Vail Resorts, Inc. Stock

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vail Resorts Fiscal 2026 Fourth Quarter and Year-End Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I will now turn the call over to Connie Wang, Vice President of Investor Relations at Vail Resorts. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Vail Resorts fiscal 2026 fourth 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 annual report on Form 10-K 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, September 28, 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 annual report on Form 10-K, were filed this afternoon with the SEC and are also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.vailresorts.com.

I would now like to turn the call over to Rob for opening remarks.

Thank you, Connie. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our fourth quarter earnings call. Looking back at fiscal 2026, while it was an exceptionally challenging weather year, it also demonstrated the resilience of our business model that was intentionally built over time. In particular, our advanced commitment strategy and resource efficiency transformation plan delivered meaningful stability that enabled us to stay focused on our long-term objectives. The year also underscored the value of the investments we've made in our people, operations and the guest experience. Even in a difficult weather environment, we achieved record guest satisfaction scores and strong employee engagement and retention, demonstrating the importance of the investments we've made in talent and strong execution across the business. That said, we recognize that our stock price performance has been disappointing over the last couple of years, and the Board and company are not standing still.

Over the past 18 months, we have accelerated the pace of change across the organization as we strengthened our leadership team with a new CEO and Chief Revenue Officer, added a new board member with extensive hospitality experience, revamped our marketing approach, including increasing marketing spend, adjusting channel mix, elevating resort branding and messaging and optimizing products and pricing. We also expanded our resource efficiency transformation program by $30 million and launched a new company-wide guest-focused growth strategy Epic experience. The actions we've taken are grounded in a clear view of where we can improve and have the greatest opportunity to strengthen the business and drive strong competitive differentiation.

We have moved with urgency but while remaining disciplined, very mindful that in an operationally driven company with over 50,000 team members, speed has to be balanced with executional excellence to ensure we are building a great company for the long term. Our focus remains on delivering on these priorities and demonstrating their value through sustained improvement in financial performance. While many of these initiatives are in the early stages, we're encouraged by the progress we're seeing across the business. In marketing, our changes in media strategy heading into last winter helped improve past sales trends per day by approximately 5 points compared to the earlier selling period. During the past season, we made changes to our products and pricing across lift tickets with the introduction of Epic Friends and super advanced lift ticket pricing, along with targeted pricing actions at certain resorts and time periods. As mentioned on the last call, those new products and strategies had strong results despite the weather, and we outperformed the industry in lift ticket visitation. With all of these changes to our marketing approach, we also benefited from increases in unaided brand awareness from destination guests for our top resorts.

Heading into this upcoming winter season, while pass sales remained down to prior year. During this selling period, third-party data indicates we continue to outperform the broader industry, even more so on comparable unlimited products. While we're clearly not satisfied with any decline in pass sales, this is not necessarily surprising given the severity of the conditions we experienced this past season and the massive growth we saw in past sales in the previous 5 years, especially in our frequency products, which continue to see the largest declines to date in our lease committed pass holder group. Angela will discuss the results in more detail, but we do believe that a portion of the decline is likely due to delayed decision-making rather than reduced overall intent to ski next season. This creates an opportunity for potential improvements for pass sales in the final selling season and/or ultimately, through in-season lift ticket purchases next year. Based on a store U.S. ski market data, visitation typically recovers quickly following a season with poor conditions when the following year has normal conditions, and we are positioned well to capture that recovery given the breadth of our owned and operated network and our ability to market across that network through our pass and lift ticket products. That said, last season was a true anomaly and it certainly creates risk heading into next season.

In addition to the marketing changes discussed, we are also making progress across our resource efficiency transformation plan and our Epic experience growth strategy. Starting with the Resource Efficiency Transformation Plan, we remain on track to exceed our original $100 million target of annual savings and announced an additional $30 million of identified technology-related efficiencies that we expect to realize by fiscal 2028.

Turning to Epic experience. This is our long-term strategy we announced this summer, which provides a framework for our next phase of growth. While several of the initiatives behind Epic experience were already underway, the strategy aligns them around a common objective, creating a more seamless, personalized and differentiated guest experience that drives greater loyalty, visitation and guest lifetime value. What makes this opportunity unique is our ability to connect the entire end-to-end guest experience across our resorts, products, ancillary services and digital platforms in a way and at a scale that is not easily replicated by others.

I want to touch on the five key pillars of Epic experience, starting with guest engagement and the digital experience. As part of Epic experience, we are expanding the My Epic app into a personalized digital companion for the entire ski experience, bringing planning, purchasing and in-resort engagement into a single platform. This month, we introduced native in-app commerce and added Apple Pay and Google Pay for pass offerings, and we'll shortly be launching that functionality for lift tickets across all our resorts, making it even easier for guests to transact within our ecosystem.

Next, we are reimagining how guests access and use gear with My Epic gear. Over a multiyear time frame, we will allow guests the ability to rent the gear they want, when they want, where they want without the need for either transporting their gear or going through today's current lengthy rental process. This season, we will roll out pic from demo gear and an updated web platform that in FY '28, we will be rolling out the first full incarnation of the program along with full personalized app integration. For ski and ride school, we are elevating lessons into a more personalized mountain experience. This includes upgrading the private lesson experience through Epic Ascent a premium private lesson offering that provides dedicated concierge support, personalized trip planning and enhanced benefits that help guests build confidence and deepen their connection to skiing and riding.

In parallel, we are expanding the digital ski school experience across our U.S. destination resorts, allowing for a seamless arrival with direct to one digital check-in and real-time updates and progress monitoring within the app.

For our on-mountain dining, we are elevating the ski day classics, burgers, chicken fingers, chile, hotdogs, fries and Mac & Cheese by investing in higher quality ingredients and refined presentation. We see an opportunity to make dining an additive differentiated part of the entire ski experience and another reason guests choose to spend more time with us on the mountain. In the future, we'll be adding technology to improve the guest experience in our restaurants.

Finally, delivering an exceptional guest experience starts with people, who will always be at the foundation of this company. That's why we continue to invest in our frontline teams through training, development, engagement and retention initiatives that strengthen our ability to deliver a differentiated guest experience at scale. It is also one of the most important proof points of our company's ability to deliver on Epic experience with our frontline staffing and talent being a competitive strength today only accept 11% of those who apply for frontline roles versus the challenges the company experienced in staffing just four years ago. By placing the guests at the center of everything we do, we see a significant opportunity to drive higher visitation, deepen guest loyalty, increased ancillary spending and ultimately grow guest lifetime value. Through our continued investments across our resorts, the digital experience and in talent, we are uniquely positioned to differentiate the guest experience with our integrated owned and operated network, a world-class destination and regional resorts connected through our path and marketing ecosystem and supported by unified data and technology platform. These other building blocks that will ultimately support sustainable long-term growth and value creation.

As we noted in a release earlier this month, we have received notices of intent to nominate individuals for election to our Board of Directors. The Board is evaluating those nominees and given that this process is ongoing, we will not be answering any questions on this topic today.

With that, I'll turn it over to Angela to walk through the financial results.

Thank you, Rob. Starting with our results for the fourth quarter. Resort net revenue was about flat year-over-year. Results were impacted by unfavorable weather conditions in Australia for cumulative snowfall was more than 50% below the 10-year average. Those conditions pressured visitation and revenue during the quarter, partially offset by growth in Australian pass sales heading into their winter period and revenue growth at Grand Teton Lodge Company.

Looking at the full year. As Rob mentioned, fiscal 2026 demonstrated the resilience of our business despite historically challenging weather conditions across several key markets. Total revenue decreased only 3.5% despite a 30% decline in skier visitation, supported by 4% growth in past revenue, highlighting the resilience of our advanced commitment model. Fiscal 2026 Resort reported EBITDA of $746 million, landed in line with the midpoint of the range we provided in June, despite the softer Australia results, reflecting the benefits of not just our advancement strategy but also our disciplined cost management, continued progress on resource efficiency transformation and the strong execution of our teams across the organization.

Turning to post sales. Through September 18, pass units declined 12%, days old declined 10% and sales dollars, including tax were down 6%. We Performance through the September deadline remains consistent with the spring selling period when excluding auto renewal during that period. We believe the performance to date continues to be affected by the prior season's historically challenging conditions. Since the spring deadline, we saw modest improvements in Colorado, Utah and Tahoe Local performance, while the weakness remains concentrated among destination frequency products, especially lower frequency passes. This may suggest delayed decision-making for lower frequency guests that may move later into the past selling period or migrate back into lift ticket products sold during the season.

Importantly, we continue to see evidence that we are outperforming the broader industry via third-party data, particularly within comparable unlimited products, which gives us confidence that our competitive position remains strong despite softer overall cast sell trends to date. As Rob noted earlier, we view the current environment as being driven more by delayed purchasing behavior than a structural change in demand. As a result, we see meaningful opportunities to recapture demand through both pass sell and lift tickets in season.

With that in mind, I want to spend some time on our fiscal 2027 outlook. We are guiding to net income attributable to sales Resorts of $158 million to $233 million and resort reported EBITDA of $805 million to $865 million, including approximately $14 million of onetime costs. Our guidance reflects a meaningful recovery in visitation when compared to the weather impacted fiscal 2026 season, though we expect visitation will not fully return to fiscal 2025 levels in the U.S. Given the current pass sale trends, we are not expecting an overall improvement during the rest of the selling season and expect to recapture a meaningful portion of lower pass visitation through increased lift ticket visitation.

Importantly, the level of lift ticket visitation embedded in our guidance remains well below historical levels achieved when the pass program was significantly smaller and below levels achieved following the fiscal 2022 past price resets. Current pass sale trends leave a larger pool of uncommitted guest heading into the season, and we are making targeted investments in pricing and product optimization and marketing to capture that demand and drive visitation. While these investments are expected to support near-term demand generation, they are also consistent with our larger strategy of strengthening guest awareness, acquisition and engagement to drive sustainable growth over time. Outside of the expected changes in visitation, we also expect benefits from pricing, and capture initiatives across our rental, school, dining and other lines of business.

On the cost side, beyond variable expenses on the increased revenue, our outlook incorporates labor and expense inflation of approximately 4%, including normal wage inflation together with higher utility, fuel, legal and professional services costs. In addition to inflation and variable expenses, our guidance reflects approximately $20 million from the normalization of incentive compensation relative to fiscal 2026. Approximately $10 million of incremental marketing investments, million associated with the renewal of the Grand Teton Lodging Company contract and $3 million of incremental resource efficiency transformation onetime costs, partially offsetting these cost pressures are approximately $25 million of incremental efficiencies from our Resource Efficiency Transformation Program.

Lastly, fiscal 2027 cash taxes are expected to be approximately $75 million to $85 million. To provide context on the outlook and given the magnitude of the severe weather impacts this past year, I also want to compare to the midpoint of fiscal -- of our fiscal 2027 guidance to the midpoint of our original fiscal 2026 outlook issued in September of 2025. While fiscal 2027 assumes a meaningful year-over-year recovery visitation, we expect total visitation to remain modestly below our original fiscal 2026 expectations.

Despite that, total revenue is expected to increase approximately 3% when compared to the fiscal '26 expectations, driven by stronger ancillary revenue growth, while lift revenue remains relatively flat as targeted lower pricing and product strategies employed to support visitation offset a portion of the pricing related. As a result, implied resort EBITDA margin of 27.3%, excluding onetime costs, is expected to be approximately 200 basis points below our original fiscal 2026 outlook.

Resource efficiency savings offset a portion of the incremental investment spending in areas like marketing, but this continues to demonstrate the value of the resource efficiency transformation program as we fund strategic investments while managing ongoing inflationary pressures. However, with visitation still below our original expectations for last year, inflation growth is outpacing our revenue growth, resulting in margin pressure compared to the original outlook.

Turning to capital allocation. Despite the challenging operating environment this year, we remain confident in the cash flow generation capabilities of our business. Even at the low end of our fiscal 2027 guidance range, we expect to generate positive free cash flow after continuing to fund our capital program and dividends. At July 31, total liquidity was approximately $0.8 billion and net leverage was 3.9x trailing 12 months total reported EBITDA. Based on our fiscal 2027 resort EBITDA outlook, we expect leverage to decline to approximately 3.5x by year-end, assuming no change in net debt compared to the year-end fiscal 2026 level. Additionally, our Board declared a quarterly dividend of $2.22 per share, and we reaffirmed our calendar 2026 core capital plan. Our capital allocation priority remains balancing disciplined returns to shareholders with investing in the opportunities we see to further strengthen our competitive position and support long-term value creation.

For calendar 2027, we're particularly excited about planned lift investments announced today at Park City Mountain including the replacement of Silver load with our first passenger detachable chairlift in the U.S. and the replacement of Eagle and Eaglet with a new 6-passenger detachable air lift designed to improve access, capacity and guest flow. Combined with other recent infrastructure investments, those projects will further enhance the guest experience at one of our largest destination resorts.

In summary, while we continue to navigate the lingering impacts of last season's unusually severe conditions, the experience has reinforced the investments we've made to strengthen the business. As we look ahead, we remain focused on executing against the opportunities in front of us, while maintaining a disciplined approach to growth, profitability and capital allocation.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Stephen Grambling with Morgan Stanley.

I know you talked a little bit about this. So wondering if you could maybe just dig into some of the guidance assumptions around revenue, particularly as we just think about closing the gap from where pass sales are now to where the assumption is, I think, for slightly down for the year? And then also, I think you said that you said ancillary should actually be up, but again, with visitation down. So any additional color in terms of the contributions you're expecting, whether that's gear or other areas?

Yes. I think, ultimately, even though pass sales are down, the total amount of lift tickets that we would have to sell to make up a portion of that or even all of that would still be way below obviously the lift tickets we sold. If you could just go back, right, certainly, 4 or 5 years and obviously, even much further below where we were 10 years or 15 years ago or what you see other resorts doing. And so essentially, what I would say is going on is that you've had the most -- the least committed skier, right, who has come in, for the most part, on the lower frequency pass products that we've had that we added over the last few years, and obviously, with last year being so challenging, they're taking most likely a wait-and-see attitude. And these are folks who historically bought lift tickets that we recently converted to a path, not surprising to see a portion of them as we go into next season, again, probably holding off, waiting to make that commitment. Now whether they make that commitment in a path as the pass selling season plays out through early December or whether they make -- ultimately commit to buying a lift ticket. We're not sure that, that kind of movement from lift tickets to pass or pass the lift ticket necessarily gets in the way of the overall demand that you'll see for the season. And it's an important reminder that if you go back certainly 5 years, 10 years, and you see some of the years that we had 20% or even 30% and season pass growth that didn't necessarily transfer into visitation growth for the year. It just meant that we were converting people from lift tickets to pass. And this year, what we might see, right, is obviously people moving out of a path into lift tickets as we go into the season. And then on -- sorry, and then on ancillary, yes, that is, we do expect to see capture growth across all of our ancillary lines of business, including in ski school and rental and in food.

Fair enough. And then maybe one other maybe a bigger picture question. There's been a lot of, I think, noise or certainly a lot of hoopla around, Meta's news and agentic AI. I'm just curious about, I know you have your own agent for helping with consumers, but any thoughts around how agentic AI may unfold how you may partner with folks or how you think about leveraging AI to support the business?

Yes, sure. I think, one, it's a core part of the technology transformation, which is part of our resource efficiency transformation that we announced, which is -- we do see a huge opportunity to bring AI into a lot of the kind of behind the scenes work that we do in many corporate functions and other areas where there's an opportunity for us to gain efficiency and candidly gain a lot more functionality and ability through a lot of these new softwares, and we will be partnering with a number of people as we look for the best providers on that. I think on the guest side, yes, we do see -- we do have an agent out there, but I'd say it's in its infancy. And really the opportunity for us, and it's definitely on our road map to essentially, yes, provide essentially a support person of source like a virtual concierge, where people can get information about our resorts and about how to plan their day and about how to ski the mountain and anything else that they want really at their fingertips, and we see that as a critical next step. And again, one of the ways that we intend to drive kind of guest engagement is absolutely going to be using AI, but also using human beings as well because we think the core ski experience, whether you're on the mountain or elsewhere, you do need those human touch points. And so we see those kind of acting in concert with each other.

We'll take our next question from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America.

Robert, Angela; I kind of wanted to go through the same as Evan's question, but maybe a little bit more on the operating expense side. Just walk us through a little bit, and you gave a couple of the buckets, but hopefully a little bit more, if you could, on just normal kind of run rate operating expense inflation and then any other things to get back to sort of a more normal level of expense growth, just again, when people, I think, are looking at the revenues versus EBITDA dollars year-over-year, the expense growth looks a little higher than normal, but obviously, that anticipates probably a different revenue picture. So any thoughts on that and maybe your ability to adjust should the revenue top line maybe not come in as planned?

Yes. Thanks, Shaun. Yes, relative to last year, there definitely are a few moving pieces here. I mean there's obviously the revenue-driven expense that comes with that revenue, the kind of the variable piece that comes with it. But then on top of that, we are seeing higher expense inflation. And so we are expecting about 4% kind of blended all in between labor and expense. And then on top of that versus last year, Ray, you do have the add-back right from performance plans that we're obviously not paying out last year. There was a $20 million delta that I mentioned there on that cost coming back. We also have $10 million incremental that we're investing in marketing to drive some of the strategies and guest capturing to really drive visitation. And then we had a $3 million adjustment for GTLC Grand Teton Lodge Company, that's with the new contract, and we have $3 million associated with the kind of onetime cost on our transformation plan. So all of those kind of, I guess, headwinds, if you will, are being partially offset then by about $25 million of incremental transformation savings that we will expect year-over-year.

And then Rob, maybe just as my follow-up, very big picture. You laid out a lot on the experience side, which is, I think, very important and good to hear. I'm curious on just of those initiatives you laid out, which you touched on a lot of different parts of the business, what do you think is most sort of financially impactful in the kind of next 12 to 24 months? What do you kind of have an eye on or should investors have an eye on that you think can really move the needle on the financial side?

Yes. I think -- I mean, to me, I think our goal is creating a differentiating experience. So when people come to our resorts, obviously, there's a portion of when you go to any ski resort, that's about like what that ski mountain is like. And obviously, we're going to continue to invest in lift and snowmaking and everything else just like everybody else will, I assume. And so that will be great. But what we're looking to do is to take almost every other aspect of the experience and have people have the felt sense that it's easier than it is more personalized, that each skiing is a challenge. We all know that to get to the mountain, gear. And we want people to feel like we are now providing services that candidly, other people would struggle to provide that actually makes their experience, yes, that much more compelling. And so it is that guest loyalty and the visitation that we'll get from that, that I think is candidly the most important. I think the biggest singular opportunity financially is going to be geared. It's not something that's going to be in the next 12 months, but I absolutely see it as it's really a transformation of how people engage and use gear. There's very few people in the world that could do that. We're really the only one -- and so that would be both a financial opportunity given how relatively small a percentage of the total amount of gear that's on our mountain do we actually rent. And then two, it is a guest loyalty opportunity. As once we were quite confident that as people get used to that experience, it will be a major shift to go to another resort that may not be able to provide the same experience to them. I think over the next 12 months, I think what will differentiate us is going to be the marketing and our ability to basically go from kind of country and worldwide passes to resort-specific passes, two lift tickets across each one of our resorts to communicate with guests seamlessly across the entire continuum to use the data that we're getting from everybody. And that is what we are looking to leverage. We unclear, right? I think every no one is clear as to exactly how this upcoming season will perform. But our goal right now is to make sure that we are taking share by picking up this bigger pool of uncommitted skiers that are now out there. And so that, to me, over the next 12 and 24 months, that's certainly going to be an important key driver of our financial performance, especially relative to the industry.

We'll take our next question from Arpine Kocharyan with UBS.

I was hoping you could talk a little bit about what's embedded in the lower end versus higher end of EBITDA range. Is it simply a matter of reasonably good ski season versus choppier season, but overall much better than last year. Just what's within that range? And then I have a quick follow-up.

Yes. I mean, I think a portion of it could be weather. A portion of it is obviously, there's economy. There's other factors. But yes, we try and kind of come up with what we see as the expectation of the most likely outcome. And then we realize that there are so many different factors that could add to that or subtract to that. I think certainly, on the upside if we get a normal ski season, we could see -- we're estimating that visitation will be down, right, in this upcoming season versus the season 2 years ago for the U.S. ski industry to the extent that even in a normal winter, you could absolutely make a case that we could see the visitation come fully back to where we were in '25, if you get certainly a super El Nino or something like that, you can certainly see it even beat that. On the other hand, we are going through a transition where people are going to be moving from passive to lift tickets. There's clearly more variability and risk in that. We feel really good about how we're positioned in that transition to potentially actually again, continue to pick up share. But again, there's some variability in risk in that for sure.

Got it. And then I wanted to go back to the first question that was asked. Current margins imply revenue up something like 9% to 10% resort revenues. And you know you mentioned that after a disaster season seeing window demand up 25%, 30% is not inconceivable. And that certainly can be true, but isn't it sort of really dependent on weather. But then on the other hand, you also have some positive mix, right, that's helping you given incentives to drive shifts towards -- away from 1 or 2 day passes to longer stays, given some of the pricing actions you've taken. Is it possible at all to outline how much mix could be helping you for the year to get to that 9% to 10% in resort revenue when you have pass product down 6%.

Yes. Well, I would say it circles back a little bit to what we said earlier, which is passes are not -- I mean, just like when passes were up 20% or up 40%, it didn't mean the visitation during the year were going to be up that much. We were just moving people from lift tickets to passes. So it passes down right now, we don't see necessarily that that's indicative of lower demand for the season. It could be people moving either later in the past selling cycle or in lift ticket, back to lift tickets, because a lot of these folks have only been in the past these types of guests only for the last few years. So that's 1 piece of it. From a mix perspective, yes, we are mixing up in terms of our path, which is good, although clearly, some of these folks may actually either move out of path into lift tickets or ultimately come in at the end of the selling season into lower frequency products. So at this point, I think it's pretty hard for us to tell the kind of frequency mix right now. But I guess, as we think about next season, we're not thinking that there's necessarily an overall frequency change for the U.S. ski industry. So if that helps...

It would be helpful to just put in perspective versus last year's guidance, right? We're essentially saying we're going to be modestly below that on visitation, making up that to be flat on lift revenue versus last year's guidance. And so there are -- and not have the blended mix assumption essentially built in there. But remember, we did take some actions to also drive visitation within our pricing strategies as well.

We'll take our next question from Jeff Stantial with Stifel.

This is Zane Young on for Jeff Stantial. I imagine you have more to share after your final pass sales update fiscal Q1. But Rob, just curious if there's anything you can provide in terms of Gen Z uptake on a 20% discount. And in particular, how you think about the mix of incremental demand, whether you think most of these are new pass holders are coming in from lift tickets, competitors or if they're either the support?

Yes. I think it is a little hard to tell at this point. And so we will give a more fulsome update when we get to the end of the pass selling season. We've definitely seen yes, some positive results from that program. We're pleased with it. Obviously, it's in the context of the overall market being down. So it's always a little bit tricky to -- yes, we're not getting, certainly, the full opportunity that we think we could get in a more normal kind of pass market. But yes, we still feel very good about that decision because it aligns with a lot of our other decisions, which is to bring more people into the program and certainly when we look at how we're doing versus others. We feel good about our position. I mean in the end, of course, we'd all rather be in an up market. We'd rather last year have been a great ski season versus the worst ever in the Rockies. But ultimately, our job is to really provide the best experience we can and to ensure that we're making inroads and bringing in new guests on a relative basis to the rest of the market.

Great. And for a follow-up, do you have a sense for what sort of impact, if any, the [ Deer Valley ] expansion had last year? And do you think there can be any more incremental share loss this year just as awareness grows and they open up some more terrain?

Yes. I don't know certainly the exact impact of that. And obviously, last year was a tough year all around. So it's a little hard to assess like what that impact would have been. And I do think it's really a terrific addition to [ Deer Valley. ] No doubt about it. And I feel really good about the investments that we're making in Park City. So when you think about it, we've got these two new lifts going in on the Park City side plus a retrofitted crescent lift plus the Sunrise [indiscernible] that we introduced last year and put in on the Canyon side, plus this year, we're putting in the Skyway gondola from the parking structure to the top, plus a new parking structure at the base of the lift. So you think about that is a -- these are very, very significant investments I think over the time that since we've owned Park City, it's like over $200 million that we've invested in Park City. So yes, I think it's -- by the way, I think it's terrific that [ Deer Valley ] is investing in the resort. Now we're investing in the resort. And I think that just brings the entire market up, which I think both resorts will really benefit from.

We'll take our next question from Ben Chaiken with Mizuho.

Just maybe one on guidance and one quick follow-up. So again, the implied top line is up around 9% or 10%, if I'm not mistaken. I would have thought there's an effective ticket price headwind in FY '27, given the utilization last year in the past was so low. Maybe where am I off in that line of thinking? Because it sounds like you're actually assuming some price growth or tailwind as part of the algo, if that's correct.

Thanks, Ben. Yes, when you looked at the increase for ETP, effective ticket price, this year, you saw the benefit, right, from just lower utilization on the passes. So you're right, that piece is impacting kind of how you think about then the year-over-year impact of that next year. But what I would do is I would think about this in terms of past revenue growth that we provided and the assumption on recapturing that on lift tickets and think about those two things. Because the ETP impact from both the low pass-holder utilization, but also the regional mix from this prior year definitely is, of course, that part is a headwind on the lift ticket side for next year.

Okay. And then maybe just directionally, are you assuming that ancillary grows faster than your lift ticket revenue in '27?

Yes. With our core initiatives, our pricing strategies, yes, that's where we're expecting versus last year's guidance. We're expecting to see revenue growth on ancillary, which is how you're getting to the kind of 3% total revenue growth over last year's guide.

We'll take our next question from Lizzie Dove with Goldman Sachs.

I wanted to ask just in terms of like -- in terms of the guidance this year, it's below, obviously, as you talked about, what 2025 was. And so that's even with, I think, some assumed weather recovery, it sounds like for the cost savings. And so I'm just wondering, just structurally, if you think anything has changed about the industry will bail specifically whether that's just a 2027 thing or how that impacts kind of how you think about the long-term algo that you gave back in March.

Yes, I think we're -- the guide we have for next year right now is based on, yes, some lingering effects from last year. And I think we're seeing that in pass sales. And so I think as we go into next year, we're we're saying that we will recover a good portion of the past sale mix, but we're not missed, but not all of the passes sales miss. As I said earlier, we could easily see that, that fully recovers, but we are assuming that based on some transition as people go between up between passes and lift tickets, there could be some kind of slippage between those two candidly, there's a good case to be made that there won't be any. But at this moment, right, having not seen this kind of dynamic yet play out after the huge explosive growth and path we feel like, yes, that's probably the right way to guide. And I would say that, yes, we are leaning into being more competitive on price in terms of our lift products. So that -- those combined, right, create the kind of guide you're seeing for next year. It does not change the algorithm that we see for the business as we go forward. So we feel like, yes, what we outlined at the Investor Day is still 100% what we believe, but as we grow back from the issues of last season, yes, that may not -- and I think we mentioned that at the Investor Day, that may not all come back in the first year.

Got it. And then I think you said that you're not giving full CapEx guidance until next quarter, but you mentioned some exciting investments that you're making, Park City the Grand Teton requirements and then some tariffs and inflation. And so just, I guess, high level in the context of cash flow that you talked about and whatnot. I'm curious, just high level what you're thinking about for next year's core CapEx plan, whether that can be ahead of this year? And if there's any change to kind of what you think of as like normalized CapEx requirements longer term?

I mean no long-term change to the core capital guidance. We will adjust it for inflation. So inflation like you saw kind of in our operating budget yes, we are seeing a little bit elevated inflation, and we will have the impacts that we'll call out separately for Grand Teton Lodge, those we will call out separately. But really in the scheme of like relative to this year, very much in line with the spending we've had in this current calendar year.

We'll take our next question from Xian Siew with BNP Paribas.

Maybe on the recovery of the lift ticket. Can you talk a little bit about how much do you think is just the broader industry recovery versus your share gains. It sounds like you're expecting some share gains, but maybe just how do we kind of think about that relative to a broader recovery.

Yes. I would say -- I mean, we certainly assume that the industry is going to have a significant recovery from last year. The only question is whether the industry is going to get all the way back to the FY '25 season. And I think our assumption is for the guidance at least is that it may not, given what we're seeing in our pass sales and what we're seeing in other people's pass sales through third parties. That may or may not happen. We don't -- again, it's like -- as we've said, there's some variability in there, some upside, certainly could be some downside, it's hard to say. But our view is, yes, that within that, our guidance assumes that we will outperform the rest of the industry, weather adjusted, of course, on litigate. And so we will pick up and we will outperform on pass sales. So we will pick up visitation share as we go into next year. We're not disclosing exactly how much that is versus the industry. But yes, it is -- in our mind, that's a key driver of a lot of our strategies, both on the marketing side, product and pricing side and on the investments we're making in the guest experience. And so that's how we're setting up the guidance for next year.

Okay. Great. And then you talked also about converting some guests who might have been on passes in the past. Maybe it's a lower frequency pass back into a lift ticket, potentially this year. Can you talk about how you think about maybe like the price that, that guest might pay, whereas if they got used to kind of paying a lower price for a visit to go on the Epic path or an Epic day pass to now having to pay potentially a much higher window price, even with maybe one month in advance, but maybe just kind of the confidence in the ability to kind of convert that guest going from like maybe a lower price path to a higher priced window pass?

Yes. I think it's one of the key reasons last year why we launched the one month in advanced ticket with a 30% off opportunity for people because it blends in in between Epic Day Pass and obviously a window pass or even a kind of one-week event, for it blends between an Epic Day path and a lift ticket or even like one week advanced lifting. And so our view was that, yes, it's a little bit more for sure, but it also allows people not to have to pay or commit during the pass selling season. And again, you only have to go back a few years to realize, these are folks who were paying lift icket prices only a few years ago. So like in the end, we don't know that, that conversion is a huge issue. Secondly, we're also still going to be heavily promoting really in its second year of its current incarnation at friend tickets, which is a much larger right discount, 50% off if you come with a pass holder. So there's going to be opportunities, we think, for people at almost every stage here. So as you get into later into November or early December, if people want to make a -- book their trip, they'll be able to get those lowest pass prices. if they didn't want to wait, they'll be able to gain the 30-day in advance ticket price. If they want to wait all the way to the last day, but they know a passholder, they can come with that pass holder and get that 50% off offer. So we feel like we have like kind of offers and products and prices for kind of each guest along the continuum. And maybe most importantly is these are guests that we're going to be talking to continuously from the beginning all the way through the season. At, for us, is unique, right? We'll be serving them a personalized ads based on what we know about them, again, initially for passes, then for lift tickets. And so we do think that gives us a unique advantage.

We'll take our next question from Anthony Bonadio with Wells Fargo.

Not to beat a dead horse on the lift tickets, but just given the cost levels there that you just mentioned, I guess is there any concern around how the consumer backdrop is evolving as we think about resting rates accelerating inflation as you forecast that demand, and just how you think about those consumer sensitivities more broadly?

yes. I think -- I mean, look, i think we're subject for sure to the same dynamics that every travel company is -- has to deal with in terms of overall inflation and affordability and things like that. I would say though that when you look at how we're leaning in on lift tickets and on passes, I think certainly with us right now, there's an opportunity, I think, for people to, yes, still have affordable options at every level. And so I think our path has always been viewed as one of the most affordable options in travel. And so we think that positions us quite well -- but yes, it's true. Like obviously, we should note that we're subject to the economy overall. And certainly, if there's a slowdown in travel or and in particular, a slowdown in high-end travel, yes, that could be an issue for us. We do skew as the industry does and us even more, we do skew to the high-end traveler, which has at least so far shown to be a little bit more protected against some of the pricing challenges that other parts of the consumer industry have faced.

Got it. That's helpful. And then maybe one for Angela. On capital allocation, can you just talk about your comfort level with the current 3.9x leverage multiple. And just how you're thinking about the dividend, the buyback in that context?

Yes. The confidence in the balance sheet is still very strong. We expect that our leverage will go down to 3.5x at this year's guidance. So it is elevated off of a really challenging last year, but we think that the balance sheet supports really all of our capital priorities, right? It gives us flexibility for if we had attractive or accretive M&A, which we would prioritize or rate what we've already said, which is we're fully committed to our capital spending plans. And then for returning capital to shareholders, yes, even at the low end of the guidance, like I mentioned, we feel like we are covering both the capital plan and the dividend. So I feel very confident where we sat.

We'll take our next question from Anthony Burney with Jefferies.

This is Anthony on for David Katz. Should we expect additional incremental lift ticket pricing strategies to be unveiled this year, like the salt and the under 30 tickets. And how should we think about dynamic pricing going forward?

Yes. I would say we're not Yes, we're not going to share kind of any indication on future pricing decisions, but all of that is captured within our guidance. And I would comment that I think we feel really good about the Epic Friend ticket and the kind of super advanced lift ticket that we announced last year. And I think there's room for both of those to continue to grow and for us to continue to optimize on both of them because obviously, we have a whole season behind us, although a little bit of a challenged season. And so we think there's an opportunity for both of those things. But yes, we're going to continue to be opportunistic certainly on pricing. But I would say still within a fairly disciplined approach. So I think that's one of the hallmarks we've had for a long time, is taking a discipline poor pricing. If we're making a move, it's not something that's reactive about one day or one season. It's something that we think long term is the right strategic positioning for us.

Got it. And then a quick one. Can you just talk a bit about what's driving the negative real estate EBITDA guidance that kind of surprised us.

Yes. The real estate guide for next year does not anticipate any new closings, and that's why it's down versus -- in the prior year, we did have several scheduled closings within the year. And so that's what's created a year-over-year variance.

We'll take our next question from Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank.

Rob, if you kind of look at the -- where you are on pass sales, I mean, is there anything to think that like you can get help from international if that rebounds. I mean, I kind of -- I'm thinking those guys simply buy an Epic Pass, and if they side come kind of closer to the last minute, they're going to have to be dealing with a lift ticket. So I mean, is there any -- are there any learnings you look at and say, "Hey, there's a chance that international destination rebounds," that's going to be more helpful than getting a bunch of people closer to home that come last minute, if that makes sense?

Yes, it does. I don't think that portion of the market would really be enough to actually drive the overall results for our pass program. I think as we talked about, certainly to the U.S. international visitation has been down along with overall inbound travel and tourism into the U.S. So I think we're a part of that. And so the program is much smaller. I think for Whistler, it remains critical. And so absolutely, we could see -- I don't know that that's necessary -- it could be in a past product, but it could be an elliptic in either way. But we do see, of course, for Whistler, it's a critical part of their business. But yes, I don't know that, that -- I don't know that we're anticipating any dramatic change certainly in the U.S. for inbound international travel in the upcoming year.

Okay. Okay. Fair enough. And then a follow-up, much longer-term kind of strategic question. It's been a couple of tough years for the Australian season mean is there any point at which you start to think that that's non-core in terms of friction costs and other things. I know the longer-term plan for for you guys to maybe get more global, but it's obviously hard to do. So is there any point at which you think Australia becomes too much of a headwind.

I don't think so at all. because obviously, yes, they are -- they have ups and downs in their year just like a lot of other ski markets do, and it can be more variable certainly than the Rockies. But one of the things that we feel really good about was, yes, we're growing the past program. We grew it quite a bit last year. Obviously, this year, would be tougher following last year's challenging weather. But thinking about it more holistically on a long-term basis, now the more people we can get in the pass program there, the more we can funnel those folks into the U.S. added to Canada, we are taking a long-term view on the international opportunity inbound into the U.S., it's fairly depressed. I'm not sure that that's going to -- I'm not sure it's going to be like that forever, and we want to be well positioned for when -- yes, there's got to be greater visitation into the U.S. And so we do see them as a critical part of the network. And yes, very understanding of the ups and downs. And I would say if you look back over the time period since we did those acquisitions, yes, they have been incredibly have had incredible performance. And those -- that's been an incredible investment for us from the beginning in terms of what we've been able to create at those three resorts. So even as we sit today, even with a bad year, it's still been, yes, a really accretive investment for us.

We'll take our next question from Brandt Montour with Barclays.

I wanted to circle back on the fiscal '27 guidance versus last year's original guidance in the ancillary expectations that are kind of -- well, one of the, I guess, the fastest growth driver you have into next year? And just wondering how you kind of get to the confidence around the ancillary given that destination frequency guests were the weakest pass segment. And so I would just think logically, you'd get more sales from regionals and locals and perhaps folks that probably are showing up last minute and aren't going to utilize ancillary services. How do you think about that?

I mean what I would say is I think the destination frequency guest is -- I think what we've been trying to share is that, yes, they're buying less passes right now. Obviously, that's a group that bought -- really went up quite a bit over the last few years. But if you go back just a few years before that, they were all buying lift tickets. So we do see a lot of these folks coming back into the market as we think about, right, what the totality of this season is going to look like, both for us and for the industry. And so as these people come in, yes, we think given what we're putting forward in terms of the experience, in terms of the product and price, in terms of what we've seen over the last couple of years, we feel good that we can, yes, grow capture and price within that market. But yes, you're right. I mean, I think as we look -- really what this comes down to in a way and all these questions, is what do people think about the U.S. ski industry for next year. And I think our view as we look backwards is that if we have a normal season, actually, there's often pent-up demand for people who didn't get a chance to ski last year will come out. And again, if you look over the history of the industry, all of these people have historically bought tickets. It's really been us that moved a portion of them into destination frequency low-frequency passes over the last few years. But long term, this has been a lift in market. And by the way, we've had such huge growth in that frequency product that, yes, even though we're down, as we go into next year, it's still incredible to how these folks that we do have locked in ahead of next season, and then we can focus on kind of lift ticket marketing for the rest. So we do feel and our guidance assumes that, yes, we're going to see maybe not a full rebound to where we were and where the industry was in FY '25. But from a visitation perspective, we'll get very close.

That's helpful, Rob. And I just have one follow-up kind of on that thread, specifically destination guests. You guys call out weaker destination guests and it looks like you're hoping or you're planning for some of that to kind of bounce back. We look across our other consumer verticals, where a lot of us are in Las Vegas right now for a conference. Vegas visitation has been down for a while now because the product became very expensive. You guys hold your past product to very reasonable prices, but you're not in control of the entire vacation basket, right? So the question is flights Airbnbs, resort prices, things that are outside of your control how much of that is weighing on the overall vacation basket for your key destination consumers that is affecting their ability to come and ski that there's not much you can do about.

So I think if you look at the upper income part of the travel sector, I think that part of the travel sector has been performing better and some of the challenges you're seeing are in other parts of the travel sector. But as I mentioned earlier, it's true that to the extent that the upper income part of the travel sector is going to be hit or because of the economy or other factors certainly it will impact us. That said, I think that when you look at our results to date, I don't think that the results in passes are related to any kind of economic factors but are much more related to the weather challenges from last year and a lot of the more like less committed skier just not willing to commit as far in advance as we've recently gotten them to do. And so they're going to make that decision closer to or in the season. I also think that, yes, to the extent there's any kind of economic issues, we tend to have more stability on that anyway because on the other side, we've got all these regional and local skiers. And candidly, where, yes, our overall vacation can be very cost competitive, even though, yes, there's other parts of the vacation that are expensive.

This concludes our question-and-answer portion of today's call. I'd like to now turn the call back over to Rob Katz for closing remarks.

Thanks, everyone. In closing, fiscal 2026 tested our business in ways few seasons have before. Yet despite these challenges, we continue to strengthen the company, invest in our future and advance initiatives that we believe will drive growth for years to come. I also want to thank our employees across the organization. Their commitment to our guests, teams and resorts was on full display this past season, and their passion and execution continue to be one of our greatest competitive advantages. We enter fiscal 2027 with a stronger foundation, a clear strategy and a significant opportunity to further differentiate the Vail Resorts experience. While the near-term environment remains dynamic, our focus remains on execution, serving our guests and creating long-term value for our shareholders. Thanks for joining us today.

Thank you. This concludes today's Vail Resorts fiscal 2026 fourth quarter and year-end conference call and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vail Resorts Fiscal Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions]

I will now turn the call over to Connie Wang, Vice President of Investor Relations at Vail Resorts. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Vail Resorts Fiscal 2026 Third Quarter Earnings Conference Call. Joining me on the call today are Rob Katz, our Chief Executive Officer; and Andrea 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 8, 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 10-Q, were filed this afternoon with the SEC and are also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.vailresorts.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 corner, 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 is 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 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 is 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. We're 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 injuries 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 past product portfolio, and I'd like to provide an update on each of these.

First, evolving our marketing approach. This involves 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 past 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 clear 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 pass holder benefit program with Epic friend tickets at a 50% discount and saw visitation from benefit tickets increased 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 U.S. industry in lift ticket visitation this past season. based on preliminary data, as we saw our U.S. 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, we saw excellent conditions, we saw an increase in our lift ticket visits of 8% and versus the rest of the industry down in 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 which reflects softer demand following one of the worst ski season 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 pass holders for the first time, in part was due to the timing of auto renew charges. Excluding auto renew and military, unit declines are very stable between the 2 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 the 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 decline this past spring. Encouragingly, third-party data suggest that our spring pass performance meaningfully outpaced 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 past 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 past performance in the fall selling season and/or ultimately through in-season lift ticket purchases next year.

Looking back over the past several decades, U.S. ski market data indicates that visitation typically fully recovers following the 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 past analytic at 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 path and marketing ecosystem and supported by unified data and technology platform.

We have key initiatives underway or 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.

Thanks, Rob. I'll briefly cover the results from the quarter, our updated fiscal 2026 guidance and spring pass sell results. Starting with the third quarter results. Weather conditions remained extremely unfavorable in the quarter, which put continued pressure on visitation and revenue across the business. Resort revenue for the quarter declined 7% compared to the prior year. primarily driven by unfavorable weather conditions that impacted visitation and revenue for both local and destination guests, particularly at our resorts in the Rockies and in Tahoe.

Lift revenue declined 5% despite visitation being down 15%, primarily as a result of North American pass sales increasing 3% heading into the season. Resort EBITDA for the quarter was down 9% and as our advanced commitment model, cost discipline and the geographic diversity of our portfolio, partially mitigated the larger conditions headwinds.

To expand on the magnitude of the conditions impact, even our most committed past visitation in North America declined 17% over the winter, while lift ticket visitation declined 10%. The impact was particularly severe in the Rockies, where snowfall for the winter finished down 55% below the 30-year average.

Looking ahead to the fourth quarter, we expect stable demand across our North American lodging and Mountain Resort businesses during the summer season, and we are encouraged by early momentum in Australia, where Epic Australia Pass units are up approximately 26% and dollars are up approximately 31%.

Turning to full year guidance. We are updating our full year outlook with the resort EBITDA midpoint now at the bottom of the range we provided in March, consistent with our April update. We now expect net income attributable to Vail Resorts in the range of $128 million to $162 million and resort reported EBITDA in the range of $735 million to $755 million. This change reflects the continuation of historically challenging conditions through March and April, which further pressure visitation late in the season.

With the reduction in earnings, we now expect our cash taxes to be in the range of $75 million to $85 million. We remain on track to exceed our initial 2-year resource efficiency transformation plan of $100 million as we expect to achieve $106 million of annualized efficiencies by the end of this year. We also remain on track to deliver an additional $30 million of savings in fiscal 2028 as outlined in our March investor conference presentation. From fiscal 2026, this translates to an incremental $45 million of efficiencies year-over-year before $13 million of onetime costs. Our resource efficiency initiatives are providing a modest offset in a weather-impacted year and reinforce our commitment to driving structural efficiency across the business.

Turning to our balance sheet and capital allocation. Despite the difficult operating environment this year, we remain confident in the strength of our cash flow generation and the stability of our business model. Our balance sheet remains strong as we ended the quarter with liquidity of approximately $1.1 billion and net leverage of 3.5x trailing 12 months EBITDA. We are also reaffirming our capital plans of approximately $215 million to $220 million in core capital spending and $234 million to $239 million of total capital investments as we continue to invest in technology across our gear, ski school and dining businesses to enhance the guest experience and ultimately to drive long-term growth in our business.

Our capital allocation priorities remain unchanged, starting with reinvestment of the business and maintaining balance sheet flexibility to pursue potential acquisition opportunities, followed by returning capital to shareholders. We maintained the quarterly dividend at $2.22 per share and we'll remain opportunistic on buybacks as evidenced by the repurchase of approximately $45 million of shares year-to-date.

On pass sales, as Rob noted earlier, pass units and sales dollars through the May deadline were down 10% and 5%, respectively, including the effect of tax. Half days sold were down approximately 8% and reflecting a higher mix of unlimited products sold during the period. Pass performance to date has been driven by softer demand following the challenging conditions this season, evident in the fact that the weakness has been most pronounced in our more weather-impacted destination markets, including Colorado, Utah and Lake Tahoe as well as a long destination gap to typically travel to the Rockies, which all saw low double-digit unit decline.

In contrast, we saw much stronger performance in our Eastern U.S. markets and at Whistler Blackcomb, where cost units were down low single digits. We are seeing positive performance in our new initiatives as the new young adult product introduced this year saw results pacing well ahead of other age groups. And as I mentioned, our core high-value unlimited pass products are outperforming frequency products. all of which reinforces the strength of our value proposition.

We are also seeing better relative performance from growing pass holders and more pressure in pass sales within our new segment. as reduced visitation in the past season has resulted in a smaller conversion audience, which is typically a key driver of unit growth during this period. While near-term trends likely reflect delayed decision-making following a challenging season, we remain confident in the long-term growth opportunity given our strong resort network and marketing strategies.

In closing, while the season's results reflect an exceptionally challenging operating met, we are confident in the strength of our business model and the progress we're making on our key strategies. We remain focused on delivering a differentiated guest experience. strengthening our demand model and executing the opportunities within our control. Over the long term, we believe these efforts position us well to drive sustainable growth and create value for our shareholders.

With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] And we'll take our first question from David Katz with Jefferies.

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.

Sure. I'll comment on it, David. I think it's -- we're not going to put more specificity around it yet. We'll provide more color as we get to the end of the full selling period, but it's definitely meaningfully outperforming all the other age groups and has been from the beginning. The other comment I'll share is that what we're seeing is a good trade-up from a lot of other products, of course, into the core Epic product, which is what we were trying to do. So we see that as a real positive as well. In the end, I don't think it's not something that is going to drive our overall results for the year. It's a mitigator, I think, to some of the other declines that we're seeing.

Right. And frankly, if we were to break up the different cohorts within the pass group, right, like 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?

Yes. I think what we're seeing is pretty -- I think as we highlighted, as Angela mentioned, I think 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 kind of the Rockies resorts or typically visit the Rockies Resorts. Those are where we're seeing the biggest decline. And we're seeing much, much more modest declines in the Northeast and in Whistler Blackcomb. And so that really tells us, right, 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 that the new segment of our pass sales is down a lot more than renewal. But obviously, we're kind of heartened that the renewal piece is as strong as it is. And I think the other piece that -- yes, that we would mention is just 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, if we're going to see a buyer is the newer buyer to the overall program a bit more sensitive and unlikely to buy as early given the conditions that we just went through.

We'll take our next question from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America. .

Rob, I guess, 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 and sort of to not box in on guidance, maybe the easiest way to ask it is based on what you know right now, does this -- 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, I think when you look back historically, what you see is that -- and this is over a lot of years, and both -- when you look at years where the Rockies did poorly, I think another great example is when 2 years during the drought that we had in Tahoe. And then you look at the year that had normal conditions, yes, we see every indication that visitation comes fully back and in some cases, the passes 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, right, there was no past programs like we had or have today and certainly now past programs to the extent that we've grown them over the last 5 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. And 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, yes, a normal season next year with normal conditions.

Now that said, as we mentioned and as I mentioned, as Angela mentioned, yes, 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, I think, in the release and also in your prepared remarks, you talked about I think it was a step function improvement on lifts, terrain, you mentioned snowmaking, but I think all of it built around the guest experience. And just wondering if you could either elaborate a little bit more? Or is there kind of 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 lift and snowmaking terrain, upgrades to restaurants, things like that. I think where we really see the step change is taking the network of resorts that we have and using technology and new processes to obviously, to then elevate like through system-wide or network-wide investments, the experience that guests have. And so that could be like 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 that we have other things that we're working on that we'll be announcing kind of 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. And in our minds, we can create a bit of an ecosystem around our resorts that we think meets what guests of this generation, right, expect in this time, expect, which is technology that really makes a new process that makes everything easier and better and eliminates all the kind of a hurdle 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. And we think we're just uniquely positioned to do that as well as the marketing piece, right?

Obviously, we have the ability to market both pass and lift tickets to these guests with a kind of unified marketing approach but at the same time, and I think we saw some of the benefits of this, still elevating each Resorts brand, elevating the experience and unique connection that each resort has to our guests.

We'll take our next question from Molly Baum with Morgan Stanley.

I guess one follow-up to -- you talked about the deferral of past 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, what have you seen historically after a weaker weather year when it comes to the different pass products?

Yes. I think it's a little challenging because obviously, when the last time, certainly when the Rockies went through this, we actually saw a pass growth in 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. I think we're not seeing trade down in 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 yes, obviously, unprecedented season that we just went through. It's so hard to say how it will 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 app in 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 the subscription revenues or starting to call out there in terms of the volatility we might see?

I mean I think when I say in FY '27 for My Epic Gear is that it's definitely a transition year where we're moving from kind of what we were offering before to taking kind of 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 obviously, what I'd say is it's not from a financial perspective, no, we don't see any any issue there.

From an experience perspective, it's kind of going from a very small high-touch experience but very few number of guests to really rolling it out to the highest end guests but across a much broader base of tears. And then in FY '28, you would see the full experience with high touch points and everything else being rolled out to yes, to everyone who rent and then we'll have gradations, obviously, 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 try out a boot or use the ski and then you like it, we can actually have that already for you without you coming in again, trying anything on or even if we're delivering it to your unit or condo, you don't have to -- we'll just drop it off and you can pick it up. It's not like we have to actually have people go through the process of the fitting. So all of that is really FY '28 piece, but FY '27, it will be the first step towards that.

We'll take our next question from Arpine Kocharyan with UBS.

This is somewhat related to an earlier question. But assuming the current trend of down mid-single digit in dollar sales for the past 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, I guess, in conceivable or a tough year but probably hard to do. At the same time, you have given some nuggets of positive indicators in the release kind of suggesting that historically visitors seem to come back after a tough year. even after they kind of delayed purchase decisions initially. I guess, could you talk to the potential or perhaps have 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.

Yes. I think if you look back -- I mean, when I say is maybe the reverse of this, right? So 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 to lift ticket visitation as people move from passes -- from lift tickets to passes. And 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 2 products. It doesn't mean that it's perfect.

It doesn't mean 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 kind of artificial cap to how we can drive lift ticket growth, it really comes down to what the demand is. And I think for us, the key thing was having a product available for people at more accessible price points. And so there, I think, certainly, our Epic Friend tickets, the super advanced lift tickets sold. That has performed very well and obviously, only in its first year, 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. Now that said, it will always be that the best deal is going to come from a pass. And so as we get certainly 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 preticket this year or bought any lift to get can obviously use that to buy a path as they go into next year.

Okay. That's helpful. And then could we go over the levers you have to protect EBITDA, right, given mid-single-digit range decline so far, at least in past products, it seems like you see that improving a little bit later in the season. But sort of top line dynamics but also cost side of things, what kind of underlying cost inflation we're looking at and how you look at tape of that EBITDA recovery after an anomaly year with an underlying -- understanding that, ultimately, a lot also depends on strength of the lift business once we get there, I guess?

Yes. Well, first of all, we'll go into next -- into FY '27 with an opportunity to really see, right, the kind of run rate improvement in our resource efficiency transformation efforts because obviously, we're delivering on all of that for FY '26, a portion of which is going to really roll into FY '27 and we have new initiatives that we'll be talking more about as we go forward a portion. Most of that will be FY '28, but a portion of that will also hit FY '27.

And then obviously, yes, I think we have given a unified approach that we take towards how we schedule labor and all of our workforce planning. We can be nimble with labor to the extent that we see that visitation decline but we're going into next season looking for full staffing and really expecting -- assuming that the condition is good, yes, that we're going to get that full visitation. So we're not going to pull back on the guest experience. But I think as we saw this year, yes, if that's what happens, we certainly can make adjustments. But that's not what we're going to be planning for.

We'll take our next question from Xian Siew with BNP Paribas.

Maybe kind of going continuing on to the past selling season, as you kind of go through the rest of the year or summer, like how do you think -- are you changing any of the maybe strategies or like marketing to kind of drive a little bit of an acceleration? Or is it kind of using the same maybe like marketing approach as you have in the last maybe couple of months?

Yes. 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 to put them to work as we go through Labor Day and through the rest of the season. And 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.

And yes, in the midway, we tend not to make big product changes because we feel like, yes, 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, Yes, 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 together that we put to work this spring. And so that's definitely going to be front of mind as we go into the fall.

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

Yes. Yes, absolutely. And I would say 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, like where we've had a bad season like this. No, no, no, 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 path, and it's 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. And so that is absolutely our lift ticket, effective ticket price will go up -- sorry, our overall effective our overall effective ticket price will go up as they move from past lift tickets. Now that said, that's not what we want. We still want people to be in the advanced commitment bucket, but yes, we have to have every lever available to us.

We'll take our next question from Jay Stantial with Stifel. .

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 the choppiness we're 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 the 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 do you see to visitation behavior across the local and destination cohorts during the season?

Yes, sure. I mean, I'd say right now, tough to break out kind of any kind of macro impact from the weather impact and by the conditions impact from last year. And I think based on some of the data we were talking about in terms of how Whistler is doing or the East versus other markets, definitely seems like this is much more of a condition-driven decline.

I think when you look back historically, obviously, 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 more and stronger global 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 cutback on some of the European flights and things like that. Asia. So ultimately, that could help the overall destination -- the U.S. destination or margin destination business here.

So I think our business provides a natural hedge of sorts, I think, in tougher economic times because of how core kind of skiing is and the kind of recreation component of our business. It's not all just vacation spend. But in the end, right now, I think 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 -- I think you touched on this a little bit, but it's a correlated question that we get from investors all the time is sort of how much impact the transatlantic or transpacific outbound steer travel is having on visitation, just given that value proposition and that seems to be a lot of word-of-mouth marketing benefit over the last or 3 years.

Rob, I'm curious, just 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 obviously, flight costs and things of that are going to help you stay where they are. But from more in terms of the levers that you can pull, is there any opportunity with it's in the marketing strategy or otherwise to sort of go after this laps get space that's sort of opted for international?

Yes. We see that as a material driver, right? So obviously, we have data because our path is to provide right, access, both in Europe and in Asia, and we're not seeing a material increase in the usage of that. I think in unique locations, yes, it can be meaningful to a resort in Europe or Asia's U.S. business, they can see a real increase. But in terms of the overall visitation that's happening in the kind of North American ski industry, no, I don't think it's material either way. I think it's -- yes, it's a kind of nice kind of bucket list type thing that people add on every now and then, but it's not really replacing the normal visitation.

I would say the other side of it, which I don't think is changing anytime soon, but really, what we've seen over the last 5 to 7 years is a decline in inbound visitation into the U.S. And so between lots of different factors, part of it, the U.S. dollar, others just the overall inbound tourism, which is not just about skiing, but about everybody in tourism. I mean, I think that is the much bigger trend that international visitation to the U.S. for a lot of travel, but certainly for the ski industry has gone down a lot. And 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 U.S. travel business. trying to promote that.

We'll take our next question from Ben Chaiken with Mizuho.

Maybe one on cost. The midpoint of the new guide implies EBITDA down 12% with a cost base of just over $2 billion. As we think about next season, other than installation, how should we think about the flow-through of any incremental revenues? And then separately, are there any moving parts you would flag? I guess, for example, were there any onetime areas you pulled back this year, we should consider the need to come back as revenue presumably returns?

Yes. Thanks for the question. I think the biggest piece to think about is there's obviously a favorable component that we had this year of where we yes, we were able to manage to the demand levels and the revenue. That, of course, would come back with revenue, as you would expect, outside of just kind of inflation on our base operating cost. And then as Rob mentioned, we have the year-over-year benefit going the other way on our resource efficiency transformation. Expect that to be about $106 million relative to about, right, we were at the 82 cumulative point this year. So you'll see a year-over-year benefit from that.

Outside of that, it's really other things that just normally track with performance, things like our performance management compensation that you should think about will return, obviously, in a normal environment next year.

I guess maybe following up on that. I guess you were referring to variable cost components associated with visitation? Say that again?

Yes, the variable costs that go with the revenue, right, things like credit card fees and taxes and all of those types of things that go with the revenue that we would expect to come back with visitation returning.

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 trucks to pose against lower visitation from weather. I guess, am I thinking about this correctly? And is there any way you could help us quantify your ag next season and then any other offsets you would consider?

Yes, you're correct. The effective ticket price this year, when we have pass visitation in North America down 17%, but obviously has the revenue locked in, that is having a a very large impact on effective ticket price overall. So what I would do is I would separate out the past revenue piece from the lift ticket piece to really get more of a comparative of what you would expect in terms of the pricing change year-over-year versus just right, the visitation impact from this current season.

We'll take our next question from Anthony Bonadio with Wells Fargo.

I just wanted to ask about past 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? .

Yes, it's hard for us to -- obviously, there's not a perfect information on that since we're the only one that's publicly reporting, but we're basing that on just some third-party entities that try and track transaction volume and other things in the marketplace. Yes, so it's hard to speak with a lot of precision on any of it. But to the extent yes, 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 are -- 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, yes, lead into completely new marketing tactics and approaches than we had last spring. And 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 in our resorts, even with, I think, the down snowfall and conditions that were tough, I think. I think there was a sense broadly that on the things we could control this season, I think 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, yes, that we will, of course, put the -- put everything we have into making it the absolute best is impossible.

Got it. That's helpful. And then just maybe on M&A. Can you 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?

Yes. I'm not going to comment on M&A and never do, but in terms of spicy. But I would say, historically, I have not seen situations where down either economic years or down snow years, it trigger people to immediately sell. I think everybody feels like no one wants to be selling on it in a down year. I think sometimes it reminds people though that you can have these tough years. And so sometimes the year after, they're even 2 years after, right, 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.

We'll take our next question from Patrick Scholes with Truist Securities.

Can you just talk a little bit more about this, I believe, a new inclusion of a KPI with called days sold and certainly, it comes with footnote on it, about some metrics in there. Talk a little bit about why including that now, 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 in watching that KPI specifically?

Yes. I think it is something that we've been looking at internally for a while, and it obviously tries to say we've been reporting on units, but if you sell an Epic Pass or a Global Pass, that's 1 unit, if you sell an Epic 1 day, that's also 1 unit. That's the way we've been tracking it. But obviously, those are 2 completely different products. And so internally, we've been tracking days sold because it tells us how many days of skiing we have. Now that said, like we don't -- we, of course, 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 now that if we are mixing up in the kind of frequency of that unit, so to speak, yes, then that will show up in the days sold versus just units. So I think we started talking about that publicly at the investor conference. And I think we said -- talked about that we might continue to report on that, and we're going to. And 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.

Now obviously, it's important to us. The units are important, too, because we like to see all the guests. Obviously, that's kind of a transaction piece. So it's still important, but not quite as important as the days sold, which tracks, yes, just a little closer to how much volume people are buying.

We'll take our next question from Brandt Montour with Barclays.

So Rob, you mentioned the turn-in ticket program, the Epic Buddy ticket program and 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?

Yes. I guess what I'd say is yes, there -- it's kind of early because a lot of that is going to -- we think probably happens later. But right now, yes, we're seeing improvements in both the turn in our 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. And 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, of course, 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 turn in your ticket perspective in terms of the impact they can have on the past business, we would really need to see like a normal full season. see how many people actually buy it in that context and then how many people convert into 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 are promoting that made it easier for people to buy.

And I'd say that's the same thing with pass, obviously, it is a tougher past selling season right now. And so the fact that we have these other avenues for people to get in, we see is all positive.

Okay. Fair enough. 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 try and win some share back? And then how that could sort of impede your ability to try and improve pass sales throughout the next 3 defaults?

Yes. What I said -- of course, I have no idea, right? It's hard to know. And I think we take our purchase part of it -- there's a little bit of competitive dynamic that we're looking at there. But a part of it, I think, as we shared in the investor conference was we looked at how much we increased pass pricing over the last 4 years in both adult and young adult. And what we realized was in the adult category, yes, actually, we did quite well on that. But in the young adult category, we didn't. And so in a way, this was almost like a rollback of some of the increases that we took before.

Look, I think one of the benefits we have, and again, I have no idea how other people are going to make pricing decisions and and that's obviously on them. But one of the benefits we have here is that because we own, right, all of our resorts and how only limited partners, when we increase or decrease price, we're not constrained by the relationship that we have with the partners or how we're paying them, we're not paying them. how we're spending on media or not. I mean all of those things are easier. We also get the benefit of ancillary, right, in all of our resorts, not just in the owned resorts, or a limited number of resorts in the past.

So to the extent that we're being more aggressive with young adults, no matter where they ski largely in our North American network, we're getting the benefit of that lift full 100% of lift revenue was, 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 set up. And I think the same is true, right, for all of these other things that we're doing as we move back and forth between past and lifts, we're doing this in a very holistic manner. It can be harder to do when it's a little bit more vulcanized. So for us, in the end, we're not really in a reactive mode at all. We're really in how do we optimize. And I think we set that when I first came in, you were looking to optimize our past portfolio and make decisions that were pretty independent of what others are doing.

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 reinforce the work we're doing to address the end-to-end guest experience. from marketing to products 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 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 Vail Resorts Fiscal Third Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. You may disconnect your lines at this time, and have a wonderful day.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vail Resorts Fiscal Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Connie Wang, Vice President of Investor Relations at Vail Resorts. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to Vail Resorts Fiscal 2026 Second 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, March 9, 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 10-Q were filed this afternoon with the SEC and are also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.vailresorts.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 second quarter earnings call. This quarter and our full year outlook reflect the challenges we faced this season, including the most difficult weather environment in the Rockies we have ever seen, with snowfall and snowpack at or near all-time historic lows, even worse than fiscal year 2012, which had previously been our season with the worst conditions in the Rockies. Our second quarter was significantly impacted by these unprecedented weather challenges in the Rockies, which weighed on visitation and overall performance. In addition to Rocky snowfall through February being at historic lows, it's also been the warmest winter to date on record for Colorado. For example, February was 9 degrees warmer than average in the Rockies, which has dramatically impacted our ability to open terrain. This season saw the latest opening of the back Bowls at Vail Mountain and Imperial Lift at Breckenridge and only 70% to 80% of acres opened through the end of February at our resorts in Colorado and Utah. The Rockies are the largest driver of resort EBITDA for the company, and as such, the poor weather had an outsized negative impact on our results this year.

While these conditions weighed on our results, they also underscore the importance of our advanced commitment strategies. While pass units may have declined a couple of points over the past few years, it's important to highlight that we've grown our pass units by 55% over the past 5 years with pass holders now making up approximately 75% of our annual visitation, providing meaningful stability, especially in a year like this. Over the past decade, we've also meaningfully expanded the geographic diversity of our portfolio to help mitigate regional weather impacts. While that benefit is less evident this year given the severity of conditions in the Rockies, diversification has provided more support than it did historically, and it will continue to play an important role over time. We're proud of the resilience of our business model that is now more durable, more diversified and well positioned for our next phase of growth. We continue to advance strategic initiatives to optimize visitation, supported by enhanced marketing initiatives and new products. We saw the first signs of that last fall as we materially changed the trajectory of pass sales post Labor Day, which was critical heading into this season. We also launched pass sales for the 2026, 2027 season last week with new products and targeted pricing adjustments.

Most notably, we introduced new pricing for skiers and riders ages 13 to 30 at 20% less than standard pricing, providing a more accessible pathway for the next generation of skiers who are the future of our sport. This incentivizes young adults, those ages 18 to 30, who tend to be more price sensitive and likely were more impacted by the price increases we took over the past 4 years. We supported this new product with our enhanced marketing strategy, including the launch of a new campaign this week called Epic Passion, which leans into the emotional connection skiers and riders, particularly Gen Z, have with the sport. This campaign exemplifies our evolved marketing approach of supporting new products through integrated investment and messaging across channels, including a social-first and influencer-driven approach to content to reach younger guests and drive awareness and conversion.

For our broader array of passes, we announced 3% to 4% price increases for Epic and Epic Local passes before taxes. Combined with our new 20% discount for young adults, price changes we made to Epic Day passes and other unlimited regional products, this results in an approximately 3% to 4% blended price increase before the impact of any mix changes. Additionally, this year, we are passing through the sales and lift tax the company pays to local communities on multi-resort passes in the same way we do for lift tickets and all of our other mountain products. The tax rate for most of our passes is approximately 3%. Lastly, as part of the broader integrated approach across lift tickets and passes, we also made targeted updates to pass pricing, including adjustments to Epic Day pass pricing to incentivize greater frequency, resulting in higher increases on 1- to 2-day passes and year-over-year decreases on 6- to 7-day passes. These are key steps in advancing our portfolio of products to address our largest opportunities to drive revenue growth.

Moving on to our lift ticket initiatives. We are seeing positive early reception to our Epic Friends and Advanced Lift tickets introduced this season, both of which are especially noteworthy in light of the soft weather conditions we've had this year. Epic Friend ticket redemption rates are up over the legacy pass holder benefit tickets and showing growth in visitation compared to declines across traditional ticket types, demonstrating that this product is both delivering meaningful value to pass holders while also expanding a key top-of-funnel audience. Similarly, our 1-month advanced lift tickets are showing positive signs of moving guest purchasing behavior earlier despite the uncertainty this year around weather. We are also encouraged by the results from our off-peak pricing strategy at select resorts. It's been a difficult season to truly evaluate performance of these products given the magnitude of the weather overhang, but these initial results give us confidence that these products are expanding our reach and strengthening the funnel into our pass business.

Most importantly, in the face of very challenging conditions, we achieved record high system-wide guest satisfaction scores this season, including increases year-over-year in Colorado and Utah, which is a direct reflection of the caliber of our team members and their exceptional execution throughout the season. I want to extend my sincere appreciation to our frontline teams for their unwavering commitment to our guests, which was critical during this time. Overall, the collective strength and focus of this organization are evident. As I mentioned upfront, this year underscores the stability of our advanced commitment strategy, what it provides. We have purposely built a model that has been designed to withstand challenging weather years through regional diversification, pre-commitment of roughly 75% of visits through our pass products and continued investment in snowmaking, and that's just part of the story. Combined with new lift ticket and pass initiatives launched this season and our reimagined marketing approach and significant investments in guest-facing technology and an opportunity to completely reimagine the gear business, I'm confident we are setting ourselves up for the next phase of growth. Looking ahead, we are well positioned to continue elevating the guest experience, executing with discipline and delivering sustainable long-term value for our shareholders. With that, I will now turn the call over to Angela to review our financial results and outlook in more depth.

Thanks, Rob. Good afternoon, everyone. I'll now walk through our second quarter financial results, season-to-date metrics and our updated outlook for fiscal 2026. Starting with the second quarter results. As Rob mentioned, historically challenging conditions in the Rockies significantly impacted performance in the quarter with Rockies snowfall down 43% year-over-year. Conditions in Whistler and Tahoe have also been variable, while conditions in the East were strong this season, providing a partial offset and highlights the geographic diversification of our portfolio. Q2 total net revenue declined approximately 5% in the second quarter compared to the prior year, driven by unfavorable weather conditions that negatively impacted visitation and ancillary spending for both local and destination guests. Total Q2 lift revenue declined approximately 3% despite visitation being down 13%. This performance reflects the stability provided by pass sales, which were up approximately 3% heading into the season. Q2 resort reported EBITDA declined approximately 8% compared to the prior year as weather-related headwinds were partially offset by disciplined cost management and continued savings from our resource efficiency transformation plan.

Turning to season-to-date metrics through March 1, skier visitation declined approximately 12%, consistent with the ongoing weather impacts we saw during the second quarter. Lift revenue declined approximately 4% as growth in pass revenue was partially offset -- was offset by declines in non-pass lift ticket revenue. To highlight the magnitude of the conditions impact, even our most committed pass visitation declined approximately 14%, while non-pass lift ticket visitation declined approximately 6%. Ancillary revenue trends improved compared to January metrics, though they remain down versus the prior year due to lower visitation, partially offset by increased yield per visit.

Moving to our fiscal '26 full year outlook. Persistent challenging weather conditions through February in the Rockies continue to limit terrain availability, and we are reducing our fiscal 2026 net income and resort reported EBITDA guidance. We now expect net income attributable to Vail Resorts in the range of $144 million to $190 million and resort reported EBITDA in the range of $745 million to $775 million. With the reduction in earnings, we now expect cash taxes for the year to be approximately $95 million to $105 million. Given the unprecedented conditions in the Rockies, we are pleased with the stability provided by our past program and resource efficiency transformation savings. To put the magnitude of the conditions impact into context, Rockies snowfall this season is approximately 40% lower than fiscal 2012, which was historically the year with the most unfavorable weather conditions until now. We acknowledge that given challenging conditions persisting this late into the season, there is greater variability in our guidance for the year despite limited time left in the season. Our updated guidance range reflects our assumptions outlined in the press release, including the conditions for the rest of the season are consistent with the current levels in North America.

Turning to our resource efficiency transformation plan. We now expect to exceed the initial $100 million annualized savings target by approximately $6 million by the end of fiscal 2026. This program continues to drive improvements in organizational effectiveness and operating leverage. For fiscal 2026, we expect to deliver approximately $42 million of incremental savings versus the prior year before approximately $15 million of onetime operating expenses.

Finally, turning to liquidity and capital allocation. Despite the difficult operating environment this year, we remain confident in the strength of our cash flow generation and the stability of our business model. Our balance sheet remains strong as we ended the quarter with liquidity of approximately $1.1 billion and net leverage of 3.1x trailing 12 months EBITDA. During the quarter, we retired our convertible debt of $525 million using a combination of net proceeds from our delayed draw term loan and cash on hand. On February 9, we amended our credit agreement to extend the maturity date to 2031, revised the pricing levels and slightly increased the facility size. On capital allocation, our priorities remain unchanged. We continue to prioritize reinvestment in the business and balance sheet flexibility to pursue attractive acquisition opportunities. We then look to return capital to shareholders. We reaffirmed our calendar year 2026 capital plan with core capital expenditures of $215 million to $220 million and total capital spending in the range of $234 million to $239 million, with a continued focus on technology investments that can be deployed at scale across the enterprise. We also maintained the quarterly dividend at $2.22 per share, and we'll remain opportunistic on buybacks as evidenced by repurchasing 0.3 million shares for a total of $45 million year-to-date. In light of the results from this year, we reevaluated the current dividend level and elected to hold our quarterly dividend flat as we do not believe this year's cash flow decline is indicative of the long-term cash generation potential of the business. We always take a long-term view when investing in the business and setting the level of the dividend, knowing that we may have variations due to weather like we experienced this year, and we built a business model with strong cash flow generation and a balance sheet to withstand those fluctuations and stay focused on the future.

To close, while this season has unfolded in an unusually difficult weather environment, the quarter reinforced the resilience of our business and the benefits of the strategic choices we've made over time. The stability provided by our advanced commitment strategy, the progress we're making across lift ticket and pass initiatives, along with our resource transformation plan have all helped mitigate the impact of extremely challenging conditions this year. We remain confident in the actions we're taking, the durability of our cash flow profile as conditions normalize and the strength of our balance sheet to support both reinvestment in the business and returns to shareholders. With that, I'll turn the call back over to the operator for Q&A.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Sean Kelley with Bank of America.

Just wondering, Rob, if we could start off by -- I think usually right around now is when we flip the script and start talking about next season as hard as that is, and I know there's still a bit ahead of work for everybody at the team to do. But can you just talk about sort of how that conversation with your consumer is evolving in sort of a season like this? And specifically, we read a lot about unusually warm temperatures in the base communities around areas like Denver and Salt Lake. So just kind of how do you think this ultimately impacts renewals and the look to next year in some of these local communities that were hit hard by weather this year?

Yes. I think it's certainly something that people will take into account. But I think what we've seen historically when there are big aberrations like what we saw this year in terms of weather, we saw this I think back in 2012, we saw this, I think, the following year in 2012, '13 for Tahoe, which had a pretty tough year. I think what we see is that people tend to look at this in terms of how many times they may have used their pass as also an aberration that it's not really that they don't love skiing. It's not that they're not as connected to the sport, but just that the weather didn't show up this year like they may have hoped. But I think everyone also knows that, that doesn't really change the likelihood that next year could be an amazing season even in this year where we had tough conditions out West. We obviously had really strong conditions in the Northeast. So I think people understand that there is a little variability to that. That's one of the reasons why we do provide our passes at a low price so that it's something that people can plan on year after year through good years and bad. Not to say, obviously, since we haven't seen a year like this, it's hard to know exactly how this will play out, but I don't think this is going to impact kind of long-term engagement in the sport.

Great. And then maybe just as a short follow-up more on the numbers. Angela, I got a couple of questions regarding sort of just the flow-through assumption here. So if we look at the change from where you started the season in revenue relative to the change in EBITDA, it's quite high. I mean it's roughly 80%, which I think when we think about locking in a lot of the Lyft revenue would hopefully be a little bit of an offset. But can you just talk us through that, maybe where the delta and expectation was to your model and why that flow-through is as elevated as it is, understanding that you're obviously a fixed cost business?

Yes. I mean that is the punch, Sean, I think that through -- yes, of course, our guidance already had the pass revenue piece. So what you're seeing in the change here is really the parts from the season. right, that's turning from demand from the conditions impact that's impacting revenue, there is a high flow-through, right? Because we are doing everything we can to, right, operate as much terrain and operate our resorts to the highest guest experience levels we can, which you did see in our kind of guest experience scores. And we don't change that, right? We don't pull back on those types of things. And so yes, there is a high flow-through when you see this large visitation change and the impact that has to revenue during the season.

We'll move next to David Katz with Jefferies.

Rob, I wanted to go back to one of the issues that we -- you've talked about a bit, which is the marketing efforts, particularly the social presence. And any feedback results, input, impact or updates there would be helpful.

Sure. I think we started to see, I think, the real benefits of that in the fall of last year with pass sales, where we really saw that kind of big change in trajectory of pass sales, which through Labor Day and then post Labor Day. And I think we've continued to see that this year. I think some of our kind of social-first content, influencer content has been some of the best-performing content we've had throughout the year. which I think highlights the strategic change, right, that -- which I think is, again, not about Vail Resorts, but the broader marketplace where people are looking for more authentic, more real-time content. They're looking for more voices than just the company amplifying that content. And quite frankly, they are -- yes, they want to see us show up in the places that they are engaging, which I think we have been this year. And so we are feeling -- we do feel very good about all the both media spend and channel shifts that we made this year because we are tracking kind of the incremental return that we're getting from that spend, and it's all been very good. Now unfortunately, that, of course, is not enough to overcome some of the other dynamics we're talking about with weather and visitation. But so far, in terms of what we've seen, we feel like it was absolutely the right choice and something we're going to continue going forward.

I appreciate that. And I wanted to -- just as my follow-up, at the risk of trying to steal some thunder from the analyst meeting. We've seen a couple of Buddy programs, Epic discount programs, the Gen Z program. Is this the direction we should expect you to continue progressing, which is to offer very specific kinds of discounts in the interest of driving some visitation with the hope of ancillary spending and return.

Yes. And yes, we'll share a little bit more at the investor conference. But I would say that it isn't necessarily like the strategy that we're going to take is about discounting. I think what you're going to see from us is constantly looking at where we think we can optimize price, optimize features and benefits and performance and we're going to make whatever moves we think are the right moves for the business and the program for that. And so what you saw with our kind of Gen Z effort, young adult effort was really seeing that, yes, when we look back over a number of years, we saw growth in a lot of different segments of our pass business, but the area that we were showing the most struggles was in this age group. And I think when you look back over the past price increases that we've had, those were taken -- I mean you could look at it as a discount today or you could look at it that, hey, we provided price increases over the last 4 years across the board in the program. That probably hit, right, folks who are earlier in their career, so to speak, harder. And so I think what we're doing is kind of resetting a little bit from that based on looking at all the data and all the information we have. And we do think it's critical that we keep the engagement of these folks in the sport for the future. But as we go forward, you'll see us make other adjustments whether we may increase prices, pass through prices, other things that we think make more sense in terms of how we drive overall revenue, which is really just the ultimate goal here.

We'll move next to Patrick Scholes with Truist.

When I think back to the most recent weak snowfall season, that being 2017 to 2018, after that season, you went very heavy on the CapEx and upgraded your systems for snowmaking. Is something like that being contemplated for after this season in light of the very weak snowfall?

Yes. I can't exactly remember. I'd have to go back and look at exactly what we did after that year. But I would say that the plans that we make for capital start -- so we're currently spending money in what we call capital year 2026. We start planning for capital year 2026 in the spring of 2025 or sometimes even earlier and making commitments on those plans maybe in September, late summer, September 2025. So what I'd say is we really make snowmaking investments based upon the results of that year because it's too late. Once we're going down that road, we also typically would need long permits and other things. So what I'd say is we have a long-term commitment to upgrading snowmaking as part of that guest experience. I think we actually did see, again, hard to see through all the challenge of this year, but Keystone had a strong year, which I think was absolutely because of the investments that we made in snowmaking there. And I do think that even the investments we made at Vail a number of years back, as you're pointing out, I think really helped us. So that is absolutely something we're going to continue to look at as we go forward. And I would say it's not that this year will change that. I think we understand having been in the business for a long time, yes, that this is the nature of the business. And so we're going to prioritize those types of opportunities as we think they make sense.

We'll take our next question from Matthew Boss with JPMorgan.

So Rob, maybe just trying our best to parse through some of the most difficult weather conditions this season for your business as you cited. Could you elaborate on traction that you're seeing with the proactive actions that you've put in place to accelerate visitation? Or how would you rank order maybe some of the green shoots...

Yes. I mean, again, it is hard to parse through this year because obviously, it's such a unique year. But we highlighted, obviously, the actions we took to drive pass sales, which clearly made a difference, and I think were really helpful as we went into the season. We talked about that, right, in December and what we did in the fall, and we did see those shifts. I think on the 3 kind of lift ticket initiatives that we launched, Epic Friends, yes, a ticket type that performed was up, right, when every other ticket type was down and obviously meaningfully down. So that tends to indicate that, yes, people are, of course, interested in going there and that the lower price made a difference. We also saw a lot of folks going into Epic Friends who right, came from a lot of different kind of corners, so to speak. And so we felt like that was a real positive. The 1-month advanced discount that we offered the same thing. People -- we saw that grow quite a bit again when a lot of other -- all of our other advanced ticket types were down. And we saw a lot of prospects coming in, people who are new to the database, so to speak, from this 1-month advance ticket. And again, I would say for that product, in particular, unusual that you would see people in a year like this with so much weather instability that they would commit a month in advance. So I think that was also helped by the fact that we had a greater call to action on the website kind of a month out when people are really in there kind of looking and booking time frame for making a vacation. So we feel really good about that. And we definitely saw some of the resorts like Keystone, which had good weather, but good better conditions, but honestly, really outperformed. And I think that was also because of the changes that we made to the off-peak ticket prices there. And even if you compare kind of the off-peak to off-peak or peak to peak for the exact same resorts, what we saw was that in a year like this, yes, the lower prices really made a difference. none of this is that shocking. I think we understand that bringing those prices back in line are important. But I think all of those, we do see as green shoots because there are things that we're going to continue to build on for next year. Now I will say that, that doesn't mean that like we're going to go around just discounting. It is really this kind of more sharpshooter approach, right, where we're not -- I think what we were probably doing before was a little bit more peanut butter as it related to past and as it related to lift tickets because we were trying to move everybody from lift tickets to VA. But at this point, right, we're now going to kind of coming back and really picking apart each and every product and time period to decide what's the best way to optimize it.

Great. And then Angela, with resort EBITDA forecasted roughly $100 million below initial expectations for this year, under normal weather conditions, if that played out, I mean, what do you see as the recapture opportunity next year? And are there any reinvestments for us to consider as it relates to bottom line?

Yes. Thanks, Matt. The changes from this year are all weather related as we noted, right? So all of this we see is, yes, the visitation impact that was obviously not part of our original guidance and very stark visitation obviously had the large revenue impact that we were just talking about with Sean. And so yes, that is all things that we would say was very unusual related to weather for this year.

We'll move next to Jeff Stantial with Stifel.

Maybe following up on Sean's question and then Matt's question just now, Rob, so obviously, a chunk of the pass sales historically has come from cross-selling skiers over that purchased a window ticket in the prior year season. Can you just remind us sort of years like this, really bad weather conditions, what have you seen in terms of the impact of that overall funnel? How does that play into pass sales? And sort of has that factor in your expectations for this year?

Yes. No, there is no doubt that I think when you see less usage, whether it's lift tickets or passes that it does have an impact. I think the question is like how much of that for folks, typically, it's because people are just choosing not to ski for some reason. And I think in those situations, yes, sometimes it's that kind of person who's either not -- maybe not going to renew, not going to buy or buy less frequency products or something like that. But this -- I think when you get to a year like this, it's almost more like a life event that happens. So if somebody, for instance, gets injured, well, their skiing might go to 0, but that doesn't have any impact on the following year if they're now healthy or a life event like children and things like that. So in other words, those are things that happen that people understand are really outside of this question that people think about like, well, do I really like skiing and how much am I going to ski and all that. So that's -- a year like this, I think, has a lot of that. Now that said, there's no doubt that it absolutely means that we have to work hard, right, to reach people who may not have come as much or may not have come at all or didn't buy a lift ticket. So that's -- there's no doubt about that. And that's where I think we feel good about some of the moves that we've made going into this year in terms of the broader marketing, the increased investment, the different channels that we're reaching out to people, the young adult discount, the Epic Friends discount and the promotion, we've been promoting turning your ticket right all season long, which is new for us because we typically didn't do that. So we do see all of those things as tailwinds. There's no doubt that the conditions and visitation is a headwind.

That's great. And then maybe switching gears over to Angela or Rob, whoever wants to take this on the operating expenses side of things, can you just remind us how much of the expense base here is utilities and just how to think about sensitivity in the model to higher energy costs given everything going on from a geopolitical perspective? And that's all from us.

Yes. We have not disclosed the exact percent that's utility or energy. Obviously, we do have utility costs at all resorts and energy at this point in the season, though that's dramatically ramping down. So yes, and we do also lock in some long-term contracts at a lot of our resorts. And so yes, we don't expect that the energy piece is not part of kind of our changed outlook for the year, and it's something we'll monitor as we go into next year.

We'll move next to Arpine Kocharian with UBS.

My question is on the pass product pricing for the upcoming season. It sounds like the actual price increase is around 7% or so if you look at it like-for-like basis after taxes. And I understand there was a difference last year the way that was -- I think taxes were included. At the same time, it seems like most of your initiatives, recent initiatives are really focused on pricing, mostly targeting discounting for both lift and pass offering for the upcoming season. I'm just trying to understand the 7% like-for-like pricing better. Is there a segment of your consumer that is not that price sensitive and you can better segment more price-sensitive consumer by raising sort of overall cost to the core consumer in that 7% range, which to me was not that different to the pricing versus the pricing increase you had the prior year?

Yes. So what I would say is, I think, first of all, we obviously are providing a pretty big discount to a big chunk of our pass holders through this new young adult pricing program. So for -- I think what you have to look at is everybody, it's not -- it isn't a one price fits all to everybody. So for those guests, they're obviously seeing a pretty significant decline in pricing. And we do think that, that is our most price-sensitive guests, especially those really 18 to 30. And so I think when you look at it that way, we are essentially segmenting the customer base in a way. It's also consistent with what we've seen over the last 4 years in terms of the performance of all of that. And I do think -- yes, I think we do charge tax on all of our products. And I think historically, just because network was growing, it was moving around. We just hadn't added it here, but we do think it's time. And we do think a lot of consumers understand, look at it a little bit differently. They understand that, that is what they should expect when they purchase almost any product and certainly any product in travel. So yes, it did give us comfort that on an overall basis, we felt good about the moves that we are making going into the past selling season for next year.

Helpful. And then you mentioned there's greater variability in your guidance. Could you zoom on that a little bit more? What is driving that variability on the guidance that you just issued? What needs to happen for you to come in at the higher end versus lower end of that guidance range?

Yes. I just think at this point in the season, I would say, typically because the snowpack is lower, the conditions is more variable now than it has been at different times. If I look back over the last 10 years on this same date, I think because the snowpack is higher, the conditions don't change as much between now and Easter or early April. where here, actually, right, if we get a storm that comes through, that could really improve the conditions. If we don't get a storm and it's -- the temperature goes up 5 degrees, that can hurt conditions. So I just think we're at a point in time that's -- obviously, as we've mentioned a few times on this call, for the Rockies, pretty much no one's ever seen. So I think that creates more uncertainty as to what we're going to see for the rest of the year.

So it's entirely weather driven. There's no sort of current macro or geopolitical...

No, no.

We'll take our next question from Ben Chaiken with Mizuho.

Rob, in the past, we've kind of talked about adding benefits to the past, both ski and non-ski to reduce weather dependency and drive year-round engagement. Clearly, you've been moving fast with the friend ticket, the advanced purchase, the lift ticket conversion. As you sit here today, using your words, arguably the worst Rocky Mountain season ever, does that accelerate or change your thinking on past benefits? Or do you feel the product is largely where you want it?

I think we're always looking at past benefits. And I think that's something, yes, we'll definitely be taking a look at as we go into next year for sure. And there could definitely be things we add. There could be things we add for next season. There could be things we add for the FY '28 passes that will go on sale in March of '27. I don't think -- I would say, though, I think in the end, the primary benefit. I think that will just be a nice add-on, but the primary benefit of the pass is still going to be winter focused. And we do think from all the research we've done, that is the thing that most people are saying that they want from the pass. Now it's not to say that they wouldn't like to have some other benefits and perks and things like that, and we'll do that. But for us, yes, the -- what we constantly hear is, yes, they want us to make the winter season better for them, whether it's benefits, perks, what they get, pricing, discounts, all of that. But that said, like, yes, there are probably ways that we can absolutely just improve the overall package by adding things that, yes, might be useful in the summer. But I don't know that, that changes like the weighting of winter, summer, the way people think about it.

Understood. And then as you think about the overall structure of your pass, is the young adult cohort largely a single-day guest today, again, on kind of a relative basis as you think about the buckets? Meaning do you expect this purchase to be largely an incremental pass sale?

Well, sorry, you said -- yes, you said are they a single day -- they're definitely -- no, they're frequent and they ski quite a bit, and so I wouldn't say that. But in terms of whether we think that this new pricing will help get new people into the program, absolutely. And we do think it makes a difference. And we think that, yes, being more aggressive to this cohort, especially right now, we think can make a real difference in terms of the people that we bring into our program and into the sport.

Got it. I didn't necessarily mean one day. I meant like a window ticket versus a pass is maybe the better way to phrase it.

Yes. I would say both. I think we -- yes, not window, but lift tickets, yes, I think they definitely -- we do see a lot of these folks not wanting to make that commitment. But I think it's broadly. It's also just, yes, that they may -- if the pricing gets too high, they just may not engage, right, overall in the sport or engage as much.

We'll move next to Laurent Vasilescu with BNP Paribas...

It's Xian on for Laurent. Could you talk a little bit more about what went into the decision in terms of getting to the 20% discount for Gen Z? Like maybe talk a little bit about elasticity kind of studies that you were looking at with that cohort? And then maybe more broadly also, how do you think about the pass pricing relative to lift or window ticket pricing?

Yes. So I think we -- the good news for us is that we have a lot of data on the behavior of our guests, and we have a lot of data that includes both lift ticket data across all of our resorts and pass purchase and visitation. We've been at this a long time. And so we're basically looking at yes, what we think are the price elasticities of these different groups and cohorts, and we're looking for prices that we think ultimately optimize the total revenue for us. And when we look at that, we do include -- it's not just Lyft revenue. We also include all of our ancillary revenue, and we also include what we think getting them into a pass does in terms of return rate and therefore, the long-term value that we're creating. And so that's how we got to that discount. And it is -- yes, it's not just a swag. Like it's -- we spend a lot of time trying to identify what we think is the best opportunity. And then sorry, your second question was?

About kind of maybe how you're thinking about pass pricing versus the lift ticket or...

Yes, we think there is definitely a gap there, right, that was created, I think, back 4 years ago in terms of when we reduced pass pricing 20%. So it has given us some room to move lift ticket pricing down without, in our minds, really affecting pass pricing or pass demand. But I think in this cohort, yes, I think we were really more looking at what the pass prices were for this cohort over the last 4 years and what we saw in terms of their demand and performance over the last 4 years. That's really what drove that decision less about actual lift ticket pieces. But we do think, yes, that obviously, some of the other things that we're doing, including Epic friend tickets and our 1-month advance ticket, all of that also, we think, are good opportunities for this cohort as well.

We'll move next to Brandt Montour with Barclays.

So Rob, you described young adults being a big chunk of your guests. It seems like you're expecting a fair amount of elasticity to come from this program. That would, to us imply perhaps a mix shift toward a lower value guest. Even if it's a higher LTV, it's perhaps a lower value guest near and medium term. So is that true, right? -- one? And then two, how should we think about how sensitive the model might be to that shift?

Yes. I would say, by definition, yes, there are folks -- I mean, this would be true for every travel company, I think, which is typically folks in their 20s have less disposable income than folks in their 40s and 50s and 60s -- and so -- but that doesn't mean that it may be that on a relative basis, that's true, but it doesn't mean that they're not highly value-add to our model and to the business and wanting to be a part of the program and the sports. So in our minds, we're really not looking at kind of the yield per guest because in a fixed cost business, right, there's a lot of flow-through that comes from adding people onto our mountains, and we have some of the largest mountains right, in the world. And so for us, we really look at it as, yes, how do we make sure that we're optimizing that equation for each age group. And I think as we look at the model going forward, no, we think it's accretive to the model going forward. We don't think it takes away anything. It's certainly true. There's possible that they may spend less on the mountain than other people, but that doesn't mean, again, that in total, it's not going to be highly accretive.

Cost business, it's all incremental adding those folks to the mountain, but you are limited in throughput for the infrastructure that you have in place, obviously. And so the question would be, if you do get a targeted boost in visitation from this program and let's say -- and again, hopefully, that doesn't happen, but you go into winter next year and something -- it looks kind of like '21, '22, that obviously had COVID problems, but let's say you have limited acreage. Do you still have structure in place to be able to limit, let's say, nonpass guests or what have you to make sure that you can protect the guest experience for those high-value guests if there is, again, more lower value units sold going into next year? Is that -- hopefully, that all makes sense.

Yes. But I would say really important to highlight that in '21, '22, that was not an issue of that we had too many people. It was an issue we had -- didn't have enough employees. And it was an issue of yes, that we had so many people out from COVID, it was right in the global labor shortage, and we literally -- Christmas was like a peak of that. I would say that while it's true that on any given day, in any given moment on a mountain, you could have lines, but we see that as relatively transitory. And I think when you look across our mountain that we do have lots of excess capacity. And so yes, we view this as highly incremental. And certainly, we don't see this as in any way pushing other guests out. I mean it's not -- we don't see it as a zero-sum game at all. And by the way, there are other pricing points in the rest of the vacation that tend to stabilize or balance that out in terms of the price of lodging, right? So if you're at a peak week between Christmas, lodging is very expensive, airfare is very expensive. Everything is very expensive. So to the extent you have more price-sensitive guests, they tend to come in other times. And actually, if you look back over the last couple of decades, what you've seen is that the pass program and this broadening of people in the program has actually smoothed out the visitation and has not really added to the peaks. And so yes, we don't -- we see this as just positive if we can do it successfully and not necessarily taking away from some other part of the revenue opportunity.

We'll move next to Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank.

Not to beat the dead horse at this point, but circling back to the Gen Z young adult pricing strategy, was there -- is there any concern or have you done the math on cannibalization of folks who might have bought pass anyway? And then secondarily to that, do you worry at all that if cost is an issue for some of these younger skiers that it's more of an all-in cost, right, if they have to get out -- if they're taking a destination trip and they're going out of Colorado or Whistler, Park City, et cetera, that maybe the airlines aren't giving them the same discount or maybe they're not getting the same hotel discount. Is there any thought that this will be enough to get them over the finish line to buy a longer duration pass?

Yes. So what I'd say is 2 things. One is, yes, we -- of course, when we're doing any kind of analysis like this, we're looking very closely at what we think is the cannibalization in terms of, hey, wait, we had a bunch of folks buying this today and now we're giving them a discount. And so we're going to lose revenue on those folks. We're going to buy it anyway, and we have to make up in that with volume elsewhere. But I think it's important to remember that, that same dynamic is true in reverse. So ultimately, like when you raise price, you have to realize that some people are not going to keep paying those prices. And you're right that, of course, all of this happens on the margin. So it's not like there's like a bunch of people who all of a sudden say, "Oh, we're not going to do it, but it's on the margin. And I think based on what we've seen historically, that has allowed us to assess, right, what the pricing dynamic is here. So to the extent that we saw people coming out of the program from this cohort, but not in other cohorts, and we were taking price up quite a bit over the last 4 years, yes, you start to realize that, that may have had an impact. And yes, it's true that folks -- you could say that there are other parts of the vacation that may not have come down right now, but there are other parts of the vacation that were the same, right, over the last 4 to 5 years. So when we're looking at it, I think one of the things that we have learned over the last couple of decades is that past pricing in general is quite elastic. -- yes, there is a group of people, it's true that, yes, it doesn't really matter to them in some cases because we've just taken the overall price down from where it was $1,600 20 years ago and might have been $2,500 today. Yes. So those people who at the very top of the income, yes. But actually, what we've seen is when we've moved past pricing in the past, we do see volume going up and down. I think one of the things we saw this year with lift tickets was some of that price elasticity as well. That's not a bad thing. I think people feel like, oh, well, if you have price elasticity, does that mean you don't have pricing power? No. I think what we feel is that we just have to -- it's constantly optimizing it to make sure that we're setting the right price, which, of course, is what we did way back when we introduced the Epic Pass in the first place.

Okay. Yes. Fair enough. Fair point. And then just as a follow-up, it's kind of another, I guess, customer research question for you. But do you -- when you think about reasons why someone is not taking a ski vacation this year, obviously, weather is a good reason, but there could be other reasons. Do you look at something like the cruise industry, you guys study that and get a lot of information on that? Do you worry that you're losing customers to that industry and maybe not entirely related to the weather when you think about price points and multi-gen family travel, things like that?

Yes. I mean I think the cruise industry clearly is -- has done well. But when I look at overall visits to ski resorts last year, actually, they're pretty good, one of the better years right on record ever. And so I think that in the face of the cruise industry being fully back or whatever, -- and so I don't see that necessarily as -- yes, that people are going out. I think it's really for us more about, yes, overall -- weather is definitely a factor, the overall cost of the vacation, people's willingness to ski in general. But I don't know that, that's like that there's -- that the cruise industry per se is taking from us. But I do think that our sport has to stay competitive and aggressive. And I think that one of the things that I think the cruise industry does, and we do look at the cruise industry quite a bit. And I would say one of the things they do well is they are really strong marketers with all kinds of different offers to different groups all the time slicing and dicing their market, their experiences, what they're providing, the cross-sell, upsell technology. I think we've seen some really strong results there, especially from Royal Caribbean -- and I think that's all stuff that I think we can learn from, which I think you're seeing us kind of use in how we're trying to pivot the company right now.

We'll move next to Stephen Grambling with Morgan Stanley.

I realize most of the questions have been around pricing. But when we think about what's in your control from a customer experience standpoint, what initiatives are you most excited about, Rob, as we get ahead of next season?

Yes. I think the thing that I'm most proud about is, yes, it's just the talent and the staffing that we have, our team members on the ground at the resorts who I think are doing an incredible job. And I think I've heard that anecdotally and it's showing up in the actual results that we're seeing. They make a big difference in the guest experience. And in my mind, that started, I think, as we made investments in frontline wages back in 2022. And I think we've become much more selective. We top of the funnel in terms of our recruiting and using technology across our HR system to bring people in and then be able to select who we think are best aligned with the values that we have. We're then seeing right, higher seasonal employee return rates and engagement scores and retention rates. And that's now -- we're seeing this now after kind of 3, 4 years and all of a sudden, I think it's really coming together. So when I think about next year, I think that's a huge opportunity for us as we go forward. I think the other piece is technology, guest-facing technology, where I think there's really an opportunity with rentals, with the -- my Epic app, with the stats that we're providing with the digitized engagement that we're providing in ski school by adding commerce onto the app. All of these things are things where we're pretty far out in front in many cases, like Mobile Pass, where you don't need a lift ticket or card on your neck anymore, your phone access that. So it's kind of like we're creating an ecosystem where, yes, I think that -- and we're bringing our employees in on the technological ecosystem that we're creating. I don't think we're totally there yet. I think we've got another like, yes, absolutely a couple of steps until we're where we want to be, but we're seeing really good, strong results right now. I mean, candidly, in a year like this, yes, to have record guest satisfaction scores across the system, yes, highly unusual and to have guest satisfaction scores up in Colorado and Utah, yes. And again, Utah, obviously, Park City is up because we had the strike last year, but it's up even when you're looking back over 2 years. And so in our minds, like that speaks -- when conditions aren't good, usually, we see that go down. So the fact that we're seeing it up, we really say, yes, that is the whole system working well, which starts and ends with the folks on the ground who have the connection to our guests.

And Rob, you mentioned the technology side. And I think last quarter, you flagged content management system being rolled out as well and kind of alluded to it on this call. But is that fully implemented? And how do you think about the path to offering more personalized, not only pricing, but even some of those experiences and promotions? Are there still systems that need to be implemented? And/or is there an iteration that we should be thinking about over a couple of years?

Yes. So no, that new content management system, or CMS is -- we're putting it in now. So it's in cal year 2026, but it will be in place for next year for '26, '27. And yes, that will absolutely allow us much greater personalization and agility in how we manage that system. Obviously, we're putting new functionality into the app. And so when you combine that, yes, it does allow us to be much more personalized with people. I think there's another couple of steps for us to get to because we ultimately want to get -- for next year, we'll have lift tickets and passes in the commerce and the app, but we ultimately want to have rentals. We ultimately want to have -- right now, they are pop-outs where you can still do it, but it's not the same experience and obviously, ski school. And at that point, we really have like an incredibly cohesive guest experience, including kind of, yes, an FAQ bot of sorts that we have in the early stages of now where people can get their answer -- questions answered and things like that. So I think we're -- yes, next year will be a big step forward and 2 years from now, really will be in an outstanding spot.

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

Thank you, operator. To wrap up, this season reinforced the resilience of our model and the importance of staying focused on what we can control. We remain confident in the long-term outlook and our balance sheet strength. And I again want to thank our frontline teams for their exceptional dedication and execution this season. Thank you all for your interest and for your time.

This concludes today's Vail Resorts Fiscal Second Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and Webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.

Good afternoon, and welcome to the Vail Resorts Fiscal First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. [Operator Instructions] I will now turn the call over to Connie Wang, Vice President of Investor Relations at Vail Resorts. You may begin.

Thank you, operator. Good afternoon, and welcome to our fiscal 2026 1st quarter earnings conference call. Joining me on the call 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, December 10, 2025, 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 annual report on Form 10-Q, were filed this afternoon with the SEC and are also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.vailresorts.com. I would now like to turn the call over to Rob for opening remarks.

Thank you, Connie. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining our first quarter conference call. Before we discuss the results from the quarter and pass sales results, I want to provide an update on some of the key strategies we laid out last quarter to drive visitation and evolve our marketing approach. Beginning in the fall, we made some shifts in our marketing approach to increase spending in channels outside of traditional e-mail that drove improved results for the fall pass selling period. This included broadly increasing paid media and specifically being much more present in social and influencer channels. We saw some initial positive results from this effort, turning around the pass sales dollar trend for the post Labor Day period from up 1% compared to the prior year through Labor Day to up 6% post Labor Day, even though we faced challenging early season conditions heading into the final pass selling period that likely impacted our local passholder results. As we head into the winter season in the Northern Hemisphere, we are turning our focus to driving lift ticket visitation. For this season, we have several new strategies aimed at increasing lift ticket visitation that is an important funnel for driving long-term guest lifetime value.

Earlier this year, we launched Epic Friends tickets, which provides a 50% discount to friends and family of householders. This pass holder benefit enables our most loyal pass guests to share their experience with their network of family and friends who can apply the cost of that lift ticket to a pass the following year. In addition to the new Epic Friend tickets, we have also announced a new advanced discount offering for guests willing to commit 1 month in advance. The new lift ticket offer provides a 30% discount off window pricing for customers who commit over a month in advance at select resorts. That means that some of the company's largest destination mountains, skiers and riders can save over $100 per lift ticket depending on the day by purchasing 4 more weeks in advance. This provides another important bridge in product offerings for guests who cannot commit to a pass purchase ahead of the season. In addition to our new lift ticket product offerings, we are also looking to be more strategic in pricing across our individual resorts and time periods.

We are implementing more dynamic pricing strategies targeted at driving off-peak visitation at certain resorts, which fulfills the dual purpose of pricing select resorts more competitively and incentivizing visitation in lower volume time periods. We will be utilizing these strategies at resorts like Keystone in the upcoming ski season where we see the most opportunity to offset lower price with additional volume capture to drive overall revenue. Finally, in addition to purchasers of Epic Friends tickets, purchases of advanced and window lift tickets will be able to apply up to $175 of the cost of their lift ticket to a pass for next season. Growing lift ticket sales is a critical entry point for guests to join our pass program, and we believe it is critical to have an integrated approach across all lift access products. Given the widened spread between lift tickets and pass prices, we believe that even with these new discounts, passes still represent the best value for our guests.

Moving now to our broader marketing efforts. We are looking to evolve and modernize our approach in how we reach and engage our guests. On the messaging front, we are in the early stages of creating content that builds a stronger connection with our guests by tapping into the passion they feel for our resort brands. Over the past quarter, we took some first steps to increase our media spending with messaging that celebrated the individual identity of each resort, which helped drive improved fall pass sales performance and incremental return compared to the spring selling period. We have also shifted our marketing to better capture guests at the top of the funnel, a key to building awareness and have expanded marketing in channels where younger consumers spend most of their time, including social, video, connected TV and streaming audio. While the full impact of brand-building marketing is expected to increase over time, we are seeing early signs that our investments in these channels are resonating with guests through increased engagement and outperformance versus our traditional branded creative and stronger brand awareness based on guest research.

The total magnitude of our actions around lift tickets and marketing will be less visible this fiscal year, but we are seeing early signs that reinforce our focus on these key areas. Longer term, we are focused on optimizing our products and pricing across our pass and lift tickets to drive long-term value creation. We are excited to have our new Chief Revenue Officer, [indiscernible], join us next month. [indiscernible] has an incredible 20-year track record of success at Lulu Lemon and is a very strong business leader with a passion for guest experience and leadership. I am more than confident that Celeste will make a very strong and long-term impact on helping us drive growth and ensure we live up to our mission of experience of a lifetime. I look forward to partnering with Celeste in modernizing our marketing engagement to drive future growth. While we've seen a slow start to our Rockies and Tahoe resorts due to challenging early season conditions, we've seen some strength in the Northeast and seen more typical patterns of Whistler Blackcomb and in Switzerland.

Changing weather and snowfall patterns are not new to us, but they reinforce the importance of the stability we create from our pass business, which remains a key long-term driver to our success. Overall, I am confident that we are working on the key areas that will drive our next phase of growth. We are laser-focused on delivering an exceptional guest experience, deepening our consumer connection with our resorts, and driving lift ticket visitation. And while still in early innings, we are seeing early signs that our initial efforts are resonating. We will continue to look for opportunities to optimize our products and pricing to support overall guest experience for fiscal year 2027. Our calendar year 2026 capital plan, which Angela will go into more detail shortly, reinforces our commitment to improving guest experience through investments in technology and multiyear initiatives to continue elevating our destination resorts. With that, I will turn the call over to Angela to review our financial results and outlook more in depth.

Thank you, Rob. Good afternoon, everyone. Overall, we are pleased with the results from the first quarter, which were in line with our expectations. Resort net revenue was up 4% year-over-year as we saw improved visitation at our Australian resorts due to more favorable weather conditions and the introduction of the Epic Australia four day pass. Fiscal first quarter Resort reported EBITDA was flat year-over-year, reflecting the Australia weather favorability and the benefits from the resource efficiency transformation plan, offset by typical inflation in year-round overhead costs, increased marketing spend aimed at driving winter pass product sales and onetime costs related to the resource efficiency transformation plan. Regarding our resource transformation plan, we expect to deliver approximately $75 million of cumulative efficiencies before onetime operating expenses of approximately $14 million in fiscal year 2020, which represents a $38 million in incremental savings versus fiscal year 2025.

As stated in our prior call, we anticipate exceeding the original $100 million annualized target, and we're looking forward to providing more details next spring. Turning to pass sales. We finished the North American pass product selling period for the upcoming 2025, 2026 ski season, with units down 2% and sales dollars up 3%. We saw an acceleration in pass sales trends from our September update, with pass sales improving from the 3% decline in units and 1% increase in sales dollars for the period ending September 19 and to a 1% decline in units and a 6% increase in dollars from September 20 through December 5, 2025, reflecting improvements from our paid media investments, and higher price flow-through from an increased mix of unlimited pass products. While paid media drove positive results, snowfall was also down almost 60% versus the prior year at our Western North American resorts, which likely impacted local pass sales near the end of the selling period.

The results from the full pass selling season, the company now has approximately 2.3 million guests committed to our 42 North American, Australian and European resorts in advance of the 2025, 2026 season in nonrefundable advance commitment products this year, which are expected to generate approximately $1 billion of revenue and account for approximately 74% of all skier visits excluding complementary visits this year. We have grown pass units by 55% over the past 5 years, highlighting the increased guest commitment, which in turn provides greater financial stability to the company.

Moving to guidance. We are reiterating our previous guidance range of $201 million to $276 million in net income and resort reported EBITDA of $842 million to $898 million for fiscal year 2026. Similar to last quarter, our guidance assumes growth from price increases and ancillary capture as well as the assumed benefit from the approximately $38 million in incremental efficiencies related to the resource efficiency transformation plan, offset partially by lower pass units, which are expected to have a negative impact on skier visits relative to the prior year, along with normal cost inflation. What's changed this quarter is that while our paid media efforts have driven an early improvement in hassles, we've also seen a slow start to the season from below average conditions and recognize that it's very early in the North American ski season. We have seen conditions improve with recent increased snowfall, but recognize that most of our primary earnings period is still ahead of us. Therefore, we are reiterating our previously announced guidance at this point in time.

Rounding out the fiscal first quarter, our balance sheet remains strong with liquidity of $1.5 billion and net debt at 3.0x trailing 12 months EBITDA. We are confident in our ability to address our upcoming convertible debt maturity with a combination of cash on hand and our delayed draw term loan facility. Our capital allocation priorities remain intact as we announced our calendar year 2026 capital investments at our resorts, along with maintaining the cash dividend of $2.22 per share. We continue to be opportunistic about share buybacks, and we completed approximately 200,000 shares of repurchases after the quarter and for $25 million. Standing on our 2026 capital plan, we announced a core capital investment plan of $215 million to $220 million, which reflects the growth in inflation, including the impact from tariffs. In addition to the core capital plan, the company plans to invest an additional $12 million of growth capital investments in its European resorts, $5 million of resource efficiency transformation projects and $2 million in real estate planning capital.

Including these investments, total capital is expected to be between $234 million to $239 million. Within our capital plan, I want to highlight our investments in a couple of key areas. First, we are making multiyear investments to elevate guest experience at our destination resorts. In Park City, we will replace the existing 8-passenger Cabriolet lift with a 10 passenger gondola, enhancing the accessibility and experience between the village and connecting multiple gondolas to the Canyons Village in the garage base area. At Whistler Blackcomb, we are also investing in new lift to replace a new lift to replace the showcase TBAR lift, which will greatly improve accessibility to scale terrain on the Blackcomb Glacier. We are also rolling out a larger initiative around elevating our dining experiences at our top resorts, which includes remodels as well as activations to -- at our destination resorts.

We are also beginning a multiyear investment at select resorts to implement remote avalanche control systems. These systems remotely trigger controlled apple inches reducing manual intervention and improving safety, reliability and the guest experience through faster, more consistent predictable train openings. We are also investing to upgrade the Blitzen lift at Seven Springs to ease congestion and improve the experience in accepting the North Face side of the resort. Next, we are investing in technology to support the guest experience with improvements in addition to the My Epic App, along with enhancements to our marketing capabilities and e-commerce platform. Within the My Epic App, we've added functionality. The functionality will provide guests with information they need and streamline their resort experience, allow for in-app commerce with Apple and Google Pay and continue to invest in revamping and digitizing the ski school experience and integrating the MiFi gear experience into the broader rental platform.

On the marketing front, we are modernizing our e-commerce platform by migrating to a new content management system, to enhance personalization, flexibility and speed to market. We're also expanding our capabilities for more agile pricing and product updates to capture revenue opportunities and improve the operational efficiency. Last, we will continue to support our sustainability initiatives through investments in low energy snowmaking at Okemo and waste reduction projects across the resorts. We are also investing capital to support the resource efficiency transformation plan. In closing, we are leveraging our distinct competitive advantages and progressing on the drivers of our next growth phase to drive results in fiscal year 2027 and beyond. With our track record of disciplined capital allocation, we are laying the foundation to drive long-term sustainable growth and consistent value creation. At this time, I'm happy to turn the call back to the operator for your questions.

[Operator Instructions] We'll take our first question from Shaun Kelley with Bank of America.

Rob or Angelo, I'd love to start with announcement yesterday, obviously, it kind of builds on the momentum of what you did with Epic Friends over the summer. But just help us think and how you're thinking about quantifying an initiative like this. Just how do you expect it to play out between price and volume as you take another stab at kind of the reduction here for the advanced period. How did you measure it? And when you put these 2 initiatives together, -- how are you thinking about just kind of when you're going to know like was this trade-off or was this kind of the right level to kind of to offer this product out to people?

Yes. So I think the drivers here, obviously, and we have been talking about this for a little bit in terms of, yes, making lift tickets more accessible, being more competitive on that front, but also doing it in a disciplined and fenced way, and in our mind, this is a unique opportunity to kind of address, yes, at this moment in time. So people -- there are some people who will book a vacation, obviously, they know they're going skiing. So they're going to buy a pass before the deadline that just passed in December. Then there are other people who may be truly making a decision right in the moment in that day. But there's a bunch of people who are not ready to make their decision by the December deadline, but are still planning to vacation in the future. And so when they go to our website, they will now see these lower prices. So as they think about the ability to make this decision, they're going to be looking at those lower prices on the website. That's one. So we're kind of trying to catch them like in their booking phase and then their comparing phase.

Two is that we are providing a call to action, right, for lift tickets that we think is a little bit stronger than what we've had before. So now when somebody is going to a website, for instance, if somebody is on the site now looking for them okay, then they'll know that, hey, they've only got a little bit of time if they want to book a lift ticket, and we're going to be obviously showing them that on the website. So that actually creates, right, some time sensitivity to their purchase. Last is that once people don't buy a pass, we see very few people buying lift tickets this early. So in our minds, it was also an opportunity to start getting kind of a little bit of the mini advanced commitment piece that we thought was actually more important than just the 7-day advance or the 3-day in some resorts that we have today.

So in our mind, yes, we looked at that and said, "Yes, we thought this would move enough vacation decisions plus enough additional incremental days of skiing even for people who are already get to come that, that trade was worth the cut in price.

Great. And then for my follow-up, and maybe just switch gears slightly, obviously, the comments on the weather on the one side, but what we saw on the pass trajectory on the others seem to offset each other here a little bit. But I just wanted to dig into that core message, if you could is the message here that all other things equal, we could have actually raised had it not been for what you're seeing in the early conditions on the resorts. And then if so or regardless, just help us think about, is that kind of comment on the weather through today? Or have you also derisked a little bit as we look into the forecast here, just kind of knowing that this is always evolving with the weather?

Yes. I guess what I'd say is I'm not going to comment on like a hypothetical around guidance, but I would say that, yes, we did overdeliver on passes. And even that the over-delivery on passes, we think, was muted by challenging weather at the end when obviously, that marginal consumer is not as motivated. Last year, at that exact time, we had very, very strong conditions. So we had a little bit of a tougher comp at the very end than we did this year. But we're really pleased with the turnaround that we see, particularly the revenue turnaround, right, up 1% through Labor Day and now up 6%, right, post Labor Day. And it speaks to a lot of what we've been saying in terms of changing how we're going to engage with guests and particularly drive much better results from our higher priced pass products.

In terms of conditions, yes, I think the comments you're making about guidance are, yes, are assuming a normal experience at our resorts over Christmas. It's really not possible for us to assess anything beyond that. Obviously, we've all seen conditions change dramatically in just a couple of days. So at this point, that is where we're focused. I do think, yes, that some of the early -- by definition, we lost some momentum in the early season, just given sluggish conditions, but that is factored into our guidance.

We'll take our next question from Ben Chaiken with Mizuho.

And apologies for any background noise. I guess sticking to the pass, as you strategize for next year, Rob, it'd be helpful to get your current view on pass benefits? And maybe specifically, how do you think about third-party benefits to the pass, how focused are you on this opportunity? And then 1 quick follow-up?

Yes. So I think we are taking a look kind of holistically at every piece of this. And as we've said, we'll look at pricing. We look at pricing in the different products. and see our focus as it's always been, is about driving -- maximizing long-term revenue. And so that's going to be a key driver for us. We absolutely look at third-party benefits. We do a lot of research direct primary research with our guests and actually broader destination guests on this. And I think some of those benefits can move the needle, but it's really on the margin. I mean I think people really are looking at this and they're looking at price and they're looking at access to the resorts. And it's about like whether -- do we have the resorts that they want to go to? And is that at a price that's reasonable. Of course, there's no doubt that people would love to have cut the line or they'd love to get on the mountain earlier and things like that. Certainly, those things move the needle.

The Epic Friend tickets, what we used to call buddy tickets, we do have seen that, that's quite important, especially to our spring pass purchasers. I think the third-party benefits are kind of a nice to have, but it's certainly not what we see as like the primary driver of results.

Got it. Okay. That's very helpful. And then as you think about the price investment made yesterday, as we sit here today, is that makes sense for the overall path in the future to evolve as well, whether that's through an extended deadline or different price points. I guess just thinking about the positioning of kind of the whole mosaic of the company today.

Yes. I don't see us extending the deadline for pass. So I mean, right now that is very much a key part of how we provide that discount is that it's before the majority of the ski season has started and that if you're buying products after that, they are refundable. And so that's true even with the product we just talked about. So this 30-day advance ticket is refundable ultimately. So it is why there's still a delta, a pretty significant delta between that and buying a pass in terms of what you could ski for by the day. So I think the core structure of this, we're not anticipating changing. But we do think, yes, there's an opportunity for us to be more creative about how we market lift tickets and I think there's an opportunity potentially for us to be a little smarter about how we price all of this.

I'd just say on the spectrum there, it is consistent with what we already do with our passes. When you think about the deadline approach we have with passes, right, the greater you commit in advance the better price you get with it pass, right? And so this is a similar thing with lift tickets. Yes, we had a 7-day advance lift ticket, 30 days in advance is kind of extending that out but in a similar structure and to drive the similar behavior that we're trying to do, which is to convey in advance.

We'll move next to David Katz with Jefferies.

Firstly, I'd like to just focus on the technology investments -- and just talk about the -- how you think about returns on those investments. Obviously, they enhance the experience. But what are you able to measure in terms of maybe school lift or other ancillary spend that may occur as you make those investments?

Yes. I think yes, absolutely, they drive, I think, 2 things. One is they definitely improve the guest -- digital kind of guest experience in the technology piece or they're enhancing kind of the in-person experience like we are doing with ski school or with rental. But a lot of these technology investments, right, also help us improve conversion. And certainly, if you compared it versus like putting in a new lift, Actually, it's a lot easier to track the return on these investments because there's -- because we're getting the real-time feedback and can see it. In particular, I think the focus that we're putting on the app, right now, we're seeing a lot of traffic growth to the app and on mobile, and we are currently in mobile, obviously, up here in a mobile website, certainly, we can take payment. But in the app, we're not doing any commerce and we don't have easy ways like Apple Pay and Google Pay to close a sale. And so we do see that as having a direct improvement in our ability to drive sales. I mean we're going to be starting with basically lift access products, but ultimately, we will have ski school and rental in there as well.

And so now when we look at ski school, for instance, yes, for this year, I would say one of the key things is going to be seeing how guests react to the digital ski school experience that we're going to be providing. I don't know whether it's necessarily going to have an impact this year on conversion. But obviously, to the extent that we can improve our guest experience scores and Net Promoter Scores within ski school, then we expect to see that actually come back certainly in follow-up visits or a next season.

Got it. And as my follow-up, I'd like to go back to Sean's first question and maybe ask it in a bit more direct way since it's something that comes up in our conversations quite a bit. With respect to the discounting on lift tickets, I think what we're all at least in part, trying to figure out is whether there is kind of a reset in lift ticket revenues separate and apart from pass revenues and/or whether those decisions that you're making are producing incremental revenue now? Or are they setting you up to create incremental revenue in the future, right? We're all trying to sort of plot your revenue growth and put it all together.

Yes. So what I would say is I think if you look at our lift ticket visitation over the last couple of years, it's declined at the same time that our season pass revenue has basically been flat. And so -- and particularly on visitation. And so when you look at that, I think that's not -- that relationship is not something that I think it was 1 thing to see lift ticket visitation decline when we were growing pass units dramatically. But to the extent that we are seeing more mature growth in season pass, we should see growth in lift tickets. How? And so this is one of the things that Epic Friend tickets would be a way, being more creative on pricing and more differentiated on pricing at our resorts is another way which we're doing. Another way is the promotion, the 30% off promotion that we announced yesterday, another way is increased marketing and improving the brand. And all -- I'd say the basic blocking and tackling of marketing of lift tickets, which we were not really doing in the same way that we were doing for pass before.

So yes, we do see this as adding revenue. And we do see this as adding revenue this year and that is included within our guidance and it's included -- when we put out our guidance and highlighted that we saw pass visitation declining, but overall, that would be offset by lift ticket visitation improving, that was included in that. What we're saying though is that, yes, we think these things take a few years to get into the guest psyche. It's not -- I think one of the things we've learned over time is that just like when we introduced the Epic Pass a long time ago, it wasn't that everyone in the entire ski industry was like aware of it and all of a sudden started making decisions around it. It took time. And these new things that we're doing, I think, are the same. That will have some impact this year, but we think we'll see better impact with Epic Friends and this 30% of 4-week out ticket as guests really start to get in that habit.

We'll move next to Arpine Kocharyan.

This is a bit of a maybe unfair question since I'm asking about the current quarter, but I was wondering if you could speak to broader visitation trends into November and early December in terms of seeing traction with some of the promotional initiatives you have going on for the season. But specifically, within this broader bifurcation in the consumer space between upper end and lower end. What are you seeing in regional versus destination resorts? Do you see that leverage of lower pricing kind of discounting working better at your original resorts? While maybe higher end not is price elastic and maybe there isn't much need to discount with those guests.

Yes. I think we said in our comments, and I'd reiterate that I think we're in very early innings of even this season, let alone the life cycle of a lot of these changes that we're doing. And -- but what we're seeing is encouraging. But yes, it's hard. Obviously, we're not ready to really speak to a lot of this because the season has barely begun. And of course, conditions are impacting so much of this in terms of looking at current visitation. So really hard for us to assess a lot of this. I'd say on the broader point about upper and versus lower end of the consumer, yes, I think at this point, we're not ready to suggest that any of our results are being impacted by that. That's maybe a broader point about the economy and broader points about travel. But I think it's a little too early for us to comment on that. I think a lot of what we're seeing, we think is much more about our own trends than it is necessarily about macro trends at this point.

We'll move next to Patrick Scholes with Truist Securities.

As you think about changes to your pass structure, I've seen that there's been the announcement of the Icon reserve type of pass, would that ever be a consideration for you folks? That type of pass.

I would say everything is always a consideration for us. So I think in terms of having some more premium experience, that's something we clearly -- we'll always think about and focus on, I think, some of the things that they're doing, we have in some of our higher-end resorts, obviously, like private clubs and private dining. And then obviously, ski school for us is a major driver. It's almost like a club in and of itself, right, in terms of getting the line cutting privileges plus concierge-type support services plus obviously, ski instruction in the midst of all that. So it's something we'll always look at. But for us, like -- just like a lot of the other changes that sometimes people suggest we have to look at like how it would impact the total ecosystem and other sources of revenue and other business lines that we have. But for us, for our upper-end guests, we really do feel like we've got some pretty good avenues if they want to spend more on their vacation and get kind of some unique services.

Okay. And then sort of breaking news well, there's a chance to tell you right, it may go on strike. Roughly, how much does in a normal year does your relationship with Telluride and Epic Pass contribute to your overall earnings ballpark?

Well, it's -- I mean I think it's -- yes, the relationship is it doesn't -- Telluride doesn't necessarily contribute to our earnings into the year. I think access to Telluride helps pass sales. which is important. And obviously, yes, we're very hopeful that -- yes, that they can find a way to resolve the differences. And yes, that they have an amazing ski season ahead.

Okay. So it's pretty small, I assume, in the big picture of things because you don't own it. It's just a past relationship essentially, correct?

There's no earnings from Telluride that go to us.

We'll take our next question from Chris Woronka with Deutsche Bank.

I guess, Rob, as you kind of look at this year and understanding the slow start, but if you kind of look at -- I know you've always lodging bookings for both pay period and then kind of further out into the spring is a little bit of an indicator. Are you seeing any change in pattern or booking behavior in terms of people maybe if you look at same customer coming that has an Epic Pass are they waiting longer to book, are they booking shorter, longer? Any patterns you can see yet?

What I'd say is I think there's no doubt that I think as conditions were not great, right, during November and early December, we definitely have seen booking deceleration by that. But the flip side to that is we've also seen it rebound very, very quickly. And so that's not that uncommon in terms of where we are. I think, obviously, we go into the season with $1 billion of revenue, right, on passes, but those represent visits like we're saying almost 75% of our visits. So those are folks who are going to come, most likely as we see in every year. But yes, we do see -- of course, people are trying to pick and choose like when is the right time to come. I think for Christmas, we're going to get a lot of folks who -- because a lot of our biggest destination resorts they have incredible experiences, right, not only on the mountain, but of course, in the town and with other activities.

And so what we see actually, there's been a lot of evidence of this. And even in years that were slower for us on the mountain sometimes, actually, it's been record sales years for some of these towns. So actually, for us, we feel like that's where this combination of a broad set of experiences that people have plus the pass pulls people in. And yes, then it's just a matter of how many visits do we get during Christmas and when snow cons and when conditions shift. But at this point, we're -- we have kind of factored that in. And yes, assuming that we have a more normal Christmas experience, we always feel very good about the guidance.

Okay. Understood. And then as you -- and this kind of question relates to both your -- the new friend pass print tickets and also just your overall goal of getting more folks on to the mountains. Any early read on how ancillary spend looks for kind of the first timers and what's kind of embedded in your expectations related to ancillary spend for first timers.

We don't -- I'd say -- yes, it's way too early to try and to sell that because we -- I think that -- that's something we'll probably have a much better sense of much deeper into the season. But I would also say that the folks -- there'll be some people who are true first timers, there will be some people who, yes, just couldn't make up their mind in Epic Friends, for instance, before the pass deadline. And then there'll be other people who are normal lift ticket purchasers who are just going to be committing 30 days in advance. So for us, these guests, I think, our destination guests largely we see as a cohort in terms of their spend on the mountain, and we would expect that a lot of these folks who were coming in would be quite similar to those folks.

We'll move next to Jeff Stantial with Stifel.

I wanted to follow back up on Sean's questions from earlier. If I heard you correctly, Rob, I think you described the 30% 1-month advanced discount as sort of unique was the term, I believe you used. I guess my question is this, could this represent a bit more of a transition long-term evolution towards a suite of, call it, advanced lift ticket discounts, whether it's 4 weeks, 3 weeks, 2 weeks and it starts to become really more of a yield management exercise more than anything else? Or to that point, you should we think about this more as one-off? And then just as a corollary to this, how do you think about the potential for AI to sort of, we'll call it, simplify the consumer purchasing journey and and help enable some more differentiation that you've been able to drive historically?

Yes, sure. So I think -- I don't remember if I -- I don't know if I said it in the prepared remarks, but if I said it in the answer in terms of unique, what I would say is I think it's unique for us. Sure. We have not had a product like this before. At this point, no, we're not anticipating having kind of multiple products that by 7 days, 10 days, 15 days, 20 days, we're not thinking that. I mean, I guess it's certainly possible. I would say, yes, I think AI does help quite a bit, and it's certainly something we are using in terms of taking a lot of data and synthesizing it down to give you some insights. And so when you look across how many resorts we have, how many lift ticket products we have and how many pass products we have that give essentially the same access and all the different advanced dynamics, we do think that AI can help kind of really take our information plus research and assess like what's the right pricing point and approach for that.

But in the end, it's of course, it's still a business judgment and offsetting our strategy for what we think makes the most sense for the company, and that's still going to be it's us ultimately setting pricing based on what we think ultimately drives revenue.

That's great. And then turning over to the lodging side of things. I'm just curious if you think there's opportunity to sort of run similar initiatives as is what you're doing right now with the window and the lift ticket side of things, whether it's more advanced on sort of discount? Just obviously, lodging is a material piece of the budget for a destination guests coming into one of your resorts. So I'm just curious if there's opportunity to sort of rethink pricing there as well.

Well, I would say, I mean, lodging is already, right, a highly dynamic pricing system because it basically is participating in the broader lodging dynamic pricing system. So there, right? Obviously, we're changing price all the time, literally on an almost daily basis based on what we have in inventory, what we're seeing out in the market. So it is a very different, I don't know, eco sphere than what we see in lift tickets and passes. So I'd say, no, I don't see us trying to do what we're doing right now and lift access to lodging because lodging is yes, much further along. I also don't see lift access going to where lodging is either because they're just different businesses, and I think we respect that. But we feel good about our entire approach to lodging. I think we absolutely are leveraging like the right technology and very much looking at all of our competitors to ensure that we're, yes, driving the most revenue.

We'll take our next question from Brandt Montour with Barclays.

So the first question is I think it was pretty clear, the pricing discounts and cuts that you've talked about throughout the call are more than offset by volumes and you said you're going to -- you had baked in some incremental revenue for these. And so I guess the question is, when you think about the incremental revenue that you baked in, I know you're not going to give that number, but is it -- is that piece more coming from what you called out today, selectively being more aggressive on dynamic pricing from window tickets at certain resorts? Or is it more from the thing you announced yesterday the month ahead, 30% discounted ticket program?

Yes, we're not going to give specifics on that. But all of these things come together, including Epic Friends to help and marketing, right, to help in terms of marketing, I mean, additional paid media, better brand elevation, more top of funnel. I mean all of these are things that are all coming together to create the guidance that we have. And so yes, at this point, tougher to parse it out. But I would say, yes, we absolutely see this as driving additional revenue because, yes, I mean, that's based on the assessment that we have and what we look at in the market and what other people are doing. And in a way, just because we've been -- again, if you go back historically, right, we have been -- we really haven't been focused on lift tickets to drive lift tickets on their own. We've really been focused on moving people to pass. So you just haven't seen this level of dynamic approach that we're taking today. So I think it maybe stands to reason that you're going to see some benefit from this now that we're really putting our muscle behind it.

Okay. That's helpful. I appreciate it. A follow-up on this, though would be for that sort of more dynamic pricing, it's like resorts throughout the season. Can you just benchmark us on sort of what the what you did before? I mean we remember you talking about pushing into off-peak before, but it wasn't really a situation where you were taking price down specifically? What were you doing before? And then what also -- what can you see in your data as you were raising prices that kind of gives you the sense for the elasticity that you need to see for this to work out in terms of volumes.

Well, I'd say 2 things. One is in terms of what we're doing for Well, we had -- I mean there's certainly activations at the resort. Obviously, pricing was lower. Lodging pricing was lower and off-peak and another time periods. Ski School prices were lower, rental prices were lower. So it's not that -- obviously, we weren't ignoring it. But in a way, right, but so much of our focus was on a pass. And the pass really wasn't focused on -- I mean, there are some passes that have blackout days, some didn't. So we were focused, but we were not really focused on when it's actually going to use the product. It was much more of a focus on just getting them into the program as a whole. So like this is a pretty big shift in terms of where we're sitting today and how we're going to go about this. And I would say that, yes, we have done a number of price tests on different things at different resorts yes, that are not -- we don't -- we're not going to call attention to, but we actually do get learnings from that. And a lot of what we've launched so far has been built on the experience that we've gleaned from a number of those things.

And again, it's helpful because we have a lot of data capture, and we have a lot of personalization amongst our guests and so we can really track and we can compare resort to resort, we can compare different periods. So that allows us to do some things that obviously are tougher to do if you don't really have the same breadth that we have and that we could bring. And I'd say, yes, of course, the other piece is -- what we have just the broad piece that I mentioned earlier, which is our lift ticket sales were down the last 2 years, even though the industry's lift tickets sales were, I think, flat and then up or maybe up in both years. And so I would say that's also a test that, clearly, we're doing something that wasn't working. And so -- which is why it's not like we're not saying that it's just about price. What we're saying is it's about these multiple things. It's about price, it's about promotion. It's about engaging with guests. It's about brand and the individual resort brands. And it's about, yes, this kind of top-of-funnel advertising versus call to action. I mean -- so we see this as a multipronged effort, not just price.

We'll move next to Molly Baum with Morgan Stanley.

The first one I wanted to ask is about the larger initiative you mentioned to enhance your dining offerings. Can you talk about what the impetus was for that investment? Was it driven by guest feedback -- and maybe at a high level, how you're thinking about your value proposition there and how impactful you think the investments will be ultimately for your ancillary business?

Yes. I think one of the challenges I think we saw from COVID was we went into COVID and although it was terrific that we could operate the resorts in the second year. kind of 2020, 2021, we could barely could operate our dining and then even in the following year, we also we're operating at a much more scale down level. And I just don't think the company has fully come back from that. I think maybe we're a little slow to do that. And I think a little slow maybe to realize that it was going to take the consumer right, more effort by us to get them back into our restaurants. It wasn't going to be enough for us to do what we were doing before COVID. We actually we're going to need to do some new things. And so the things that we've launched are really, one, having a much greater level of personalization and creativity and merchandising, branding in each outlet, both resort by resort and within each resort.

So I think yes, giving more initiative opportunity to people managing all of these locations. But at the same time, having a central team that's watching all of it and then saying, wait, here, this is working, that's not working, we should try this, we should try that and much better data. So that's key. Then 2 is, yes, the investments we're making, which are really, I'd say, threefold. One investment is we're actually improving the dining -- physical structure of the dining. Sometimes it's adding new food or stations. Sometimes it's just upgrading the visual look of it or upgrading kind of how people move through it. We also have another initiative where we are trying to optimize seating. And so we've gone back and looked at table size and chair size and everything else and how we're laying out each of the dining group. And again, with technology and a centralized approach, we can kind of compare and contrast what's working in one place, what's working in another place and make sure that we're doing what we can on that. And then last is ultimately the food itself. And then this is not a capital investment but more of an operating investment in terms of how we can invest in the food either elevating ingredients or providing more breadth.

So it's -- and we do see this as also a multiyear effort, where I think you'll see even more of this as we go into FY '27 where we've got a lot of work going on right now on, yes, what are ways for us to really differentiate on the food business.

Got it. That's very helpful. And then just one quick follow-up on the improvement in pass sales trends post September. You saw it in both pricing and in units, but you mentioned that the marketing investments helped improve mix sequentially. So I guess my follow-up there is, was that an intentional byproduct of your marketing changes? Should we expect to see more improvement from mix going forward? Or do you think maybe units may accelerate a little more as we go forward and as these initiatives mature?

Well, I think we're -- one, we're obviously going to be trying to drive growth. But yes, our marketing was, I think, a little more heavily weighted this year to our unlimited products. One, the Epic Friend tickets, are for unlimited products. And the Epic friend, we extended it for the first time into the fall, so that fall purchasers of unlimited products could get Epic Friend benefits. We also -- doing more upper funnel kind of brand building and brand connection. We also felt was directed at these folks who are making a bigger commitment and really trying to inspire their passion for the business. And that is something that we intend to do, I think, more of a -- candidly, a much better job of as we have more time to prepare as we go into next year, I think we are going to be focused on those unlimited products.

I think we've done maybe much like the season pass, the pass and lift ticket piece, we've done this incredible job of building out the Epic Day pass product line and promoting that and bringing new people in. And obviously, when you look at the growth we've had over the last 4 years, it's been significant. A lot of it coming in Epic day. But we also think it's now an opportunity for us to go back to that kind of unlimited pass holder and the Epic and Epic Global pass holder to make sure that they're feeling, yes, the strong connection and incentives to go into those products.

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

Thank you all for joining our first quarter fiscal 2026 earnings call. I want to close out by saying that our path to sustainable growth is clear, and I'm confident we're focused on the right priorities to keep advancing these strategies. I'd also like to take a moment to thank our dedicated team members, particularly our frontline employees as they create an experience of a lifetime for our guests. It is only because of our team's commitment and passion that we are able to deliver on this mission. With that, thank you all again for your interest and time, and we look forward to seeing you on the slopes this season.

This concludes today's Vail Resorts Fiscal First Quarter 2026 Earnings Conference Call and webcast. You may disconnect your line at this time, and have a wonderful day.