of feedback
Speaker 3: from sort of higher ups in Colorado is exactly what
Speaker 3: people feel angry about around New Hampshire and why they
Speaker 3: had been pushing for so long to get more in
Speaker 3: these properties.
Speaker 1: Well, Austin, it's a great story. I encourage everybody to
Speaker 1: check it out, and also the graphics on it are amazing,
Speaker 1: So read it online at Bloomberg dot com, Slash BusinessWeek. Austincarb,
Speaker 1: Bloomberg News technology reporter, joining us from our Boston studio