Patrick Scholes: Okay. And may I just slip in one last question here? Do you have an EBITDA target first year for Epic Gear, or maybe I should say, do you expect that initiative to be EBITDA positive first year, if you can’t give us a target?
Kirsten Lynch: No. We’re going into the pilot this year, and I think we’re going to learn a lot from the pilot, which is a very limited execution. And we have not yet gained those learnings, and we have not yet disclosed exactly what the targets would be, but I believe we would have more information to share with you as we go along on this journey.
Patrick Scholes: Okay, fair enough. Thank you.
Kirsten Lynch: Thanks, Patrick.
Operator: Our next question comes from Chris Woronka, Deutsche Bank.
Chris Woronka: Hi, Kirsten. Hi, Angela. I want to kind of go back to the — I know you guys have mentioned you expect that the lift ticket — pace of lift ticket revenue could moderate or what’s implied by the pass sales to date as you expect to pull more people on to a pass product as opposed to a lift ticket product. I guess is there anything you saw last year that gives you any kind of indication as to what that pace might look like, the pace of moderation this year or anything else — any kind of color you can give us as to how that might unfold?
Kirsten Lynch: Well, I mean, every year, when we think about our pass business, right, we’re always striving to convert our lift ticket purchasers into a pass because of the stability that creates the renewal, the retention, the frequency increase, the lifetime value. So, we view that as a good thing. It’s just when we share our growth rates on pass, we just want to make sure to acknowledge so that everyone remembers that some of those guests are coming from lift tickets and that they’re factoring that in as to how they think about the upcoming season. We obviously track that very closely. And those expectations that we have on total lift revenue and visitation are incorporated into our guidance, and we just reaffirmed our guidance.
Chris Woronka: Okay. Fair enough. And then kind of a longer-term question for you here. As we think about the level of investment over time, we could go back over a number of years and look at percentage of revenue or something like that, I’m mindful that you’ve done a bunch of acquisitions as well. Is there any way to think about — is the level of capital intensity increasing over time, again, maybe it’s relative to revenue or some other metric? Do you have an opinion on that?
Angela Korch: Yeah, Chris, if you look back over time, actually, you’ll see that we’ve become more and more efficient as a percent of revenue with our capital. And we just put forward our capital for the next year, in line with what we have put out there historically in terms of how we think about capital, which it typically will grow more with inflation and then we adjust it for any acquisitions. And so, we’ve been very disciplined in that approach, which you can see has translated to kind of more and more efficiency over time.
Chris Woronka: Okay. Very good. Thank you.
Operator: Our next question comes from Brandt Montour, Barclays.
Unidentified Analyst: Hey, guys. It’s [Chris Lee] (ph) on for Brandt. Thanks for taking our question. We’ve been seeing some competing passes like the relatively new Indy Pass receive a lot of attention this year. I was wondering if you could talk about the competitive landscape for passes and how that’s evolved to impact your performance, either good or bad this year. And that’s all for us. Thanks.
Kirsten Lynch: Thanks. Yeah, we think it’s great. I mean, honestly, this industry, we view that the more of this industry that is in a pass and committed in advance the better. So, I think it’s great to see the emergence of other passes out there. And pass decisions are often tied to the resorts that you love and that you want to go to. And so, while they — you could view them as competitive dynamics, there’s also a fierce amount of loyalty that people have to certain resorts. And we’ve been fortunate that we continue to bring more and more new people back into our pass program in terms of renewals. But as I highlighted when — earlier, the percentage growth of people who were pass holders in Epic but were not last year that came back was substantial, and we’re really pleased to see those pass holders returning back to us.
Can’t say exactly what products they were in last year or what — if they were on a pass last year and then came back to us. But part of our whole strategy is that we continue to reinvest in the guest experience that attracts our guests and keeps that loyalty, it brings people back who may have tried something else, things like Mobile Pass and My Epic Gear and the investments we make in lift, My Epic app are a whole part of driving those results. And we’re incredibly pleased with our growth in pass for this upcoming season, and incredibly pleased to have over 2 million people that we know are coming to our resorts for this coming season. Thanks so much for the question.
Operator: Our next question comes from Megan Alexander, Morgan Stanley.
Megan Alexander: Hi, thanks for squeezing us in. Maybe kind of a shorter-term question and then a longer-term one from us. The Australian impact, you quantified as $14 million, that’s probably, I imagine, pretty transitory. So I guess, if we sit there — sit here and add that back to kind of the midpoint of your EBITDA guide this year, all else equal in a normal environment, that would imply kind of a resort EBITDA margin in the 31.5% range. As we think about going forward, again, all else equal in a normal environment, is there any reason whether it’s OpEx investments related to My Gear or anything else, why you couldn’t see margins above that level next year?
Angela Korch: Thanks, Megan. Yeah, first part of your question just on the Australia impact, we really highlighted two pieces of that. One being the prior year, which, right, had a phenomenal finish to the season, had some pent-up demand dynamics from after two years of COVID versus this current year, right, which had one of the warmest seasons on record down there and was obviously impacted by very challenging weather conditions in the first quarter of this year. And so, the $14 million is kind of the combination of both of those factors and roughly equal between those two. So that’s maybe how you should think about kind of the one-time versus ongoing type of impact. And then, to your question, long term on margins, yeah, we have talked a lot about how we intend to grow going forward.
We’ve talked about our resource efficiency, growth strategy as well, which is how we’re very focused on driving margin improvement moving forward, but we haven’t given specific kind of forward guidance on that.
