Matthew Prince is pressing Vail Resorts to sell him Park City Mountain Resort, the largest ski area in the United States, and he says he would take only that resort, not the rest of the company. The 50-year-old Cloudflare founder says the mountain where he grew up and worked as a ski instructor in the mid-1990s should not stay locked inside a company he sees as under strain.
He is not talking about a distant ambition. Prince first started urging Vail in March to sell him Park City, and now says he is increasingly convinced the deal could happen much sooner than he once thought because the company is in real trouble. That matters today because Vail shares were around $137 recently, down more than 60% from their 2021 peak, and Prince argues shareholders will soon decide the company is a poor capital allocator.
Park City is not just any asset. It is Vail Resorts' flagship resort and the largest ski area in the United States, which makes it the kind of property a company rarely gives up voluntarily. Vail owns 42 ski areas across the United States, Canada, Austria and Australia, and it has never sold one. Prince says that is exactly the problem. In his view, the company’s resorts are worth far more than $5 billion, but the ownership model has become a drag.
That is where his pitch turns from nostalgia into a business argument. Prince says Vail should move to an asset-light franchise model, keeping the pass business while selling the resorts themselves. “You don’t need to own the resorts in order to have the resorts take your pass,” he said, adding that selling Park City Mountain Resort is the right thing to do. He also said shareholders will eventually tell management that it should no longer act as the company’s capital allocator.
The friction comes from what could happen if Prince does not get his way. He says activist investors are interested in Vail and could force a broader breakup if the stock keeps sliding, which could put even more valuable resorts on the block. He specifically points to trophy assets such as Whistler-Blackcomb, Breckenridge and Vail-Beaver Creek as the kind of properties that could be sold to pay for a takeover, even as he insists he is not interested in taking over Vail himself.
For now, the question is not whether Prince has made himself heard. He has. The unresolved issue is whether Vail’s management, led by Chief Executive Rob Katz, is willing to do the one thing it has never done before and sell a ski area, starting with the one Prince says he knows best.
