Will the Epic pass affect season pass prices in the northeast?

[Epicone]

I also think the Muellers were smart to sell Triple Peaks when VR came calling. Although it had to be hard for their children since they were running Crested Butte to switch gears.

The other resort that was picked up just before the pandemic changed everything was Crystal in QA. Clearly John Kircher's son had to shift his career plans quite a bit with that sale. John had grand plans for Crystal when he pulled out of Boyne Resorts to have a simpler approach. Stability is not easy to achieve in the ski industry.

Was the price of the Sugarbush season pass as high as Stowe was before it joined Epic? For Stowe, it was over $2000. So for locals to shift to Epic was quite a decrease.

I think John Kircher and Stephen Kircher are brothers not father/ son, from reading press articles and reading between those lines, I think Stephen wanted him out of the business, and gave crystal Mtn to get him out of the business, but I could be wrong on that.

 

[Epicone]

I took a peak at AZ a while back. Chose not to get involved. The regular posters on AZ are not the market that Waterville Valley is targeting. There is no question that Waterville had a low period. But in recent years they have upgraded lifts, added Green Peak, and have more lift upgrades in the works. Plus Waterville has the cross country trails. Based on my personal experience skiing there a couple times, I don't get the sense that WV is in any danger of disappearing any time soon.

Would Waterville be a good candidate as a partner for Ikon? The advantage is that the number of days is limited so less risk of being overrun. But a different market than those who buy the Indy Pass.

Could Waterville be an acquisition target for VR? What VR got from Peak Resorts were resorts where recent upgrade projects were finished. Certainly the case for Hunter and Mount Snow at least.

Could Waterville be an acquisition target for Alterra? Alterra has Sugarbush and Stratton in VT for the NYC/NJ, CT market. Ikon includes Loon, Sunday River, Sugarloaf for the Boston market.

Just looked at stats for loon Mtn and Bretton woods, always thought Bretton woods was a hill for the fufu crowd staying at the mt Washington hotel, but it’s a real ski area, more acreage than loon, less vertical than loon, I could see vail in the future buying it, the hotel run by rock resorts, especially if vail has written of buying Smuggs ski area. Skied Smuggs last winter was shocked how small or how old everything is their, I don’t think Smuggs is worth more than 10 million, based upon the infrastructure I saw, great Mtn though, if Vermont won’t allow vail to connect the two mtns, Smuggs is worthless to vail, in my opinion, vail would rather have Bretton woods, but who knows what vail is thinking. Or if vail needs an overflow Mtn, relatively close to Stowe, Bolton valley could be the candidate. Read an article about Smuggs shortly after vail bought Stowe, sure sounded like the owner of Smuggs wanted to talk about either selling out to them or connecting the two, that was my impression anyway.

 

[MarzNC]

I think John Kircher and Stephen Kircher are brothers not father/ son, from reading press articles and reading between those lines, I think Stephen wanted him out of the business, and gave crystal Mtn to get him out of the business, but I could be wrong on that.

Yes, John and Stephen are brothers. The sons of Everett Kircher who created Boyne Mountain "out of a molehill" with 300 ft vertical in the 1950s. I think the reasons John moved out of Boyne Resorts are more complicated and perhaps more personal. After all the brothers had been working together for a long time. John brought Crystal into Boyne Resorts while he was based at Big Sky. Did you know John had cancer? His wife wrote a book about that era in their lives. She was the head of Crystal Ski Patrol.

My point was that John Kircher's son expected to take over at Crystal. It could not have been an easy decision for John, Kim, and their son to decide to sell.

 

[Epicone]

Listened to Stephen Kircher on a couple of podcasts very sharp guy, boyne resorts and the ski industry are lucky to have him.

 

[Brownski]

The more I think about it, the more I think that acquisitions and upgrades are just going to stop for the next few years. If the courts ever get around to disposing of Jay and Burke, expect them to be bought by a non-ski-centric company at a bargain price. Hopefully some retired tech billionaires are interested in owning their own resorts because the big conglomerates are gonna need to offload their lease profitable resorts. What if VT doesn’t get their collective head right in time to salvage a season? Right now most of the northeast’s population is persona non grata up there.

 

[Epicone]

The more I think about it, the more I think that acquisitions and upgrades are just going to stop for the next few years. If the courts ever get around to disposing of Jay and Burke, expect them to be bought by a non-ski-centric company at a bargain price. Hopefully some retired tech billionaires are interested in owning their own resorts because the big conglomerates are gonna need to offload their lease profitable resorts. What if VT doesn’t get their collective head right in time to salvage a season? Right now most of the northeast’s population is persona non grata up there.

 

[Epicone]

I think your right about acquisitions and the upgrades, it will take years to get back to precovid financial situation, the wild card in all this is a Covid vaccine, if one comes November/December, a normal ski life could return pretty quickly, if they have a vaccine, this will be a blow out season for Skiing, as well as cross country skiing and snowshoeing, snowmobiling etc,. You can see how the big four ski companies drive the industry, without them in the jay Peak mix their is very little interest in jay Peak, plus the federal receiverships is asking way too much for jay. Not sure vail will sell anything for a few reasons, unless they have to to stay afloat, the small resorts are their to drive demand for the epic pass, The Vermont resorts are destination resorts and feeder mtns for the western resorts, kinda cool how they set that up. plus they know it’s a buyers markets for ski areas not a sellers market, when vail closes the epic pass sales and they equal or surpass last years totals, why would they sell a feeder? my guess they sell about 100k less passes than last year, but who knows, lots of wild cards at plan with Covid 19.

 

[Benny Profane]

Vail does not make most of it's money selling Epic passes.

 

[Epicone]

True, lift ticket revenue equals roughly 50 percent of their revenue, which also includes day tickets, my guess, the passes equal 50 percent of the lift ticket revenue, they can do short term investments in commercial paper with these funds, like the old saying you need money to make money. Latest earnings report they had sold 850000 season passes, times that by 500 dollars that’s 425000 million , 425 million in commercial paper, what’s that another 20 million, 30 million, who knows

 

[Benny Profane]

You must of missed it earlier this year, but Vail borrowed a ton in the early part of the shutdown. In other words, sold a chunk of the company to survive, because even before Covid they were having money issues. The acquisition war has been going on for a while now between them and Alterea and the forces behind that company before it was Alterea. Basically, sorry, Ahole finance guys waving their little things. We've been through it before with ASC, and that never ends well. These people are poison to America, but, I digress.
I know money is cheap, but, with the massive loss of revenue they have seen and may well experience for possibly years, sane minds will probably prevail. Ha. Prevail.