According to the Vail press release the purchase did NOT include many of the lodges at the mountain and did also NOT include future real estate development sites. So maybe Vail will not be looking at dropping season pass prices and then making up the short fall with lodging visits and real estate sales.
Vail has said publicly that they (Vail Development Corp) cannot be the primary real estate developer at each resort, and might focus on a limited number of luxury properties across the expanding portfolio.
This is why the "beds on base" concept is important: they don't have to be developed by Vail, just by somebody in order to create the captive tourist market for the adjacent services.
All of Vail's major recent acquisitions share the features of an already established base and already established multi-season tourist market. What Vail does is provide the connective tissue, at the heart of which of course is the EpicPass and the on mountain infrastructure across the portfolio.
What seems to irritate people Is the monetizing of that strategy, although that hardly wasn't already the case at Whistler, Park City, Deer Valley, and Stowe. Which arguably means those local skiers just got a huge benefit of now being tied to the EpicPass.
I get that people think Vail is going to eat the world, but they don't want "ski areas" where the only possible connective tissue would be being "on the pass", unless it's something like Perisher where you are after the Japan market for a Southern Hemisphere customer base. So Vail is going to own all of the places you already claim to hate, and probably none of them you don't.
And if they take on a major development project by say buying Mammoth, it would be a departure from current strategy. Vail has so much to do in terms of the on mountain two season infrastructure strategy and the coming year round EpicPass. I'd be worried more about their impact on boardwalk visits as a seaside resort owner than an acquisition of a place the ski world thought was immune to their influence.
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