Good and Bad - Anonymous employee Vail Resorts Employee Review

1.0
12 June 2015
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Company is growing, making money and enjoys a strong stock price. In some areas, they are way ahead of the curve like the Epic pass, and mobile App. The locations are amazing. Employees/Dependents get a free season pass. Benefits are above average as well. You get to work with some really smart people.

Cons

People don't stay. Voluntary turnover is high - even in year round professional jobs. Jobs are not filled and held open for months. That means those who are left get to pick up the slack with no reward, or even recognition for doing so. The causes of turnover are many and most have been noted here in other reviews. It is a very corporate bottom line driven company, with little attention paid to employees. Orientation, interspersed with peppy videos starring the CEO, followed-up with a dozen or more ways you can get fired. Instead of finding ways to hold on to people, the attitude is "let them go, we'll find more." Given that, it's no surprise pay is very low. Not just by market standards, but their own internal pay ranges. It's not uncommon to have long tenured people who are not at the minimum of the pay range. Everyone else then falls even further below because "so and so is low paid and been here 10 years, and you're new and can't be paid more than him/her." They overvalue the free season pass for employees as a trade off for low pay. If they tempt you with the pass, and they will, remember you will be working (or blacked out) the peak periods and may only get to the use the pass during mud season. At last check, you can't use the pass to buy food at the grocery store. The CEO got so tired of hearing about the low pay, he once stated in an employee meeting, he wasn't going to talk about it anymore. Morale overall is low. There is a major disconnect between what is expounded as the culture and values, and reality. Employee surveys show a lot of dissatisfaction. We go through the motions after the survey, but real change doesn't happen. By the next survey, there's a lot of new people, with new hopes - "this is the year it gets better." The culture is really cover your you know what, so expect a lot of micro-managing, and defensive behavior. You'll need to email and copy 20 people and get their input for even the most minor things. It's guised as being part of a matrix organization, when in fact it's just low trust.

Explore other reviews about Vail Resorts

5.0
12 June 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The managers were really cool and the work was fun. Pretty relaxed environment.

Cons

It was cold sometimes and long hours standing but that was all in the job description and we got jackets.

2.0
14 May 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

- Most people are smart, passionate, and enjoyable to work with and be around. - Fairly frequent opportunities for development and advancement through the internal job board. - Nice perks if you're into skiing or riding.

Cons

- There's an unspoken expectation to regularly work significantly more hours because the majority of employees are very passionate about the ski and ride industry, which isn't great for work life balance. There's not much down time either; you're either hustling in season or hustling to prepare for the next season. - Climate change poses a significant threat to the future of the company. The season pass model mitigates some of the impacts, but not as much as senior leadership asserts. And, since bonuses are tied to company results, you can end up working super hard all year and still end up getting half of your bonus target due to uncontrollable weather conditions. - The culture has taken a serious hit since enterprise transformation work began. Lots of people are constantly stressed out and the atmosphere in the office is depressing. - Most of the time, it feels like senior leadership makes decisions in a vacuum without consulting any of the people that would be responsible for the downstream work associated with the decision. For example, I've seen senior leaders decide on a savings target multiple times without consulting the experts, who then have to scramble to figure out how to make it work. It creates chaos and negatively impacts morale. - This organization has a wordsmithing problem. I've never worked at a company that spends such an inordinate amount of time on the framing of a message compared to the actual substance of the message.

4
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