Extremely poor treatment of customers, no consistency from management, biased treatment of employees, politics rule all
Vail Resorts Response
11y
We appreciate your candid feedback about your experience within our company. We agree that the pass and iconic locations are a huge perk to working for Vail Resorts. However, those same locations can be barriers within a large organization as well as having consistent managing practices across the enterprise. Our Company has made steps to increase the effectiveness of our leaders at all levels throughout Vail Resorts with leadership essentials programs that emphasize communication, managing expectations, understanding team dynamics, delivering performance feedback and developing talent on his/her team for all of our managers to participate in. Vail Resorts has also been utilizing an enterprise wide anonymous survey for the past few years that allow all employees to give the candid feedback that you have in a safe forum, which then we can see management wins and misses to take action on. Thank you again for taking the time to express your thoughts on your experience.
- 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.