Matthew Prince Presses Vail Resorts to Sell Park City Mountain Resort
Matthew Prince wants Vail Resorts to sell him Park City Mountain Resort, the largest ski area in the United States. The 50-year-old Cloudflare billionaire, who is now Utah’s wealthiest person, says the company should stop owning resorts and move to an asset-light franchise model.
Prince and Park City Mountain Resort
Prince grew up at Park City Mountain Resort and worked there as a ski instructor in the mid-1990s, which gives his push a personal edge that a typical takeover pitch would not have.
He first started urging Vail Resorts to sell him the mountain in March. He said he thought he would get it in five years and that it was inevitable he would get it in the next 25 years.
Vail Resorts faces pressure
Prince argues that Vail Resorts’ market capitalization is less than the combined value of its ski hills. He also pointed to the company’s 42 ski areas across the United States, Canada, Austria and Australia as evidence that it should sell resorts rather than keep owning them.
“The current management team does not sell properties,” he said on a Zoom call with The Colorado Sun. He added, “Current management has not ever gotten rid of a resort but I’m not sure that the current management is long for this world.”
He was more blunt about the company’s outlook when he said, “Do you think the current management team is going to be around for long? Something is gonna break.”
Prince also said, “At some point shareholders are going to say you know what, you don’t get to be a capital allocator anymore.”
Asset-light model for Vail
“You don’t need to own the resorts in order to have the resorts take your pass,” Prince said in support of a franchise model. He said, “The right answer here is to sell off the underlying resorts and then negotiate a franchise model. You can’t have stock that is limping along for 10 years and not have a change.”
The friction point is simple: Vail Resorts has never sold a ski area, yet Prince is arguing that it should. He said he is increasingly convinced the deal will happen a lot faster than he once expected because Vail Resorts is in real trouble.
“I don’t think that people appreciate how big a hole they are in and how deep it can potentially go,” he said. He also called the possibility of activist investors and a hostile takeover “a serious problem,” which leaves the next move tied to whether shareholders or management decide to force a change first.
