Tech CEO says he wants to buy Park City Mountain Resort

SALT LAKE CITY — A tech CEO said he’s ready to buy Park City Mountain Resort from Vail Resorts.

Vail Resorts owns 42 mountain resorts in four different countries. Matthew Prince, the CEO and Co-founder of Cloudflare Global Network, said one of the problems with Vail is that it treats its resorts like McDonald’s, trying to make them all the same.

“I think unfortunately, Vail has really underinvested in the mountain and taken what really is one of the great ski resorts in the world and just had really kind of benign neglect for it,” Prince said.

So, he wants to buy it.

“I’ve had some success, and thinking about what are those things that I can do to support the community that I love. And I think that local ownership, as we’ve seen from things like Snow Basin and Sun Valley … is just a better model for the ski industry,” Prince said. “So I’m trying to find a way to be able to purchase the property from Vail. I have arranged the financing. We have pretty good investment bankers who’ve put together a pretty good model on what we think the mountain is worth.”

Prince said he believes the owners of Vail are proving themselves to be “incredibly terrible capital allocators.”

“If you invested and bought a share of Vail 10 years ago, it’s actually … (been) over 10 years, that’s not a recipe for success,” he said. “You can’t run a business that literally has had no return to shareholders in 10 years and be in management for much longer.”

He thinks there would still be a role for Vail to play after the purchase, like helping with things like the Epic Pass. He would want Vail to assist in making sure that local ownership has the resources and ability to invest in the mountain by increasing snowmaking and upgrading the lift infrastructure.

“Maybe, most importantly, pay the people who who are supporting guests, whether that’s the Ski Patrol, or ski instructors, or lift operators or people who groom the mountain, pay them really great wages because they’re critical to to what makes the mountain great,” he said. “That’s harder to do as a big public company. It’s easier to do as someone like myself.”

Vail has repeatedly told investors that the resort is not for sale. However, Prince said the sale could take place a lot sooner than many would believe.

“I had thought that this was something that was very unlikely to happen in the next five years, but probably inevitable to happen in the next 25,” he said. “Given the … just abysmal performance of Vail as a stock and the investor interest, activist interest on something changing, I think it can happen actually quite quickly. And so I think that it may be as soon as this fall that you see a change in the market … So I think it could be within certainly within a couple of years that you might see a different owner of Park City (Mountain Resort).”

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