Western US ski resorts have had a rocky season owing to a record snow drought
Vail Resorts just cut its profit outlook for 2026, as poor weather and low snowfall reduce skier visits.
Last month, amid one of the most topsy-turvy cold seasons that America has ever seen — the West had its warmest winter on record, while extreme cold in the East saw snow cover rise well above the 20-year average — skiing hotspots Colorado and Utah both reported their lowest snowpacks since the early 1980s, when records began.
Flaking out
In bad news for American ski resort operators, this year’s snow drought already appears to be trickling down to the bottom line. Vail Resorts announced Monday that it cut its full-year guidance, with the company now expecting net income of $144 million to $190 million for FY2026, down from its December forecast of $201 million to $276 million and far below analyst estimates of $237 million, per Bloomberg.
America’s largest ski resort owner and operator also outlined in its Q2 results that total skier visits had shrunk 12.5% year over year to just 6.8 million, with the past 12 months seeing 16.9 million visits in all — off some 6% from the same point last year and 11% lower than the ~19 million visits that Vail clocked in Q2 2023.
That’s snow business, baby
With Vail’s Western US resorts seeing historically low snowfall, the lack of powder has meant that many of the region’s usual skiers have headed off to sample fresher slopes, weighing on the company’s primary mountainside moneymaker: lift passes.
In the second quarter, large dents appeared in Vail’s mountain segment, including retail/rental (-6.8%) and ski school sales (-9.3%) — though both still brought in roughly 1.7x more revenue than Vail’s entire lodging segment. Meanwhile, revenue from lift passes slipped 2.9%, yet constituted more than half of the segment’s revenue in Q2, consistent with FY2025 earnings.
Naturally, with all the lift operators, ski instructors, snow groomers, and retail staff needed to run a ski resort, labor costs consistently come out as Vail’s biggest expense, accounting for ~40% of mountain segment costs in FY2025. However, as snowfall becomes more scarce, the cost of snowmaking systems (currently lumped into the “other” category) could soar.
As detailed in Vail’s most recent annual report, the company has already invested “over $100M in improved snowmaking capabilities since 2015.” But with sales from its Epic Pass subscription service, which accounts for roughly three-quarters of all visits, stalling, even if Vail manages to artificially conjure a mountain’s worth of snow by next season, will enough people still be there to ski it?
