Matthew Prince, the Old Town resident who recently acquired the holdings at the base of the Town Lift, has publicly signaled his interest in acquiring Park City Mountain from Vail Resorts.
The publicly traded Colorado-based owner, though, has said it is not interested in a transaction.
“We are proud to be a part of this community and are committed to supporting the people, businesses and spirit that make it so special,” said John Kanaly, senior manager of communications for Park City Mountain. “With that said, (CEO) Rob Katz made it very clear that Park City Mountain is not for sale in his remarks during our fiscal 2025 third quarter results in June. That remains true today and will continue to be the case.”
Prince, the multibillionaire co-founder and CEO of tech firm Cloudflare, in an interview described the publicly traded Vail Resorts as having “some real, just fundamental problems.” Prince sees one being “their model of owning the underlying assets … and then selling passes against it” as compared to another major player in the ski industry with a presence in Park City, Alterra Mountain Company.
He elaborated later: “There are two models in the ski industry, the Alterra/Ikon Pass model and the Vail/Epic Pass model. Alterra allows local ownership of the underlying resorts where the Ikon Pass works, like Snowbasin, Alta and Snowbird. Vail almost exclusively owns the underlying resorts and manages them remotely. The Alterra model is better than the Vail model both in terms of the experience at resorts and as a business.”
Prince’s statements were made in the context of his public comments about his interest in acquiring Park City Mountain.
“Vail is about a between $5 (billion) and $6 billion company. The underlying assets that Vail has, if they just turned around and sold them, would be worth way more than what Vail’s market cap is. And so that inherently means that something in terms of asset allocation has gone way off the rails,” Prince said.
That sort of scenario, he said, has attracted interest from investors who may have different ideas about how the firm could be managed. Prince holds zero shares of Vail Resorts.
“I think that when you have a public company … where their underlying assets are worth more than the (market capitalization of the company), that creates a lot of incentive for activist investors to come in and say, we’ll take a position to do that. Now, I’m not … in that business, but I’ve certainly talked to a lot of activist investors who are circling around Vail,” he said.
Should an opportunity arise via a move by an activist investor regarding Vail Resorts, Prince said, he is prepared to acquire Park City Mountain. He said he is confident he could finance an acquisition of Park City Mountain in a short time.
“I’ve said, here’s the deal: If (an activist investor) were to take a position in Vail, I can, we can, very quickly find a way (for them) to get cash out of that by I’ll buy the mountain,” he said.
He likened the situation at Vail Resorts to a firm with holdings in gold.
“If you had a company and it had, you know, a safe full of gold bars that were worth $20 billion, but the company was being back valued at $5 billion, at some point, someone comes in and says, ‘Well, we’re going to shut down everything else, and we’re just going to sell the gold bars,’ … and it’s a better business,” he said.
Prince added in regard to Vail Resorts: “The underlying assets are worth more than … it’s trading for. And so again, you can, you just … imagine a world in which they said, OK, we’re going to go out and we’re going to sell Park City to me, or whoever the highest bidder is. You could sell Whistler/Blackcomb. You could sell Vail itself. You could sell, you know, all of their different pieces. They would have more than $5 billion in assets from that, and they could still have an Epic Pass.”
If Prince were to someday acquire Park City Mountain, he would “operate the mountain in a way that, again, is very much focused on how do we serve the local community and make this the world-class mountain that it should be, as opposed to, you know, what we have now, where you got a lift like Silverlode. It was installed the same year that I was a ski instructor here, which was a long time ago. It is way past its useful life. If Silverlode breaks down, the entire mountain breaks down. … The mountain needs investment. It’s really tough to do that if you’re a big public company.”
Park City Mountain in 2022 sought to upgrade the Silverlode Express lift, and had acquired the equipment, before the approval process was overturned by the Park City Planning Commission, sending the case to court. The lift has not been upgraded to date.
Vail Resorts acquired Park City Mountain in 2014 from Powdr Corp. in a $182.5 million deal that ended a bitterly contested lawsuit centered on a lease of the terrain underlying much of the Park City side of the resort. Vail Resorts shortly afterward linked Park City Mountain with what was at the time a separate property called Canyons Resort, creating the sprawling resort that now exists. The relationship between Vail Resorts and the Park City community has been strained at times in the 11 years since the acquisition, with issues including a trademark controversy, crowd management on the slopes, parking and a strike last holiday season by the resort’s ski patrol.
In the quarterly earnings call in June, CEO Rob Katz said the company didn’t believe selling Park City Mountain was in the long-term interests of Vail Resorts.
“We think … especially a resort like Park City, of course, is critical to our overall company and our network,” he said. “And yes, we think it’s incumbent upon us to continue to listen to the feedback from our guests, from our community partners, and continue to drive improvement, both in the way that we deliver an experience for our guests, the way that we deliver for our employees and the way that we deliver for our community members.”
Prince co-owns The Park Record with his wife, Tatiana Prince.