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The big investment Vail Resorts made in the offseason to link Park City Mountain and Canyons resorts is paying off.
In its earnings report for the quarter ending Jan. 31, Vail Resorts reported "double-digit visitation and revenue growth at Park City, following our transformational capital investments."
Vail spent $51 million before the start of the 2015-16 ski season to install two lifts connecting the Summit County ski areas and to improve midmountain restaurants.
The quarterly report did not break out specific numbers for Park City, but said that through March 8, the number of skier visits at Vail's operations in Colorado, California and Utah were up 9.9 percent over the same period a year ago. Lift-ticket revenues rose nearly 20 percent.
Additional financial support came from a 13.3 percent increase in guests' dining expenditures, a 9.4 percent jump in ski school revenues and an 8.7 percent rise in income from retail and rental shops, said Vail Resorts CEO Rob Katz.
"Our results were very strong in the second quarter," he added. "Our U.S. destination visitation remained strong throughout the year at all of our mountain resorts, as we saw the benefit of the appeal of our resorts to high-end leisure travelers, our sophisticated marketing efforts and the strong U.S. economy."
Katz said a decline in foreign visitation eased after the Christmas holidays with the arrival of more Australians taking advantage of Epic Pass purchases made after Vail acquired Perisher resort there.
Visits from Mexico have been flat, he added, while fewer visitors have come from the United Kingdom, Canadian and Brazilian markets.
As a result, Vail Resorts earned $117 million, or $3.14 per share, in the second quarter compared with $115.8 million, or $3.10 per share, a year earlier. That was based on quarterly revenues of $599.4 million, up 13 percent ($69.1 million) from the previous year.
Katz said Vail Resorts will invest about $100 million in its resorts this year, mostly outside of Utah.
The largest segment, about $60 million, will go into improvements at Wilmot Mountain, a Wisconsin resort bought to tap into the Chicago and Milwaukee markets.
Other projects include a 500-seat restaurant at Breckenridge, upgrades to Sun Up chairlift at Vail and the Pines Lodge at Beaver Creek, plus modernization of the resort's customer database and call-center technology.