Vail Resorts Q3 2026 Earnings Call | Extreme Weather Woes Drag Down Pass Visitation and Revenue

Good afternoon and welcome to the Bell Resource Fiscal third quarter 2026 earnings conference call. Today's conference is being recorded. Currently, all callers have been placed in a listen-only mode and following management's prepared remarks, the call will be open for your questions. If you like to ask a question at that time, please press star one on your telephone keypad. If you need to remove yourself from the queue, press star two. To get as many questions as time permits, we ask you please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. At any time if you should need operator assistance, please press star zero. I will now turn the call over to Connie Wayne, vice president of investor relations at Veil Resorts. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Veil Resort's fiscal 2026 third quarter earnings conference call. Joining me on the call today are Rob Katz, our chief executive officer, and Angela Korch, our chief financial officer. Before we begin, let me remind you that some information provided during this call may include forward-looking statements that are based on certain assumptions and are subject to a number of risks and uncertainties as described in our SEC filings, and actual future results may vary materially. Forward-looking statements in our press release issued this afternoon along with our remarks on this call are made as of today, June 8th, 2026, and we undertake no duty to update them as actual events unfold. Today's remarks also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of these measures are provided in the tables included with our press release, which along with our quarterly report on form 10Q were filed this afternoon with the SEC and are also available on the investor relations section of our website at www.valresorts.com. I would now like to turn the call over to Rob for opening remarks.

Thanks, Connie. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our third quarter earnings call. Before getting into the details around the quarter, I want to take a minute to step back and discuss our progress against the focus areas I laid out last year. This call a year ago was my first opportunity to speak with all of you after stepping back into the CEO role. At that time, I outlined the foundational advantages that differentiate our company, including our owned and operated network, advanced commitment model, and deep guest relationships, and our commitment to leveraging those strengths to deepen guest engagement, loyalty, and drive stronger revenue growth. Now, a year later, and despite just going through a very challenging season, those priorities remain unchanged, and we are encouraged by the progress we've made in evolving our marketing approach and enhancing our lift ticket strategies. As I think it's well understood, our results this past year were significantly impacted by weather challenges across the western United States. The historically adverse weather conditions we discussed last quarter continued through March and April, which drove meaningful pressure on visitation and revenue in the quarter, particularly at our destination resorts in the Rockies, which experienced the worst season on record for snowfall. To give context on the magnitude of the impact of conditions on visitation this past season, industry-wide visitation in the Rockies declined approximately 24%. When you look back over 40 years, the prior worst decline in visitation outside of COVID related closures for the Rockies was down 8% in 2012, which illustrates the unprecedented severity of the conditions and the anomaly we just experienced. Against that backdrop, our advanced commitment strategy and geographic diversity along with our resource efficiency transformation plan and ability to use our integrated systems to remain agile on expenses were pivotal in mitigating the impact from weather this past year. At the midpoint of our updated guidance range, resort EBITDA will decline 14% from our original fiscal year 2026 guidance issued back in September 2025, which is in line with the fiscal year 2012 miss to guidance despite snowfall in the Rockies being down approximately 30% from the previous low in 2012. And year-over-year, the midpoint of resort EBITDA guidance implies a 12% decline. Nothing to cheer about, but something to be proud of given the visitation decline in a historically high fixed-cost business. Importantly, the challenging conditions did not shift our focus from delivering a high-quality guest experience as we achieved record guest experience scores, including year-over-year increases at every resort in the Rockies where we were most impacted by weather. For the third season in a row, we had full staffing in our resorts, a strong return rate for our seasonal employees, high employee engagement scores, efficient utilization of our labor hours due to workforce planning, and much better selectivity in our recruiting efforts as our need to hire new people continues to decline. We also saw a marked decline in employee injury per labor hour, typically another good indicator of improving culture. Overall, we are very pleased with our operational execution within the areas we could control. We are also encouraged by the positive proof points we're seeing across the key strategies we outlined heading into the season: evolving our marketing approach, focusing on driving lift ticket visitation and optimizing our pass product portfolio. And I'd like to provide an update on each of these. First, evolving our marketing approach. This involved increasing our focus on targeted paid media investments and adjusting the channel strategies to better reach and engage with guests. Heading into the season, we saw positive results from this shift in approach as we were able to improve the pass sales trend by 5 percentage points in the post-Labor Day selling period relative to the earlier selling period, which provided greater stability going into this past season. Additionally, with increased marketing investment and a clearer focus on our resorts, we saw increases in unaided brand awareness from destination guests for our top resorts. Second, we made changes heading into the season to focus on driving lift ticket visitation, which delivered early positive results. We expanded our passholder benefit program with Epic Friend tickets at a 50% discount and saw visitation from benefit tickets increase 10%, despite a decline in overall lift ticket visitation of 10%. In addition, we introduced super advanced lift tickets which offered a 30% discount for purchases made a month in advance, which drove a 65% increase in tickets sold more than 28 days out, and we did not see evidence of material cannibalization of other advanced ticket products. Combined with our shift in marketing approach, these strategies drove meaningful outperformance relative to the US industry in lift ticket visitation this past season based on preliminary data. As we saw, our US lift tickets declined 12% while the rest of the industry lift ticket visitation was down approximately 20%. And in the Rockies, our outperformance was even stronger. There's no doubt a portion of our outperformance was due to the destination nature of many of our resorts which may do better than local resorts in a tough weather year. But even in the Northeast, which saw excellent conditions, we saw an increase in our lift ticket visits of 8% versus the rest of the industry down an estimated 8% in the Northeast. Finally, moving on to next season's pass sales, spring pass sales were down 10% and sales dollars including tax were down 5%, which reflects softer demand following one of the worst ski seasons in history. While our overall pass sales decelerated in May from our April deadline, part of that was the timing of military sales. A portion of which got pulled forward into April due to us offering pass benefit tickets to military passholders for the first time and partly due to the timing of auto-renew charges. Excluding auto-renew and military, unit declines are very stable between the two selling periods. While we're clearly not satisfied with any decline in pass sales, the outcome is not necessarily surprising given the severity of the conditions we just experienced this past season and the massive growth we saw in pass sales in the previous 5 years, especially in our frequency products, which saw the biggest declines this past spring. Encouragingly, third party data suggests that our spring pass performance meaningfully outpaces the broader industry, which we would attribute to all the new strategies we put in place for this year. Angela will cover additional details on the spring pass results, but we do believe based on our own results and the broader market data that a portion of the decline is likely due to delayed purchase decisions rather than reduced overall intent to ski next season, creating an opportunity for improved pass performance in the fall selling season and or ultimately through in-season lift ticket purchases next year. Looking back over the past several decades, US ski market data indicates that visitation typically fully recovers following a season with poor conditions if the subsequent season has normal conditions. And we believe we are well positioned to capture that visitation recovery with the pass, analytic, product, and marketing strategies we have developed. That said, given how unprecedented this past season was, it's hard to know with certainty how any of this will play out. Looking ahead, we see a unique opportunity to drive a step change improvement in the overall guest experience across our resorts through continued investments in lifts, snowmaking, terrain, and talent while leveraging the scale and strength of our integrated network to implement new technologies and processes to enhance key elements of the guest experience. We are uniquely positioned to differentiate the guest experience as we have intentionally built a fully integrated, owned and operated network of world-class destination and regional resorts connected through our pass and marketing ecosystem and supported by unified data and technology platforms. We have key initiatives underway in our gear, ski school and dining businesses as well as every facet of guest engagement and communication, and we will share updates on these efforts in the upcoming months and throughout the year. Together, these initiatives will play an important role in driving future visitation growth and long-term value creation. With that, I'll turn it over to Angela to walk through the quarter in more detail.

Thank you. At this time, if you wish to ask a question, please press star one on your telephone keypad. You may remove yourself from the queue by pressing star two. Again, please limit yourself to one question and one follow-up. And we'll take our first question from David Cass with Jeff. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, good afternoon everyone. Good evening, good day wherever you are. I wanted to ask Angela about the comment about the young adult product pacing well ahead of other groups. Could you put some context around how well that's doing? Put some maybe relative size on that group's ability to make a difference and just some more meat on the bones around that particular comment please.

Right. And frankly, if we were to break up the different cohorts within the pass group, could you maybe give us just a bit more detail across the board on how some of those are doing and what your expectation is for those, some up some down?

Yeah, I think what we're seeing is, as Angela mentioned, one of the biggest things that we're noting is in Colorado, in Tahoe, in Utah, and in destination markets, particularly destination guests who visited the Rockies resorts or typically visit the Rockies resorts, those are where we're seeing the biggest decline. And we're seeing much more modest decline in the Northeast and in Whistler Blackcomb. So that really tells us that this is very much a conditions impact from last year as opposed to some broader structural impact. Not surprised that following the season that we just saw, the new segment of our pass sales is down a lot more than renewal. But obviously, we're heartened that the renewal piece is as strong as it is. The other piece that we would mention is that the unlimited products, which we have been focused on quite a bit since last Labor Day, are really outperforming our frequency products, and we're trying to move people from frequency up. I also would say, yes, obviously the frequency buyer is the newer buyer to the overall program, a little bit more sensitive and unlikely to buy as early given the conditions that we just went through.

Helpful. Thank you very much.

Thanks, Dave.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Kelly with Bank of America. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, good afternoon Rob and Angela. Thanks for taking my question. Rob, big picture, we're getting a lot of questions that are a little too early on sort of what the impact is of what we learned today on next year's planning. To not box you in on guidance, maybe the easiest way to ask it is based on what you know right now, do these results and what you're seeing on the pass side in particular, does it really change much in terms of how you're planning for the business, staffing for next year, and how you're thinking about the broader operating expense and planning outlook at this stage?

No, it's not. I mean, when you look back historically, what you see is that over a lot of years, both when you look at years where the Rockies did poorly, another great example is during the drought that we had in Tahoe, and then you look at the year that had normal conditions, we see every indication that visitation comes fully back and in some cases surpasses even the year before the bad year like it did in Tahoe. Some of which I think is pent up demand that gets created during a season like we just went through. That said, during those years there were no pass programs like we have today, and certainly not pass programs to the extent that we've grown them over the last five years. So it's not surprising to us that you're going to see some, especially in the spring, delayed decision-making. This would be a perfect example of when you'd expect that. So at the moment, no, we're seeing a lot of this as timing between spring and fall or even between fall and the season for lift tickets. That's why it's critical in our minds that we not only have great programs on the season pass side, but also for lift tickets. So we are planning for a normal season next year with normal conditions. That said, as we mentioned, we are dealing with an unprecedented anomaly, so there's no way that we can be exactly sure what it's going to look like, but right now there's no change in our planning for next season.

Great. And then just as my follow-up, I couldn't help but notice both in the release and also in your prepared remarks, you talked about a step function improvement on lifts, terrain, snow making, all built around the guest experience. Just wondering if you could either elaborate a little bit more or is there the right time to hear a little bit more about initiatives there that we should look forward to listening into?

Sure. I think what I'd say is it's kind of continued investments in the way we have in the past in things like lifts and snowmaking, terrain upgrades to restaurants, things like that. Where we really see the step change is taking the network of resorts that we have and using technology and new processes to elevate through system-wide or network-wide investments the experience that guests have. So that could be My Epic Gear in terms of completely changing how guests experience gear. It could be around ski school, like the digitization of ski school which is something that we announced, and we have other things that we're working on that we'll be announcing in the months ahead. Same thing with food, other things we're looking at on food, new things that we're looking at on how we connect with guests, address guest feedback, how critical and impactful the app is to everybody. In our minds, we can create a bit of an ecosystem around our resorts that meets what guests of this generation expect, which is technology that makes new processes that makes everything easier and better and eliminates all the hurdles that some people can have when they go skiing, but at the same time doesn't get in the way of their experience on snow. We think we're uniquely positioned to do that, as well as the marketing piece. Obviously, we have the ability to market passes and lift tickets to these guests with a unified marketing approach, but at the same time, and I think we saw some of the benefits of this, still elevating each resort's brand, elevating the experience and unique connection that each resort has to our guests.

Thank you.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Molly Ball with Morgan Stanley. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi. Thanks so much for taking our question. I guess one follow-up to you talked about the deferral of pass purchasing. Do you expect heightened trade down to maybe some of the lower frequency pass products if demand does materialize later in the selling season? And I guess to the extent that you can comment, I know not all of these products existed back then, but what have you seen historically after a weak weather year when it comes to the different pass products?

Yeah, I think it's a little challenging because obviously when the last time the Rockies went through this, we actually saw pass growth the following year, but that was at a much earlier stage in the overall pass maturity cycle, and we did not have frequency products like we have today. At this point, I would say that it's hard to say. We're not seeing trade down in our numbers, and obviously the strongest performers right now are the unlimited products and higher value Epic products versus regional products. So at the moment, we're not seeing any of those trends. But we'll see. I think we're in a unique moment. In the end, we don't think this is about people saying that they're not going to ski next year. We think it's about people not willing to make that commitment today. And obviously, unprecedented season that we just went through, so hard to say how it'll play out when we get through the fall.

Got it. That's helpful. And then one other one. You talked a lot about the integration of the app and fiscal 28 bringing My Epic Gear into the app. But as we kind of think about that transition, particularly on the Epic Gear launch, does that transition period create any notable revenue gap in 2027 as we're going to lose the subscription revenues? So is there anything to call out there in terms of the volatility we might see? Thank you.

I mean, what I'd say on FY27 for My Epic Gear is that it's definitely a transition year where we're moving from what we were offering before to taking the ability to select your own gear and rolling that out for all of our demo skis that we're going to sell next year. So from a financial perspective, no, we don't see any issue there. From an experience perspective, it's going from a very small high-touch experience with very few number of guests to really rolling it out to that highest end guest but across a much broader base. In FY28, you would see the full experience with high touch points and everything else being rolled out to everyone who rents, and then we'll have gradations of different parts of the experience at that point, but the ability to select your gear, the ability to have an app and get the gear wherever you want, really reducing all these friction points, the ability once you've gone through and tried on a boot or used the ski and then you like it, we can actually have that all ready for you without you coming in again and trying anything on, or even if we're delivering it to your unit or condo, you don't have to go through the process of the fitting. So all of that is really the FY28 piece, but FY27 will be the first step towards that.

Got it. Thank you so much.

Thanks.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Arpine Centuria with UBS. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi, thanks very much for taking my question. This is somewhat related to an earlier question, but assuming the current trend of down mid single digit in dollar sales for the pass product continues, that means the lift part of the business has to come in at a double digit range for overall to be flattish, which is not inconceivable after a tough year but probably hard to do. At the same time, given some nuggets of positive indicators in the release suggesting that historically visitors seem to come back after a tough year even after they delay purchase decisions initially, could you talk to the potential or path for the lift business to grow at a double-digit range based on historical patterns but also programs you might have in plan for getting lift visitors? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Yeah, I think if you look back, what I say is maybe the reverse of this. When we were growing season pass revenue 20 plus percent per year in the double digits for a long time, we absolutely saw a significant decline in lift ticket visitation as people moved from lift tickets to passes. So we do think we have every opportunity to see strong growth in lift ticket visitation if the pass business comes down. So we do think there's a fluid movement between the two products. Doesn't mean that it's perfect, and I can't exactly say because obviously we're in a unique environment exactly how that will play out, but we don't think there's any artificial cap to how we can drive lift growth. It really comes down to what the demand is. For us, the key thing was having products available for people at more accessible price points. Certainly our Epic Friend tickets, the super advanced lift ticket sold, that has performed very well and obviously only in its first year with not a ton of awareness, so we see that as a huge opportunity for next year. We were very selective last year in picking certain resorts in certain time periods to be more aggressive on specific lift ticket products, and I think you'll continue to see us do the same thing ahead of going into next year. That said, it'll always be that the best deal is going to come from a pass. So as we get towards the end of the pass selling season, we will make sure that we're reminding everybody of that fact before we go into next year. And obviously, we do have our turn in your ticket program where folks who might have used an Epic Friend ticket this year or bought any lift ticket can obviously use that to buy a pass as they go into next year.

Okay, that's helpful. Thank you. And then could we go over the levers you have to protect EBITDA given the single digit range decline so far at least in pass products seems like you might see that improving a little bit later in the season, but sort of topline dynamics and also cost side of things, what kind of underlying cost inflation we're looking at and how you look at shape of that EBITDA recovery after an anomaly here, with understanding that ultimately a lot also depends on the strength of the lift business once we get there.

Thank you very much.

Thanks.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from DMCU with BMP Therabus. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi guys, thanks for the question. Maybe kind of continuing on to the pass selling season as you go through the rest of the year or summer, how do you think are you changing any of the strategies or marketing to kind of drive a little bit of an acceleration or is it using the same marketing approach as you have the last couple months?

Yeah, I would say that we're constantly looking at whatever our results are for the last deadline especially and saying, okay, what did we learn? What can we do differently? Where can we lean in more one place or another? And we're taking all the learnings that we have in the spring and we're going to put them to work as we go through Labor Day and through the rest of the season. I do think we have opportunities. Some of the new approaches that we launched post-Labor Day last year, we have an opportunity obviously to put those in along with the learnings that we have through spring into this year's Labor Day. In the midway, we tend not to make big product changes because we feel it's critical for everyone to be making decisions on the product set that we have and important that the folks who buy earlier always get the best deal. We're not going to change from that. But in terms of how we go to market in terms of the dollars that we invest on media, that is always going to be about the numbers that we're seeing, and we did see good results from the incremental dollars that we put to work last fall. We saw good returns from the incremental dollars that we put to work this spring. So that's definitely going to be front of mind as we go into the fall.

Okay. Got it. Thanks. And then maybe continuing on to the question around the kind of lift or window ticket demand into next year. So as you mentioned, following a challenging season, you might expect conditions to normalize and visitation to recover. And if pass units are down a bit and maybe then that means that lift window tickets are higher, in a way that also creates a positive mix effect where the price per window ticket visit maybe is higher. Is that something we should be thinking about in terms of the incrementality of window ticket visit into next year in terms of EBITDA?

Yes. Absolutely. And it's important to remember that yes, we're down 10% units, 8% in days sold after this ridiculously horrible winter, we're still so far ahead of where we've been in any previous bad season in terms of advanced commitment in total. So if you think about how much advanced commitment we have at this point in front of next year versus any year we've had historically where we've had a bad season like this, we're well ahead. So actually in some respects, we're in a much stronger position as we're thinking about next season even though we had a bad year last year. And yes, there is the opportunity if somebody is going to not buy a pass and is going to wait to buy a lift ticket, even at the lower prices that we're putting out for lift tickets, they're going to be paying more. So that is absolutely our overall effective ticket price will go up as they move from pass to lift tickets. That said, that's not what we want. We still want people to be in the advanced commitment bucket, but we have to have every lever available to us.

Great. Thanks. Good luck.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Jeff Sanchel with Steel. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Thank you, everyone. Thanks for taking our questions. Maybe starting off on pass sales. If we go back to this time last year, Rob, I think you talked to some resilience in purchasing behavior through Liberation Day and some of that shopping we were seeing back then in consumer sentiment. Obviously, weather is going to be the bigger impact so far this year. But just curious if you think that macro uncertainty may be factoring in as well if you look at trends so far this selling season. And then historically, can you just remind us what do you typically see when gas and flight costs are higher? What sort of impact you see to visitation behavior across the local and destination cohorts during the season?

Yeah, sure. I mean, right now it's tough to break out any kind of macro impact from the weather impact and the conditions impact from last year. Based on some of the data we were talking about in terms of how Whistler is doing or the east versus other markets, it definitely seems like this is much more of a conditions driven decline. When you look back historically, the further you travel, the harder. So a lot of times you do see people if they have an issue with the plane cost, they may drive. So we may see stronger local visitation. At the same time, a lot of people won't go and fly internationally to the extent that the cost of those flights are even higher. And obviously we're seeing some cut back on some of the European flights and things like that in Asia. So ultimately that could help the overall US destination, North American destination business here versus Europe. So I think our business provides a natural hedge of sorts in tougher economic times because of how core skiing is and the kind of recreation component of our business. It's not all just vacation spend. But in the end, right now, it's hard to say what the overall economic environment will be next year. And so we're focused much more on the kind of unique situation we're dealing with rather than the overall economic environment right now.

That's great. And then you actually touched on this a little bit, but it's a correlary question that we get from investors all the time is how much impact that transatlantic or trans-Pacific outbound skier travel is having on visitation, given that value proposition and what seems to be a lot of word of mouth marketing benefit over the last couple of years. Rob, I'm curious, when you look at the data, how material do you think this trend truly is versus just more of a narrative thing? And if it is material, is there any opportunity within the marketing strategy or otherwise to go after this space that's opted for international?

Yeah, we don't see that as a material driver. Obviously we have data because our passes provide access both in Europe and in Asia, and we're not seeing a material increase in the usage of that. In unique locations, yes, it can be meaningful to a resort in Europe or Asia's US business, they can see a real increase. But in terms of the overall visitation that's happening in the North American ski industry, no, I don't think it's material either way. I think it's a kind of nice bucket list type thing that people add on every now and then, but not really replacing the normal visitation. The other side of it, which I don't think is changing anytime soon, is what we've seen over the last 5 to 7 years is a decline in inbound visitation into the US. Between lots of different factors, part of it the US dollar, others just the overall inbound tourism which is not just about skiing but about everybody in tourism. I think that is the much bigger trend that international visitation to the US for a lot of travel, but certainly for the ski industry, has gone down a lot. So if there's any normalizing trend ultimately over time, that is our hope, and I know that in addition to us, there's lots of other people in the US travel business trying to promote that.

Thanks very much.

Thanks.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Benkin with the zoo. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hey, thanks. Maybe one on cost. The midpoint of the new guide implies around 12 with a cost base of just over two billion. As we think about next season, other than inflation, how should we think about the flow through of any incremental revenues? And separately, are there any moving parts you would flag? For example, were there any one-time areas you pulled back this year we should consider that need to come back as revenue presumably returns? Thanks.

I guess maybe following up on that, the variable cost components associated with visitation?

Okay. And then maybe just one from a modeling perspective, I think this year saw what presumably is elevated effective ticket price. I assume that's basically just from season pass dollars juxtaposed against lower visitation from weather. Am I thinking about this correctly? Is there any way you could help us quantify this drag next season? And any other offsets you would consider? Thanks.

Thanks.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Anthony Bondio with Bill Sparkco. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Yeah. Hey guys. Thanks for taking my question. I just wanted to ask about pass trends versus peers. I think you mentioned pass sales are outperforming others in the industry. So can you just dig into that a little bit? Just anything to frame the magnitude there and the different drivers of that delta.

Yeah, it's hard for us to obviously there's not perfect information on that since we're the only one that publishes reporting, but we're basing that on some third party entities that try and track transaction volume and other things in the marketplace. So it's hard to speak with a lot of precision on any of it, but to the extent that we are outperforming, we do think it's from all the things that we did going into this pass selling season, which is we're spending more on media, we have the young adult pass which we think was really priced well. We also think the message of that young adult pass was a really strong message for us as we went through this season. And we also just leaned into completely new marketing tactics and approaches than we had last spring. Because a lot of the new things that we started doing really were last fall, and so we feel like that helped as well. And we had a really strong year in terms of guest experience at our resorts even with the down snowfall and conditions that were tough. I think there was a sense broadly that on the things we could control this season, we did really well. I certainly feel that way and I think a lot of our guests feel that way, and I think that gives confidence that as we go into next season, we will of course put everything we have into making it the absolute best season possible.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just maybe on M&A, can you just talk about what you're seeing out there from an M&A perspective? Maybe how the abnormally poor season might be influencing decision-making from operators that might be looking to sell assets.

Yeah, I'm not going to comment on M&A. I never do in terms of specificity, but I would say historically I have not seen situations where down economic years or down snow years trigger people to immediately sell. I think everybody feels like no one wants to be selling in a down year. I think sometimes it reminds people though that you can have these tough years, and so sometimes the year after or even two years after, there's a different mindset of ownership. Obviously a lot of resorts have transacted in North America over the last couple of decades. So a lot of the folks that are still owning resorts I think are doing so because this is a long-term family commitment that they have. So whether a year like this is going to impact them is kind of unclear.

Thanks so much guys.

Thanks.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Patrick Scholes with True Securities. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi. Good afternoon. Rob, Angela, everyone. Can you just talk a little bit more about this new inclusion of a KPI called days sold? It comes with a footnote on it about some metrics in there. Talk a little bit about why including that. I assume it has to do with the prevalence of frequency products, but a little bit more color on that and anything else we should be thinking about when watching that KPI specifically. Thank you.

Yeah, I think it's something that we've been looking at internally for a while. It obviously tries to say we've been reporting on units, but if you sell an Epic Pass or an Epic Local Pass, that's one unit. If you sell an Epic One Day, that's also one unit. That's the way we've been tracking it, but obviously those are two completely different products. So internally we've been tracking days sold because it tells us how many days of skiing we have now. That said, we don't know when we sell a product how many days they're going to use it. So just for simplicity internally and now we're sharing it externally, it highlights that if we are mixing up in the kind of frequency of that unit, then that'll show up in the days sold versus just units. So I think we started talking about that publicly at the investor conference and we said we might continue to report on that, and we're going to. In the end, it is what we track most closely in terms of thinking about overall revenue and how many visits we're going to get out. Obviously it's important to us, the units are important too because we like to see the guests, that's a transaction piece. So it's still important but not quite as important as the days sold, which tracks a little closer to how much volume people are buying.

Thank you.

Thank you. We'll take our next question from Rant Mour with Barlays. Please go ahead. Your line is open.

Hi everybody. Good afternoon and thanks for taking my question. Rob, you mentioned the turn-in ticket program, the Epic buddy ticket program. I apologize if I missed this, but how are those programs being utilized so far? Is it in line with your underwriting, better or worse? And just given the nature of those products and who owns those options, is there an obvious characteristic as to when you think they would turn them in to buy the pass throughout the cycle here?

Yeah, I guess what I'd say is it's kind of early because a lot of that is going to probably happen later. But right now, we're seeing improvements in both the turn-in ticket categories across the board. But obviously ultimately we need to see how it goes out through the remainder of the season because the selling season for passes. So it's a little early to say. Both of those programs performed really well from our standpoint on a relative basis, but obviously we didn't see the full benefit of them because overall visitation was lower and we had serious headwinds with conditions. But on a relative basis to other lift ticket products, they did well. But from a kind of turning your ticket perspective in terms of the impact they can have on the pass business, we would really need to see a normal full season and see how many people actually buy it in that context and then how many people converted to passes following that. So this will be a tough year to make a full assessment of it. But the flip side to it, I would say, we felt really good about introducing some of these new aggressive products last year in what turned out to be a tough winter because obviously it allowed us to have products that we were promoting that made it easier for people to buy. And I say that's the same thing with passes. Obviously it is a tougher pass selling season right now. So the fact that we have these other avenues for people to get in, we see as all a positive.

Okay, fair enough. A second question would be on the competitive environment. You guys seem like you're gaining share in terms of pass sales versus your competitors and specifically in that younger cohort where you guys adjusted the price lower. Do you have any concern that competing systems who are doing worse than you right now may get more aggressive in their pricing or promotions, especially in that younger cohort, to try and win some share back and how that could sort of impede your ability to try and improve pass sales throughout the next 3 to 5 months?

Yeah, of course I have no idea. It's hard to know. We take our approach. There's a little bit of competitive dynamic that we're looking at there, but part of it as we shared in the investor conference was we looked at how much we increased pass pricing over the last four years in both adult and young adult, and what we realized was in the adult category we actually did quite well on that, but in the young adult category we didn't. So in a way, this is almost like a roll back of some of the increases that we took before. One of the benefits we have here is that because we own all of our resorts and have only limited partners, when we increase or decrease price, we're not constrained by the relationship that we have with partners or how we're paying them or not paying them or how we're spending on media or not. All of those things are easier. We also get the benefit of ancillary revenue in all of our resorts, not just in a limited number of resorts on the pass. So to the extent that we're being more aggressive with young adults, no matter where they be largely in our North American network, we're getting the benefit of that lift revenue 100%, plus we're also getting the benefit of everything they spend on the mountain. So I can see how that makes it a little bit trickier if you don't have that setup. I think the same is true for all these other things that we're doing as we move back and forth between pass and lift tickets. We're doing this in a very holistic manner. It can be harder to do when it's a little bit more Balkanized. So for us, in the end, we're not really in a reactive mode at all. We're really in a how do we optimize mode, and I think we said that when I first came in, we were looking to optimize our pass portfolio and make decisions that were pretty independent of what others were doing.

Great. Thanks for the follow.

Thank you. This concludes the Q&A portion of today's call. I would like to now turn the call back over to Rob Katz for closing remarks.

Thank you. While this year presented weather challenges and tougher financial results, it also sharpened our focus and reinforced the work we're doing to address the end-to-end guest experience from marketing to product to the entire on-mountain experience. On that point, I want to thank our frontline teams for their unwavering dedication throughout this exceptionally challenging season. As we look ahead, we built an integrated network and platform that positions us to deliver a consistent differentiated guest experience, strengthen loyalty, and drive long-term growth. This network allows us to deliver a more consistent experience at every touch point at scale, which remains the heart of everything we do, and I'm confident will drive us to the next phase of our growth. Thank you all for your time today.

Thank you. This concludes today's Veil Resorts fiscal third quarter 2026 earnings conference call and webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time and have a wonderful day.