Vail Resorts, Inc. (NYSE:MTN) Q3 2023 Earnings Call Transcript

Ben Chaiken: Okay. That makes sense. And then for my second question, on the cost side, historically, you’ve talked about three areas. I think you highlighted workforce management, guest self-service and automation. Regarding the workforce management, any color on the timing of that broader roll-out? And then separately, how incremental was this initiative at Park City and Whistler where I believe you’ve been trialing it the last couple of years? Meaning, is there a noticeable improvement in EBITDA margins at those properties and guest experience? I’m just trying to get a feel of how those assets performed relative to prior years or comparable to similar mountains, if that makes sense? Thanks.

Kirsten Lynch: Yes. We piloted workforce management for 2 years at Park City and also with Whistler Blackcomb. We did see a noticeable improvement in a couple of areas. One is, our managers in our Mountain operations ability to be efficient in their allocation of labor based on the demand of the business. And we also saw a noticeable improvement in the impact on our employees’ experience in terms of their ability to understand what hours are available across the resort that they can actually sign up for based on what their particular needs are, which right now is managed very differently resort by resort and function by function. So, those were some real improvement areas. You will see us expanding workforce management for this upcoming season because of the positive impacts that we saw on our ability to be efficient with labor and also the positive impact for the employee experience. So, yes, we do plan on expanding that this coming season.

Ben Chaiken: I appreciate it. Thank you.

Kirsten Lynch: Thanks, Ben.

Operator: We’ll take our next question from Chris Woronka of Deutsche Bank.

Chris Woronka: Hi, good afternoon everyone. Thanks for taking the questions. I guess Kirsten, Angela, now with the 2022/2023 North American season in the books, can you maybe give us a little bit of a sense on ancillary? How much of your gains there came from pricing versus volume, compared to last season? I think – I guess I’m thinking about things mostly like food and beverage and ski school and stuff like that.

Kirsten Lynch: Yes. I mean, on a high-level comment – and I’ll let Angela comment on it as well. On a high level, we saw very strong growth on ski school, rental, retail and food and beverage. I think we’ve shared this in prior earnings call that even though food and beverage growth was very strong versus prior year, we still didn’t get all the way back to where we expected to be on food and beverage and have very specific plans in place next year to continue to build and get that business back to where it was pre-COVID. And F&B was really differentially impacted because there were so many restrictions that we had put in place associated with F&B that were unique and different relative to our ski school and our rental/retail business. Angela may have some additional comments that she wants to make. Go ahead, Angela.

Angela Korch: Yes. The only thing I’ll add, I mean those were the key themes. I mean, we obviously had a very strong rebound from where we were at last year because of our staffing initiatives, right? Getting us back to full staffing allowed us to fully operate and so that had a big impact year-over-year. And then relative to pre-COVID, we saw some really strong continued improvements, and we start passing on more than the inflation to your question on price versus volume. And F&B, as Kirsten mentioned, is the one picture that we have not seen [since as the volumes return] [ph] all the way back to pre-COVID.