Updated Wednesday, March 11, 2026 at 3:40 p.m.
Vail Resorts, the biggest name in skiing, cut its financial forecasts as a lack of snow in the western states erodes the bottom line.
Skier visits at Vail’s U.S. resorts were down 11.9 percent through March 1 compared to last winter, according to the company’s second-quarter earnings update for Wall Street investors. The Broomfield-based resort giant missed its financial targets.
“This has been the most challenging winter across the Rockies that we have ever experienced, with the lowest snowfall levels in more than 30 years for our Colorado and Utah resorts, combined with warmer temperatures, resulting in reduced terrain throughout the quarter and into February,” CEO Rob Katz said in a statement.
At the end of February, only 70 percent to 80 percent of acreage in Colorado and Utah was open, Katz said during a conference call for investors. Its western resorts include marquee ski areas such as Breckenridge, Beaver Creek, Keystone and Vail Mountain in Colorado, as well as Park City Mountain in Utah.
The Colorado-based company’s portfolio of ski areas has ballooned to 42 globally. The company’s North American holdings span from Canada’s Whistler Blackcomb and Washington’s Stevens Pass to Vermont’s Stowe. But the Rocky Mountain region is still the company’s biggest earnings generator, Katz said. The terrible season there was enough to pull down financial results companywide, he said.
In September, Vail forecast a key measure of its annual earnings to be between $842 million and $898 million. That forecast was slashed to between $745 million and $775 million.
All of Vail’s business lines took a hit. Ski school revenue was down 8.2 percent. Dining revenue fell 8.6 percent. Rental revenue declined 5.7 percent. And lift ticket revenue, which includes a portion of season pass sales, was down 3.6 percent.
The company’s shares on Wall Street – which have lost half their value in the past five years – fell a little more after the release of its financial results.
Vail introduced the Epic Pass in 2008 as a way to mitigate the risk of poor snow by locking people into buying their tickets ahead of time. The Epic Pass offers access to all of the company's resorts for the entire winter at a tiny fraction of what it would cost to buy all those lift tickets individually.
The strategy is widely seen as changing the economics of the ski industry. Its main competitor is Alterra Mountain Company’s Ikon pass, which was launched in 2018.
Sales of the Epic Pass boomed for more than a decade. But sales of the Epic Pass have slowed in recent years amid complaints about crowds. At the same time, individual lift ticket sales at Vail properties slumped under the weight of the sky-high cost of a day pass.
Vail is pulling different levers to lure more skiers and snowboarders to its mountains. In a bid to attract Gen Z customers, Vail announced that skiers between the ages of 13 and 30 will get a 20 percent discount on next winter’s Epic Pass. Over the summer, the company rolled out a program that gives Epic Pass holders half-price lift tickets for family and friends.
A full-price Epic Pass for next winter is currently going for $1,089, a 3.6 percent increase from last year. The lack of snow this winter will make those passes a tougher sell.
“I think it's certainly something that people will take into account,” Katz said. “But I think what we've seen historically, when there are big aberrations like what we saw this year in terms of weather … is that people tend to look at … how many times they may have used their pass as also an aberration. That it's not really that they don't love skiing. It's not that they're not as connected to the sport, but just that the weather didn't show up this year.”
Still, Katz acknowledged the challenging terrain ahead.
“There's no doubt that it absolutely means that we have to work hard to reach people who may not have come as much, or may not have come at all,” he said.
