Podcast #91: Snow Partners (Big Snow, Mountain Creek) CEO Joe Hession

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Who

Bill Rock, Chief Operating Officer of Vail Resorts Rocky Mountain Region and Executive Vice President of the Mountain Division

Recorded on

June 13, 2022

About Vail Resorts’ Rocky Mountain Region

This is it, the inner empire. Where hyperbole suits just fine. This is why people in suburban Detroit buy an Epic Pass. To get here. “Aspirational.” That’s Rock’s word for his half-dozen cloud-pokers. It fits. Even for Keystone, a favorite target of the Cool Kids who only ride Snowbird Brah. Whatever. Keystone is great - it’s bigger, as you can see, than Breck, and it’s about to get larger with the Bergman Bowl expansion, opening next winter.

Why I interviewed him

For many, just visiting these snowy kingdoms is not enough. Relocation becomes the only option. They turn west, to the mountains, and there they hack out whatever life they can. I’m not talking Grizzly Adams here. They’re not building log cabins and churning their own butter. But housing in most Western ski towns - and certainly the ones listed above - is limited and expensive. Wages are, historically, low. Skiing is expensive, always.

For a long time, the skiing was enough to offset the other burdens. Then things changed. Covid, of course. But less discussed is the drying up of immigrant visas of the sort that destinatin resorts had long used to staff front-line positions. The rising labor movement. Workers, suddenly empowered, no longer had to settle for the fast-food wages of decades past. Vail had to adjust, and in March, the company rolled out a $20 minimum wage for frontline workers next season.

But another very real factor contributing to last season’s labor shortage was a sudden and dramatic re-ordering of the mountain-town housing market. White collar workers, liberated by remote work, moved en masse to the mountains. This further distorted an already unbalanced market, driving out whatever shadows of affordability remained.

So Vail’s plan also included a significant investment in affordable worker housing, on land that - the company emphasized - it already owned. If that sounds like a straightforward proposal, then you are unfamiliar with the workings of U.S. America, where all easy things are hard and all hard things are impossible. Rock, I figured, could help us at least understand the current conditions impacting resort-town decision making.

What we talked about

The shift to midweek skiing and what it means for Vail and the Epic Pass; Vail’s 2021-22 operational challenges and successes; chasing the military’s camaraderie and sense of purpose until finding it at Bristol; a regional hopscotch leading to Vail; Northstar as Vail’s executive talent incubator; the company’s monster employee-investment initiative announced in March; how Vail decided on a $20-an-hour-minimum wage for next season; beefing up the HR staff and what that means for the future of the HR tool (commonly referred to as Vail’s “HR app”); owning last-year’s employee-support challenges; the company’s new flexible work policy; why Vail Resorts’ ski area social media accounts have seemed more lively over the past several months; why Vail’s 165-bed employee housing project has stalled in East Vail; “people have gotten really good at gumming up the works”; luxury townhomes go unprotested but suddenly everyone is very concerned about bighorn sheep when it comes time to build affordable housing; the potential of the Ever Vail parcel and if there is a better way to build; updates on employee housing developments in Park City, Whistler, and Okemo; Vail’s $300 million-plus 2022 lift investment and what that portends for the future; “I don’t know if we can find 21 lifts to do every year”; thoughts on why Vail hasn’t sold a lift in several years; the current status of the Bergman Bowl expansion at Keystone; thoughts on new lifts going in at Vail and Park City; “in a town that has over 70 lifts, to do two replacement lifts should really not be controversial at all.”

Why I thought that now was a good time for this interview

Last month, I wrote a long piece about a dispute between the Town of Vail and Vail Resorts:

Unfortunately, we have entered an era in which absolutism reigns. As the ski industry housing crisis accelerates to levels that are endangering the viability of lift-served skiing as a sustainable enterprise, the town of Vail last week activated the nuclear option to block Vail Resorts’ long-planned affordable housing project near Vail Mountain. Per Jason Blevins in...