Letter: Clearly, Vail Resorts customers are voting with their money
I am debating if I should be amused or appalled at Vail Resorts’ CEO lamenting that perhaps the company has “trained” its customers to brown bag their lunch. Seriously? Does Vail Resorts see its customers as a pack of monkeys who need to be properly trained to hand over their credit cards to the appropriate terminal? It certainly sounds like that is the view of Kirsten Lynch. I think I will go with appalled.
Vail Resorts’ customers are human beings that do not need to be, and cannot be “trained” and are more than capable of making decisions on their own. The lack of respect shown to the guests and the community is sad, but hardly shocking coming from Vail Resorts.
The only thing that the mountain restaurants have going for them is the location and a nice view. Beyond that, if they tried to sell what they call food in any other location for the price they charge, they’d be out of business by the end of the month.
If Vail Resorts wants to get diners back to its restaurants, then it needs to try a novel concept: offer quality, service and value. Charge a couple of bucks extra for the view and convenience but realize that the cuts made during the pandemic did not “train” anybody — rather it opened people’s eyes that there are options. Clearly, people are voting with their money that they have had enough of overpriced poor quality food. Even trained monkeys are not going to eat food they don’t like.
What is next? The brown bag police checking backpacks in the lift lines for food illicitly brought onto the mountain?
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Sadly, this is but one more chapter in the saga of the decline of Vail no longer being the world-class resort experience it once was.
Chris Neuswanger
Edwards
