The ski patrollers at Park City Mountain say their new contract with Vail Resorts, which ended the first ski patrol strike in decades, “is a great success for everyone in the ski and mountain industry.”
The Park City ski patrol union on Thursday posted on Instagram saying the 10-month negotiations with Vail Resorts and the 12-day strike resulted in a contract that “achieved our goals.” The contract increased starting wages for Park City Mountain patrollers by $2 an hour for an average increase of $4 an hour for the union’s 200 members, with the most tenured ski patrollers getting an average increase of $7.75 an hour.
Bill Rock, the head of mountain resorts for Vail Resorts, in a note late Wednesday to the company’s 55,000 employees, said the pay agreement with Park City Mountain patrollers “is consistent with our company’s wage structure for all patrollers, unionized and non-unionized, while accounting for the unique terrain and avalanche complexity of Park City Mountain.”
On Wednesday, freshly unionized ski patrollers at Keystone ski area met with Vail Resorts administrators to negotiate a new contract with a company that swells to 55,000 employees in the peak of ski season. Like their Park City colleagues, the Keystone patrollers are seeking increased pay and benefits to help them better manage life in Summit County, where the average home price is around $1 million. The 58 ski patrollers at Alterra Mountain Co.’s Arapahoe Basin were scheduled to vote on forming a union Wednesday and Saturday this week.
The company proposed a similar wage format for Keystone patrollers during a long day of negotiations Wednesday, said Jake Randall, a Keystone ski patroller representing the patroller union there.
The Park City Mountain patrollers “set the precedent for other patrols,” Randall said, noting there are nine other outstanding contract issues that have been unaddressed by the company “for months now. We’ll see how this ‘mountain complexity’ incentive pans out for the rest of us.”
The United Mountain Workers union — which formed in 2003 under the Communications Workers of America Local 7781 as the United Professional Ski Patrollers of America — now represents more than 1,100 workers at 13 ski resorts, including Breckenridge, Crested Butte Mountain, Eldora, Keystone, Loveland, Purgatory, Steamboat and Telluride ski areas.
“A rising tide raises all ships and the progress made in this contract illuminates the path forward for all ski patrollers, unionized or not,” said Ryan Dineen, a ski patroller at Breckenridge who helps other resort workers form unions.
Vail Resorts stock price down $10 a share since strike
While Park City patrollers collected more than $300,000 in an online fundraising campaign, Vail Resorts’ stock price remains near a five-year low, pummeled by widespread news reports and often-fiery social media posts showing long lift lines as the largest ski area in North America struggled to open more than a quarter of its terrain during the first ski patroller strike in decades.
Vail Resorts is often the scapegoat for all that ails the increasingly consolidating resort industry, but the tsunami of criticism overwhelming the company in the past week is unprecedented.
The company’s stock price — traded under the MTN ticker — has fallen by $10 a share since the 200 patrollers at Park City Mountain Resort went on strike. That’s a decline of about $375 million in stock value considering the company’s 37.5 million outstanding shares.
The deluge of bad PR has certainly been more costly than increased paychecks for ski patrollers. How much more? That’s hard to say. Park City Mountain surely saw some declines in on-mountain spending during the strike. (The company suspended walk-up ticket sales Dec. 30.) But analysts who watch Vail Resorts worry the impact of the strike will come later this year when it’s time to buy tickets and passes for the 2025-26 season, with declines in lift ticket revenue potentially eclipsing payroll costs.
“We see the bigger risks coming from guests not renewing their Epic passes, not returning to PCMR next holiday season, and even more so from any wage increases to the PCMR patrollers possibly/eventually flowing through to hourly wages for employees at other/all MTN resorts,” Patrick Scholes, an analyst who watches Vail Resorts for Truist Securities, wrote to his investors in a Jan. 6 email. “While we do not take any sides on the contract negotiations, optically from a public relations perspective, it is not a good look for MTN to be playing hardball on an extra two dollars an hour in wages, to $23 from $21, when single day ski passes are currently going for over $300.”
Vail Resorts sold 2.3 million advance-purchase — and nonrefundable — lift tickets and season passes for the 2024-25 season, reaching the company’s goal of collecting more than 65% of its $1.4 billion in lift ticket revenue (and 75% of its visitation) from advanced sales of Epic Pass lift tickets and season passes. Part of the strategy to compel skiers to buy early includes pricing walk-up lift ticket prices above $300.
“If it were me, I’d never give Vail another dollar, I’d never vacation at one of their resorts again,” entertainment industry analyst Bob Lefsetz wrote in his influential Lefsetz Letter on Jan. 5.
Jim Burkett seems to be leaning that way. The vacationer from Tucson, Arizona, spent “thousands and thousands” on multiday lift tickets to Park City Mountain for his group of 15 family and friends over the holidays. They waited in lift lines more than they skied.
“And we got tired of skiing the same runs all day,” Burkett said in an interview with The Sun. “I don’t really want to throw stones at Vail when everyone else is piling on but this is something that you can’t ignore. I sent emails to their customer service and they didn’t really handle my complaint. It makes me wonder about being a Vail customer in the future.”
Vail Resorts stock repurchases versus employee pay
One thing that sits in the craw of unionized workers at Vail Resorts is the company’s focus on buying back shares of its stock, a move that increases shareholder value by reducing the total number of outstanding shares, which increases earnings per share.
Since 2008, the company has spent $1.1 billion to repurchase 9.4 million shares of its stock, but in the past two years the buyback plan has picked up steam.
Since April 2023, the company has spent $670 million to repurchase shares. In September, the company’s board authorized Vail Resorts to buy back an additional 1.1 million shares in the coming years.
In a letter sent to Vail Resorts CEO Kirsten Lynch on Dec. 31, unionized ski patrollers at Breckenridge, Crested Butte, Keystone and Park City said the unions “remain committed to the success of Vail Resorts.” But the patrollers said the company’s roughly $1.6 billion in stock buybacks and cash dividends in the past three years “could be more equitably shared between the investors who passively accumulate wealth and the workforce whose labor make this financial prosperity possible.”