Vail Resorts reviews

People don't stay. Voluntary turnover is high - even in year round professional jobs. Jobs are not filled and held open for months. That means those who are left get to pick up the slack with no reward, or even recognition for doing so. The causes of turnover are many and most have been noted here in other reviews. It is a very corporate bottom line driven company, with little attention paid to employees. Orientation, interspersed with peppy videos starring the CEO, followed-up with a dozen or more ways you can get fired. Instead of finding ways to hold on to people, the attitude is "let them go, we'll find more." Given that, it's no surprise pay is very low. Not just by market standards, but their own internal pay ranges. It's not uncommon to have long tenured people who are not at the minimum of the pay range. Everyone else then falls even further below because "so and so is low paid and been here 10 years, and you're new and can't be paid more than him/her." They overvalue the free season pass for employees as a trade off for low pay. If they tempt you with the pass, and they will, remember you will be working (or blacked out) the peak periods and may only get to the use the pass during mud season. At last check, you can't use the pass to buy food at the grocery store. The CEO got so tired of hearing about the low pay, he once stated in an employee meeting, he wasn't going to talk about it anymore. Morale overall is low. There is a major disconnect between what is expounded as the culture and values, and reality. Employee surveys show a lot of dissatisfaction. We go through the motions after the survey, but real change doesn't happen. By the next survey, there's a lot of new people, with new hopes - "this is the year it gets better." The culture is really cover your you know what, so expect a lot of micro-managing, and defensive behavior. You'll need to email and copy 20 people and get their input for even the most minor things. It's guised as being part of a matrix organization, when in fact it's just low trust.

I have been in upper management at Vail for over a decade and each and every year they seem to take more and more form the employee each and every year. For example last year they rolled out their new "innovative" new vacation program called FTO (flexible time off, which is performance based), moving away from PTO (Paid time off, which was accrued). I went from earning/using over 7 weeks paid vacation to only being allowed to take 2 weeks of vacation. Their strategy is to overload management so that they can never meet deadlines, therefore you can not take your performance based vacation. One top of that, the FTO was sold to the employees as an innovative way to attract new talent, then within the next six months they quietly eliminated all health insurance for all new employees requiring 750 service hours first...Work there with extreme caution!! and watch your back!!