The writer Andrew Pridgen seems to forget that Mammoth's majority owner since 2006, Starwood Capital, is a private equity firm not so different from KSL.
“We had greater plans for Mammoth but the Great Recession and then some less favorable weather, interfered with our strategic aspirations in a finite life investment vehicle”
This, from the horse's mouth, confirms that Starwood was not into running Mammoth long term, and by implication the alternative to this deal was acquisition by Vail.
No question Rusty Gregory is far more competent running a ski area than Andy Wirth. Today's press release says Rusty will remain in charge at Mammoth.
But yes it's curious what KSL's strategy is considering how controversial their operation is at the one ski resort they own now, Squaw/Alpine. Pridgen has written a few disparaging articles about KSL and Squaw, including advocating a boycott. Amusingly he speculated that KSL's exit strategy for Squaw was to sell out to Vail.
EMSC":jvwijnkj said:
If Vail bought Mtn Creek NJ (or maybe Hunter is a better example) and you could get in 5-10 local days and then use the same pass at any of the Vail resorts in the west... How many folks would take that and hit Vail/canyons/tahoe by flying instead of schlepping in cars for the 6 hrs each way to Mammoth for several weekends? Not everyone, but enough to matter for both Vail (positive) and Mammoth's (negative) bottom lines.
Even more extreme than that. Presumably Hunter is the biggest NYC metro daytrip area, but what percent of that market does it represent? Big Bear does 800K skier visits and is easily 75% of the SoCal daytrip market. And SoCal residents are still close to 90% of Mammoth's average 1.2 million skier visits.
FYI Liz, one of the few people who has skied both Hunter and Big Bear, sees a lot in common there.
