Ski pass; company discounts for friends and family; 4 free day passes, and 16 $55 lift passes; National Park Pass; Employee housing; benefits including health insurance, eye, and dental (for employees with over 700 work hours); pro-deals for many of the companies vendors; J1 & H2B workers; tourists from a wide variety of Nations;
Cons
low pay, limited company locations, besides 1 location in Australia (coming later in 2015) there are no VR locations outside of the USA, not a very culturally or ethnically diverse company
Vail Resorts Response
11y
Thank you for your feedback. It’s great to see that you are getting as much out of the free employee pass, four free tickets for friends and 16 discounted tickets as we do. We are also excited that in many of our locations we have been able to offer subsidized employee housing to help offset the cost of living in a resort town for our seasonal staff. The housing program is something that we are continually reviewing to make sure that we can staff our mountains. We too are also excited for our first international acquisition and to see what that new experience can take us and hopefully help diversify our work staff. Thank you again for a great season and all the work that went into it!
- 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.