Vail Offers Apology/Explanation For Lift Line Fiasco

If you hadn’t heard, Vail had some absolutely brutal lift lines last week and their COO, Beth Howard, has issued a statement after pictures and videos of the masses waiting in a snowy gridlock swept across the internet.

The Denver Post reports Vail received 38 inches of snow in a 48-hour period, requiring “a herculean effort” for staff to safely open the mountain. Beth Howard explained it was among the top five snow events in the resort’s 58-year history.

Howard said powder hungry skiers and snowboarders began lining up for Gondola One at 6 a.m. on Friday and Saturday, two hours before the gondola’s scheduled 8 a.m. opening.

“While I don’t like to see anyone waiting in any line, I want to assure you that those lines were gone by 10 a.m. on Friday and by 9:15 a.m. on Saturday. That gondola can manage a lot of guests, and once the initial group dissipated, the line was around five minutes long the rest of those days.”

The other major problem area occurred at Lift 5:

“Midday on Saturday, while the majority of the mountain was free from lines, we saw a more challenging situation in the limited amount of terrain we had been able to open safely in our back bowls. At 10:30 a.m. the wait time began to exceed 30 minutes, and the line grew much longer. By 2 p.m., the line had subsided, but that period in between created an unacceptable experience for our guests and I apologize to anyone who got stuck in it.”

Mountain managers considered limiting access from above into those bowls because of the massive lines but that would have been unprecedented:

“I know we could have done a much better job anticipating these situations and communicating with our guests. I am well aware that a picture is worth a thousand words, but I truly hope my words here help provide context for what happened. I have complete confidence in our team at Vail Mountain and the huge investment we’ve made in high-speed chairlifts to alleviate lift line concerns across our resort. I am confident this was an isolated incident in the midst of extreme conditions.”

I think I speak for everyone that skis at Vail that we all hope this really was an “isolated incident in the midst of extreme conditions.”Apology accepted or are you still salty about the incident?