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Vail Resorts, Inc. (MTN)

Q2 2015 Earnings Call· Thu, Mar 12, 2015

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Transcript

Operator

Operator

Good day and welcome to the Vail Resorts Second Quarter Fiscal 2015 Earnings Results Conference Call. Today's conference is being recorded. At this time, I would like to turn the conference over to Rob Katz, CEO. Please go ahead. Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our fiscal second quarter 2015 earnings conference call. Joining me on today's call is Michael Barkin, our Chief Financial Officer. Before we start, 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 the press release that we issued this morning, along with our remarks today, are made as of today, March 12, 2015, and we undertake no duty to update them as actual events unfold. Today's remarks also include certain non-GAAP financial measures. A reconciliation of these measures is provided in the tables included with our press release and in our quarterly report on Form 10-Q filed this morning with the Securities and Exchange Commission and is also available on the Investor Relations section of our website at www.vailresorts.com. So with that said, let's turn to our second quarter fiscal 2015 results. Our results were very strong in the second quarter of fiscal 2015 as we benefited from strong pass sales, increased ancillary yields across our resorts, and good conditions at our Colorado resorts. Total Mountain revenue increased 18.2% compared to the prior year with lift revenue increasing by 22.5%, primarily driven by a 15.9% growth in visitation and a 5.7% increase in effective ticket price compared to the prior year. We continue to see robust spending…

Operator

Operator

Thank you. And we'll go first to Shaun Kelley from Bank of America.

Shaun C. Kelley - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Hey, good morning, guys. Nice results. So, maybe we could start with just talking a little bit about what you saw in Tahoe. Thank you for quantifying the revenue impact. But just as we see, we think about your underwriting for the year, curious to think about does – when you think about that revenue impact and then your guidance reduction as it relates to EBITDA, are we seeing better strength than you would have anticipated in your guidance previously as it related to Colorado and Utah or are those closer to in line with what you were thinking? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: I think Utah is largely in line with what we were thinking. Colorado has been trending. Season pass sales were better than our expectations for the year and that was offset by Tahoe.

Shaun C. Kelley - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Great. And then as we think about the deceleration in some of the – just the overall season-to-date metrics, you gave some pretty good color. Would it be fair to assume that those numbers are starting to pick up now that we're kind of post the Alpine Ski Championships, particularly given that Colorado is probably a huge part of the visitation numbers? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yes. So I think what I'd say, though, I'll certainly stick to the metrics that we gave through March 8 and yes, absolutely. So, I think certainly for Vail and Beaver Creek, the minute the Championships were over, we saw a significant and marked improvement in their performance. So absolutely, I think from let's say that was mid-February through the March 8 guidance, and I would say that Tahoe though has continued to struggle, a couple of pockets of bumps, positive bumps, but largely speaking, I think a more challenging year this year than last year all the way through the March 8 period.

Shaun C. Kelley - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Got it. And maybe lastly just as we think about margins, huge margin growth in the quarter and the flow through was I think right back to levels that we had seen you guys deliver a number of years ago. As we think about the continued integration of Park City, do you think there is outsized margin growth even in year two and year three of your integration efforts here as you continue to cross market and consolidate, or do you think you are actually seeing better results today and that we should expect the bulk of that is really in year one? Michael Z. Barkin - Chief Financial Officer & Executive Vice President: Yes. I think, Shaun, on the margin piece, I think we're seeing two things. One, obviously being able to add Park City to our existing centralized infrastructure leads to significant improvements when we make these strategic acquisitions. And so that has been a driver this year. And then overall as we look forward, we're certainly seeing the benefit of the growth that we're driving flowing through and driving margins. And so, I think, we're certainly seeing that in the rest of the business this year along with the Park City benefit. And as we look forward, we continue to look at ways to leverage that cost structure to continue to drive margins, but clearly when you make an acquisition like this, it has a big impact in year one.

Shaun C. Kelley - Bank of America Merrill Lynch

Management

Very good. Thank you very much, guys. Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks.

Operator

Operator

And we'll go next to Joel Simkins from Credit Suisse.

Christie Fredericks - Credit Suisse

Management

Hi. This is Christie Fredericks on for Joel. Congrats on a great quarter. I guess, my first question would be around the 5% increase in the early season pass pricing for next year. And I was just wondering how comfortable you are that the market can absorb this given just weakness in Utah and Tahoe snow? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Obviously, we just announced those yesterday or two days ago. And so, obviously we've factored in all of these things, I think, into our thinking about as we look forward to next year. I think, as a company, our focus is on constantly reinvesting in the resorts and improving the experience, and therefore delivering more and more value to our guest. I think, when you think about Park City and Canyons in particular, the investments that we're going to make into both of those resorts obviously connecting them is such a dramatic improvement in the guest experience that candidly we feel like this is something where the guests will see huge value candidly for our passes. I'd say with our passes also we tend to take a fairly ratable methodical approach to price increases year-after-after, and that I think has over the last – you look over the last seven years to eight years, I think has helped kind of guide our guests with their expectation. So that's a little bit of a longwinded answer to say, yes, we are very comfortable.

Christie Fredericks - Credit Suisse

Management

Great. Thanks. And also just with the currency movement in the euro, did you see any cancellations from customers abroad this past season? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. Obviously, I'm not going to speak to any specific cancellations by customers. But what I would say is that our international business through the metrics that we provided has been actually quite healthy, and we have not seen any material decline in our primary markets. And I think some of that is – again we absolutely are increasing and improving our marketing and sales efforts, PR efforts in all of these international markets. We've become very targeted and very focused on which guests within these markets we're trying to pull into our resorts. The target demo that we have in a lot of these markets is at the upper end of the – on income and they're a little bit less sensitive I think to the currency fluctuations, a number of our markets certainly in Latin America, many of those guests have significant investments that are more U.S. dollar related. So again, they are less sensitive to it. So, overall, we have not again to this point seen a major impact from those currency fluctuations.

Christie Fredericks - Credit Suisse

Management

Okay, great. Thanks. Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thanks.

Operator

Operator

We'll take our next question from Felicia Hendrix from Barclays.

Felicia Hendrix - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Hi. Good morning. Thanks for taking my question. Rob, looking at your season-to-date lift ticket revenue growth, definitely speaks highly to your pricing power. I'm wondering if you could just update us on the dynamic pricing strategy you have for single day lift tickets, how that is progressing. And then you touched upon the season passes and how you think about pricing there in an earlier question, but arguably you do have this pricing power to raise your season passes more than you have. So, I was just wondering if you could address that too. Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. So, so far we've really – we've seen a lot of success with our pricing strategies, and largely because we've – we've absolutely been more dynamic when we have peak days and then we – to the extent that we're offering discounts, we're being very targeted with those discounts. And we really try and make sure that we're providing a consistent, reliable message to our guests. And we also feel like it's very important that we control the communication and the distribution channel on all of our products as much as we can with the company. We think that has provided, right, this kind of very stable, much like I said with season pass, reliable, understandable, kind of process for our guests that has worked quite well. One of the things for instance we saw this past year, we did when we acquired Park City, we actually pulled Park City out of – they were using Costco as a distribution channel, they were using Liftopia as a very significant distribution channel. And we pulled back from both of those and we're able to deliver to the guest a terrific value and a terrific yield increase…

Felicia Hendrix - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

That's really helpful. Thanks. And then just moving on to Utah, just wondering, do you have all the approvals needed to go ahead with the connection of Park City and Canyons; and if not, can you just kind of walk us through a timeline of how that's going to work? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. So the two major approvals that we need for the Park City improvements, one is in Summit County, Utah and the other is in Park City. And we have received approval from the Park City Planning Commission. That's the major approval from Summit County and we received that a few weeks back. And we've had our first meeting with the Park City Planning Commission and where we think that went very well and had a – we had a great community engagement, great dialogue, great discussion. And we'll be back meeting with them in later on this month, the third week or fourth week of March and we're certainly hopeful that we make significant progress at this second meeting as well. At the moment, we feel like we're very much on track to put these in place during this summer, and we haven't seen anything that would change that.

Felicia Hendrix - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Great. And then just final question again sticking with Utah, just given your EBITDA expectations for Park City and Canyons in 2016, just wondering what magnitude of skier visit increase is embedded in that, so if maybe you could break out kind of skier visit and ticket and other revenues there... Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. I think...

Felicia Hendrix - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

– directionally, because I know you're not going to give specific guidance? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. So I'm not going to be able to give additional detail on that. I think certainly we can maybe have a more robust discussion about that at the Investor Conference or maybe offline more broadly about our thoughts. But yeah, specific guidance, we're not going to be giving on that.

Felicia Hendrix - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Okay. Is there any way just to help us think about just at all, just how we should think about skier visits – visitation there? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Well, I guess, what I'd say is what's important to remember about our company, right, is that we are really focused on driving revenue and EBITDA. And when you think about the mix – pass mix with daily lift tickets, pass visitation can move around quite a bit. And so it is one of the reasons why, in addition to, yes, we don't provide specific guidance for specific resorts as a separate thing, but on visitation we actually don't – we rarely are focused at the company on driving specific visitation numbers with these strategies, because we know that that visitation can fluctuate quite a bit. And so that is why I have to hesitate to give more specificity around that, and that's why we really drive – when we give guidance, we're really giving guidance on EBITDA and revenue, because that's what we focus on.

Felicia Hendrix - Barclays Capital, Inc.

Management

Okay. Great. Thanks so much. Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you.

Operator

Operator

And we'll go next to Afua Ahwoi from Goldman Sachs. Afua A. Ahwoi - Goldman Sachs & Co.: Hi. Good morning. Two questions from me. First, in the outlook, you gave season-to-date metrics that assumed you already have PCMR in both periods. Could you give us the comparable metrics for the end of 2Q? Just trying to figure out how much of an acceleration, deceleration we saw in February and early March? And then moving to the Real Estate front, you sold the property in Brecken being turned into a Marriott Residence Inn. Can you remind us what that property used to be, and why a Residence Inn versus I guess some other brand? And then maybe following up on that, is the – you mentioned how you are seeing some pick up on the Real Estate front with people looking to develop land. Any idea when we'll start to move dirt or how advanced talks are right now? Thank you. Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Sure. So, no, we're not giving – we're not going to be providing additional metrics for that kind of cut-off period. And obviously we did give that – very comparable metrics right at the end of the holiday period, and then the March 8. So we kind of feel like we've given – I mean what I would say is the trends are largely in line. A lot of the – some of the slowdown like was driven by Tahoe, which candidly from – although, we obviously we're seeing some of that through the holiday period, the slowdown versus last year really accelerated. So there – obviously that was a big major impact to decelerating, right, the metrics from right after the holidays to March 8. And the other piece…

Operator

Operator

And we will take our next question from Steve Wieczynski from Stifel. Steven M. Wieczynski - Stifel, Nicolaus & Co., Inc.: Hey, good morning guys. So, Rob, I guess going back to the season pass question, you've now had Afton and Mt. Brighton under your belt for a while at this point. And can you kind of give us an update in terms of what you are seeing from that region in terms of a pickup in pass sales? And is there – is kind of the regional model that's still something on the table for you guys in terms of finding markets that might be underpenetrated from a pass perspective, and kind of going in and looking at assets in those markets? Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Yeah. So, we've been incredibly pleased with the performance of those markets on season pass and they have been our fastest performing markets if you look over since our acquisition date. And we feel very, very good about it. I think, the good news, bad news there is, it does – like I was saying earlier about season pass, it is not as though you go into a market like Minneapolis and all skiers in Minneapolis all of a sudden buy your pass. It's a year-by-year process, and so what we're seeing is very healthy and strong growth in those markets year-after-year, and we think that provides a terrific pathway as we look over the next few years in those markets to really augment, right, our overall – the growth in our overall program. And yes, we would absolutely be very interested in continuing that. What I would say is that, it is like all of our acquisitions, we can't just go into a market and build a…

Operator

Operator

It appears that there are no further questions at this time. Mr. Katz, I'd like to turn the conference back to you for any additional or closing remarks. Robert A. Katz - Chairman & Chief Executive Officer: Thank you, operator. This concludes our second quarter fiscal 2015 earnings call. Thanks to everyone, who joined us on the conference call today. Please feel free to contact Michael or me directly should you have any further questions. Thank you for your time this morning and goodbye.