Luxury ski resort company Vail Resorts (NYSE: MTN) missed Wall Street’s revenue expectations in Q1 CY2026, with sales falling 7% year on year to $1.21 billion. Its GAAP profit of $8.81 per share was 1.6% below analysts’ consensus estimates.
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Vail Resorts (MTN) Q1 CY2026 Highlights:
- Revenue: $1.21 billion vs analyst estimates of $1.21 billion (7% year-on-year decline, 0.6% miss)
- EPS (GAAP): $8.81 vs analyst expectations of $8.96 (1.6% miss)
- Adjusted EBITDA: $585.4 million vs analyst estimates of $577.9 million (48.6% margin, 1.3% beat)
- EBITDA guidance for the full year is $750 million at the midpoint, in line with analyst expectations
- Operating Margin: 41%, down from 44.9% in the same quarter last year
- Skier Visits: down 1.33 million year on year
- Market Capitalization: $4.82 billion
Company Overview
Founded by two Aspen, Colorado ski patrol guides, Vail Resorts (NYSE: MTN) is a mountain resort company offering luxury experiences in over 30 locations across the globe.
Revenue Growth
Examining a company’s long-term performance can provide clues about its quality. Any business can put up a good quarter or two, but the best consistently grow over the long haul. Unfortunately, Vail Resorts’s 9.7% annualized revenue growth over the last five years was weak. This was below our standard for the consumer discretionary sector and is a poor baseline for our analysis.
Long-term growth is the most important, but within consumer discretionary, product cycles are short and revenue can be hit-driven due to rapidly changing trends and consumer preferences. Vail Resorts’s performance shows it grew in the past but relinquished its gains over the last two years, as its revenue fell by 1% annually. Note that COVID hurt Vail Resorts’s business in 2020 and part of 2021, and it bounced back in a big way thereafter. 
We can better understand the company’s revenue dynamics by analyzing its number of skier visits, which reached 7.28 million in the latest quarter. Over the last two years, Vail Resorts’s skier visits averaged 2.9% year-on-year growth. Because this number is higher than its revenue growth during the same period, we can see the company’s monetization has fallen. 
This quarter, Vail Resorts missed Wall Street’s estimates and reported a rather uninspiring 7% year-on-year revenue decline, generating $1.21 billion of revenue.
Looking ahead, sell-side analysts expect revenue to grow 7.7% over the next 12 months. While this projection implies its newer products and services will fuel better top-line performance, it is still below average for the sector.
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Operating Margin
Operating margin is a key measure of profitability. Think of it as net income - the bottom line - excluding the impact of taxes and interest on debt, which are less connected to business fundamentals.
Vail Resorts’s operating margin has shrunk over the last 12 months and averaged 17.1% over the last two years. The company’s profitability was mediocre for a consumer discretionary business and shows it couldn’t pass its higher operating expenses onto its customers.
This quarter, Vail Resorts generated an operating margin profit margin of 41%, down 3.9 percentage points year on year. This contraction shows it was less efficient because its expenses increased relative to its revenue.
Earnings Per Share
We track the long-term change in earnings per share (EPS) for the same reason as long-term revenue growth. Compared to revenue, however, EPS highlights whether a company’s growth is profitable.
Vail Resorts’s weak 10.3% annual EPS growth over the last five years aligns with its revenue performance. This tells us it maintained its per-share profitability as it expanded.
In Q1, Vail Resorts reported EPS of $8.81, down from $10.54 in the same quarter last year. This print slightly missed analysts’ estimates. Over the next 12 months, Wall Street expects Vail Resorts’s full-year EPS to grow 70.8% from $4.40 to $7.51.
Key Takeaways from Vail Resorts’s Q1 Results
We struggled to find many positives in these results. Its EPS missed and its revenue fell slightly short of Wall Street’s estimates. Overall, this was a weaker quarter. The stock traded down 5.6% to $130.06 immediately following the results.
Is Vail Resorts an attractive investment opportunity right now? When making that decision, it’s important to consider its valuation, business qualities, as well as what has happened in the latest quarter. We cover that in our actionable full research report which you can read here (it’s free).
