On average, their frequency of skiing is four to six days, and you have a ton of people who own gear and a ton of people who rent gear and there’s real barriers or frustrations, I’ll call it, on both of those fronts, right? The people who own gear who live in destination markets, the hassle of transporting it to the airport — through the airport, up to the mountain, the cost of purchasing it are frustrations for an asset that sits in their garage, the majority of the skier — obviously, we have local skiers and snowborders that are using their gear much more, but I’m talking more about the destination guests. And then, on the rental side, for the people who don’t own gear, the hassle and the time of standing in line in store to pick up or drop off.
So, this idea is a brand-new business model that we believe can completely transform the gear business for our guests and offer an alternative that is basically managing the gear experience on your app that you can select the gear you want, where you want it, when you want it. The best gear, top brands and either delivered to you at your condo or hotel, in resort or slopeside. We don’t have that hassle of transporting it. It’s all ready to go. You can drop it off slopeside, and you can manage the whole experience on your app without any of the hassle. And we think there’s a real opportunity to convert our existing renters over into this, which is a subscription. So, the stickiness to our resorts is really important. We can convert owners who really don’t have a need to own that asset to enjoy the mountains and can get whatever gear they’re looking for wherever they want it by being a part of this membership and create stickiness to our network of resorts as well.
It is a pilot. We’ll be learning a lot. And I would say that the year one launch, which is next season, we’ll have a lot more insights about the business and at the end of this season in terms of what we learned from the pilot as well.
Angela Korch: And Matt, on workforce management, yeah, this is part of our resource efficiency strategy that we talked a lot about, and we’re really excited to roll this out this season across all of our resorts. As you know, we did a pilot at two of our resorts at Whistler Blackcomb and at Park City and got a lot of good learnings. And of course, any new tool, takes some time to optimize. And so, this first year, we’re going to be in rollout change management, but we’re very excited about the multi-year opportunity. What it does is we’ve historically really managed all of these in various different ways and tools. So, to give those employees and our managers a better tool that allows them to free up their time to do our guest service and so many other more important things than, right, keeping track of schedules on some of these systems, it will be a great enabler for both our managers and our employees. And so, we’re really excited about rolling that out this year.
Kirsten Lynch: And just to build on what Angela said, we would expect the financial impact in year one, which this is year one, to be modest as we’re focused on the change management, the training, the implementation of the tool. But we do believe over a multi-year period for this to be a big benefit to the company over time in terms of efficiency.
Matthew Boss: Great color. Best of luck.
Kirsten Lynch: Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from David Katz, Jefferies.
David Katz: Hi everyone. Good afternoon. Thanks for taking my questions. I wanted to ask about your latest acquisition and you did give some sort of longer-term guidance on it. And what I’m wondering is how that mountain is pricing today relative to your other Swiss mountain, or your other mountains or the premier mountains in the U.S. And whether that aspirational earnings level is driven by pricing volumes, margin et cetera, all of the above? Just putting it in a historical context that Europe has often had a lot more volume, a lot more skier days, but in many cases, its pricing has been lower. And I’m just wondering how this fits in to that.
Angela Korch: Yeah, David, I would say that consistent with a lot of what you see across the European market, right, it looks a lot like from a pricing perspective, North American did before the launch of the Epic Pass. And so, yeah, we do think over time, there’s an opportunity right here too, as we build out a network to get more into advanced commitment through creating a compelling guest-centric network there. But in terms of like the exact pricing strategy, we’re not commenting on what we’re doing moving forward within Crans-Montana at this point.
David Katz: Understood. And just a follow-up with respect to the capital plan there, assuming that you do close on time, would we be thinking prospectively about including some CapEx in this fiscal year for that? Or how might we time some of the CapEx that you’re planning out in the future post closing?
Angela Korch: David, the CHF30 million that we announced is going to be subject to what we get with regulatory approvals. So, you should expect that, that will come likely after this first year, right? We’re still going to be in a learning mode as we close. And so, we will go through a full plan and get evaluating our approval process with our communities to build out that capital plan, and it will occur over the following years.
David Katz: Okey-doke. Thank you.
Kirsten Lynch: Thanks, David.
Operator: Our next question comes from Patrick Scholes, Truist Securities.
Patrick Scholes: Thank you. Good evening everyone.
Kirsten Lynch: Hi, Patrick.
Patrick Scholes: Hi. Going forward, in Europe, now that you’ve had, I guess, it’s over the last two years or three years, two acquisitions, would you expect the pace of acquisitions to accelerate at this point?
Kirsten Lynch: So hard to predict in this industry, Patrick. Obviously, we would hope so, but we really have no way of predicting this. It is so driven by the market dynamics and the owners of these assets and kind of where they are and what they’re interested in doing. But we certainly hope to see here that we will continue to make progress on Europe. As you know, we’ve been focused on Europe and this market has a big opportunity for growth for a long time. So, we’re very encouraged to have Andermatt-Sedrun and Crans-Montana here over the last couple of years. And the market there is almost 3 times the size of the number of skier businesses in North America. So, we hope to continue to make progress with the aspiration to build a network there. But no idea how fast that pace is going to be. I wish I knew.
Patrick Scholes: Okay. Fair enough. A related follow-up question. Certainly, all the focus, I think, rightfully so, at this point has been on international, specifically in Europe. But do you still see opportunities in North America for perhaps tuck-in acquisitions, say, in Vermont or perhaps Northern Vermont or alike? Thank you.
Kirsten Lynch: Yeah, absolutely, we see opportunities in North America and our acquisition focus has been on Europe. As you know, we also believe there’s a big opportunity in Japan. And then we still believe that there are accretive acquisition opportunities in North America that can really add to our network and connect our network to major markets in between our local ski areas, regional and our destination areas. And so, we continue to stay focused on that as well.
