Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz is very optimistic about his company’s ability to drive brand loyalty through geographic diversification and season pass products.
Thirteen months ago, Vail Resorts acquired Park City and subsequently integrated the resort for the 2014-2015 ski season. Vail Resorts officials are using a $50 million transformational capital plan to connect Park City and Canyons for the upcoming 2015-2016 ski season. What’s more, on June 30, 2015, Vail Resorts closed on the acquisition of Perisher in Australia, which marks its first international mountain resort.
“It (the acquisition) created a much deeper connection between our U.S. resorts and Australian skiers and riders,” Katz said during the company’s Sept. 28 fourth-quarter earnings conference call, according to Seeking Alpha. “We have so far been very pleased with the integration of the resort, its management team, its operations, and its financial results.”
Katz was very proud of the company’s fiscal results.
“The results reflect the benefit of our geographic diversification and our season pass products that allowed us to deliver these results, despite the challenging conditions throughout the season at our resorts in Tahoe and in Utah this spring,” he explained. “Our season pass revenue growth of 20.9%, excluding Perisher, continues to be at the core of our strategy providing considerable financial stability while driving customer loyalty. While we are proud of our fiscal 2015 results, we are even more excited as we head into fiscal 2016 with a more powerful network of world class resorts, more sophisticated and more robust data-driven marketing efforts and numerous growth opportunities.”
Vail Resorts’ growth is driven, primarily, by its more sophisticated and targeted efforts to move destination guests into its season pass products, with this segment representing more than three quarters of this year’s growth to-date.
“The passion of our employees is what lies at the core of our success and all of our efforts to re-imagine the mountain resort experience,” Katz explained. “Our commitment to continuing to deliver an experience of a lifetime to our guests remains unwavering and over the past few months, we have made significant capital improvements across our network of resorts, including significant investments in Utah as well as lift and snow-making improvements at our other resorts, along with technology investments that will benefit our entire company. We believe investments of this nature are a true differentiator for our guests, a key driver of our growth and critical to our long-term success.”