Vail Resorts has never sold a ski area.
Matthew Prince, the 50-year-old billionaire behind the tech company Cloudflare, wants to change that. He lifts up his phone on a Zoom call with The Colorado Sun and shows a graphic of Vail Resorts’ struggling stock price, which is nearly identical today to what it was in 2016.
“The current management team does not sell properties,” says Prince, who is haranguing the Vail Resorts to sell him Park City Mountain Resort, where he grew up and worked as a ski instructor in the mid-1990s. Now he’s the wealthiest person in Utah. “Do you think the current management team is going to be around for long? Something is gonna break.”
Prince says shareholders will soon recognize that Vail Resorts, with 42 ski areas in the U.S., Canada, Austria and Australia, is “a bad capital allocator.”
The big problem, Prince says, is the stable of resorts are worth way more than $5 billion and Vail Resorts’ market capitalization — the company’s current share price (around $137, down more than 60% from its 2021 peak) times the number of outstanding shares (around 35.6 million) on the market — that is less than the combined value of all those ski hills.
“At some point shareholders are going to say you know what, you don’t get to be a capital allocator anymore,” Prince says. “I was hopeful they would come to that conclusion themselves.”
So Prince wants to buy his home hill, Park City Mountain Resort, a Vail Resorts flagship and the largest ski area in the U.S. Selling Park City Mountain Resort “is the right thing to do,” he says.
Matthew Prince, a tech billionaire who grew up in Park City, Utah, is pushing Vail Resorts to sell the Park City ski area. (Handout)His idea is that Vail Resorts should shift to an “asset-light” franchise model, where it partners with resorts that want to be included on its Epic Pass. That way the company would not have to own 42 ski areas on three continents.
“You don’t need to own the resorts in order to have the resorts take your pass,” he says. “The right answer here is to sell off the underlying resorts and then negotiate a franchise model. You can’t have stock that is limping along for 10 years and not have a change.”
That change is coming, Prince says.
“Current management has not ever gotten rid of a resort but I’m not sure that the current management is long for this world,” he says of the leadership team that includes CEO Rob Katz.
Activist investors, the types with big pockets who look for undervalued companies they can buy with debt and dismantle for their parts in hostile takeover of the company — a la Michael Douglas’ Gordon Gecko in the movie “Wall Street” — are calling him.
Prince says he’s not interested in taking over Vail Resorts. He does not want to buy the company, only one of its hills. But the hostile takeover barbarians are gathering at the gate, he says. They could seize the company and pay off the purchase by selling a few trophies, like Whistler-Blackcomb, which Vail Resorts bought a decade ago for more than $1 billion, Breckenridge, Vail-Beaver Creek and Park City Mountain Resort.
“That is a serious problem,” Prince says. “I don’t think that people appreciate how big a hole they are in and how deep it can potentially go.”
Prince first started urging Vail Resorts — via short social media bursts — to sell him Park City Mountain Resort in March. He thought he would get the ski area in five years and “it was inevitable that I would get it in the next 25 years.”
“I am now increasingly convinced it’s going to happen a lot faster than that, because they’re in real trouble,” he says.
Prince has a plan for operating the ski hill. It would not be anything like the members-only Wasatch Peaks Ranch ski resort to the north. Nor would it mirror fellow billionaire Reed Hastings’ plan to blend public and private skiing at his Powder Mountain ski area, also to the north of Park City.
“The last thing that I want to do in the world is hang out with more rich people,” he says. “Park City should be a world-class resort, open to locals and visitors alike.”
But he does not like the idea of unlimited skiing on one of the mega-passes. He sees limited access, like neighboring ski area Deer Valley, which is owned by Alterra Mountain Co. Prince says he is ready to invest $500 million in the Park City ski area, with a focus on snowmaking, lift upgrades and sharing profits with employees.
He sees too many old lifts at Park City. He’s still irked — as many locals are — about the 2025 holiday ski patroller strike that the company has admitted it did not handle well. Vail Resorts continues to rile some Park City locals as it proposes lift upgrades that could increase capacity at the ski area without addressing parking challenges.
“Fundamentally, the problem here is that the town doesn’t trust them anymore so everything is going to be a fight,” Prince says.
His answer for getting local buy-in: “The town should own part of the resort.”
The goal of owning Park City Mountain Resort is not to make a profit, he says. Last year he paid an undisclosed sum for the Park City Town Lift plaza at the base of the ski area, which includes the land beneath the resort’s Town Lift that climbs from the town’s historic Main Street.
“I could give a shit about about making any more money,” he says. “I want to take the community that’s been incredibly supportive to me from the moment I was born, and give back to it.”
That’s why he and wife Tatiana bought the 143-year-old Park Record newspaper in 2023, from Ogden Newspapers, he says. The group was reluctant to sell but after talking with Prince, “they told me … we believe you are the only person who can be a better owner than we are because you have the resources to make it better,” he says.
Prince is no stranger to scrapping with Park City leaders though. He spent the last few years in litigation with the town and neighbors over his plans for a palatial home overlooking town. The town recently settled the land use dispute, clearing the way for his palace.
A gondola connecting six resorts
If he ever does buy Park City Mountain Resort, he envisions an agreement with Deer Valley next door, with skiers able to ski both resorts on the same ticket. That kind of deal would never happen between Alterra Mountain Co. and Vail Resorts. He also sees a gondola stretching across the Wasatch Mountains, connecting Park City and Deer Valley with Brighton and Solitude ski areas in Big Cottonwood and Alta and Snowbird in Little Cottonwood. (That plan – first proposed in 2014 as One Wasatch – would span nine miles and cover some 20,000 acres of potential ski terrain.)
“With someone other than Vail as an owner … you can connect all six resorts and create the largest skiable acreage anywhere in the world,” he says. “I want this place to live up to its opportunity and potential. That’s impossible with Vail Resorts as an owner.”
Prince says he would funnel all his profits back into the ski area, promising he will not pocket a dollar as owner. That’s a simple operational model, he says, but one that doesn’t work for a publicly-traded company.
Prince says the Vail Resorts model “is like McDonald’s.”
“There’s no personality,” he says. “Vail just commodifies and dumbs down everything.”
Imagine a different model where Vail doesn’t own anything and is focused on selling Epic passes and convincing resorts they should take Epic Pass skiers, Prince says. Then resort operators and mountain communities could work together to boost their own appeal, which in turns amplifies their bargaining power with pass-selling companies like Vail Resorts and Alterra Mountain Co.
“Now you’ve got a virtuous circle where both sides are actually trying to figure out how they best fulfill customers and create real value and joy for the people who are coming,” Prince says. “It would be so amazing if we could create a model where we were all competing on how we were giving the best experience and we still have these master passes that sit on top.”
The current model does not incentivize resorts to create something unique, Prince says. And it’s removed communities from the process of luring visitors.
“Everyone needs a strong community and then one crazy local billionaire,” Prince says.
(Don’t tell that to Telluride, where their local billionaire seems bent on chaos. “That guy is not fully capable,” Prince says.)
Park City Ski Patrol strike requesting livable wages in Park City, Utah, Tuesday, Jan 7. 2025. (AP Photo/Melissa Majchrzak)For now, he’s still knocking on Vail Resorts’ door. He says no company executive has returned his calls. A sale, he says, “will require management change because the current management is just so pigheaded, which does not make any sense. Selling Park City would be great for selling Epic Passes, it would be great for Vail Resorts and it would be great for the town of Park City.”
Rob Katz, the CEO of Vail Resorts, has repeatedly told investors the company would not sell Park City Mountain Resort.
“I love Matthew. He’s super passionate and I appreciate the feedback and enthusiasm from him, but no,” Katz says, responding to a question from The Sun. “I don’t think it makes sense.”
As the resort industry continues to grapple with climate change and weather patterns that bury one side of the country in snow and leave the other side gasping with record-low accumulation, Katz says the efficiency of a countrywide operation with resorts in all snowy corners delivers more economic stability.
“I don’t think resorts individually going it alone is the best approach,” Katz says.
The franchise model, Katz says, “sounds kind of like McDonald’s,” expressing a counter interpretation of Prince’s fast-food view of Vail Resorts, “which isn’t really our M.O.”
Improving the ski experience is best done at scale, Katz says.
“I think there are lots of mountains out there that Matthew could buy if he wants to. I think there’s room for everyone, but that’s not where we are focused,” Katz says. “In our minds we have to be the best company that we can be and set a standard for the industry and that’s not by selling off resorts.”
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