Park City Mountain just slapped Deer Valley Resort with a spotless white ski glove, challenging its neighbor to a duel over which can make Park City visitors feel more coddled.

Colorado-based Vail Resorts, Inc. — Park City Mountain’s parent company — issued the challenge Tuesday morning when CEO Rob Katz said the company will no longer be focused on selling multi-resort Epic Passes. Instead, it is turning its attention to elevating the customer experience across its 42 resorts.

Vail Resorts is calling this new chapter the “Epic Experience.” It will be defined, according to a press statement, “by delivering the best and most differentiated guest experience in skiing and riding.”

If that sounds like a direct shot at Deer Valley — which is owned by Ikon Pass purveyor Alterra Mountain Company — it is, Katz confirmed in an interview Monday with The Salt Lake Tribune.

“We’re absolutely targeting [going] above Deer Valley and above any of our current resorts,” Katz said. “Because what we’re talking about is adding services and components to the experience that don’t exist today in the ski industry.”

Don’t tell that to Deer Valley skiers. Indulgence has been part of Deer Valley’s DNA since Edgar and Polly Stern founded the ski-only resort in 1981-82. That high-touch service was later dubbed the “Deer Valley Difference” and it has been extolled as a key reason skiers are willing to dish out $4,000 for season passes and $22 for a bowl of chili.

Asked about another Utah ski area looking to best Deer Valley when it comes to customer service, Kevin Kirksey, the ski area’s vice president of marketing said “service isn’t a thing that Deer Valley does.”

“It is what Deer Valley has established itself around. It’s not a component of the business,” he added. ”It’s the essence of the business itself.”

Park City Mountain, meanwhile, has generally been considered the budget option in town since Vail Resorts took over the mountain in 2014.

True, the resort proffered the second-highest walk-up lift ticket rate in the United States last season at $351 (Vail and Beaver Creek, also owned by Vail Resorts came in at $356) and sells its chili for about $17 per bowl. But for those who plan ahead and resist the on-mountain temptations, the skiing and riding itself can be relatively affordable. Historically, an Epic Pass can be had for less than $1,200 — or about $10 per day. An Epic Local Pass, which restricts access to Park City Mountain, can be bought for even less.

That affordability will remain, Katz said, as Vail Resorts will continue to sell its Epic Pass and will raise rates only in accordance with inflation. Still, he added, the company is intent on improving the on-mountain experience for skiers and riders of all incomes.

“We’ll have somebody who’s a billionaire with their multiple private instructors skiing on the same lift and on the same run as somebody who got a discount coupon … and has a sandwich that they put in their backpack," Katz said.

To elevate the guest experience across its properties, Vail Resorts will focus on five areas: gear rentals, lessons, food, interactions with its app and interactions with its staff.

Last year, the company launched My Epic Gear, a concierge service Katz said is designed to take the “friction” out of the equipment rental process. This year, it will unveil the personalized private-lesson initiative “Epic Ascent” at its Vail and Beaver Creek properties. Also, across all resorts for the 2026-27 season, guests will be able to buy passes and lift tickets and share buddy passes on the My Epic app.

The most popular food items bought on-mountain at Vail Resorts, according to the press release, are the classics: chili, burgers, pizza, fries, hot dogs, chicken fingers and mac and cheese. Katz said better versions of those will be on the menu but at the same prices as their predecessors.

“We’re putting essentially more money into the food that we’re serving,” he said, “to really try to elevate the ingredients and the presentation of that food — almost to the maximum that we can while still serving that many lunches.”

Perhaps the most significant element for Park City Mountain is the commitment to improved customer service. The resort suffered a black eye in January 2025 when a ski patrol strike led to severely limited terrain and created long lift lines in the midst of the busy holiday season. Katz said he hopes to avoid a repeat of that by addressing union contracts early and by making sure the resorts are otherwise fully staffed. According to the press release, Vail Resorts has made a $175 million investment in wages and benefits over the past four years across its properties.

Katz said that if Park City Mountain or another ski area has a work stoppage, he wants to make sure “that our company is fully prepared. That it’s largely seamless for the guests. That they are getting still the full experience.”

The areas of focus under Epic Experience are many of the same components — with the addition of lift infrastructure — that Utah billionaire Matthew Prince has criticized at Park City Mountain. Prince, the founder of the tech company Cloudflare and Utah’s richest man, has spent the last year waging a public campaign to convince Vail Resorts to sell him Park City Mountain. He has promised he would invest $500 million in the resort.

“It will either go into upgrading the on-mountain infrastructure, snowmaking, lifts, restaurants … or it will go into supporting the team and having the best ski patrol, best instructors, best maintenance folks,” Prince told Vail Daily earlier this month.

“Again, there’s a model of that that’s working, literally two miles away, at Deer Valley.”

Katz said the decision to focus on customer service was made long before Prince began pressing Vail Resorts to sell off its mountains.

Additionally, he argued that having so many properties in one stable will help enable places like Park City Mountain to reach a high level of guest experience. Katz said a skier or snowboarder can enjoy a variety of resorts with unique views and runs and quirky towns. At the same time, they can enjoy the comfort of knowing their preferred equipment will be waiting on their doorstep and that they can use a familiar app to navigate the resort.

“I don’t think you think that’s losing [uniqueness],” Katz said.

Still, might it be a problem if guests have to look no further than up the road to compare what they’re experiencing to what some consider the industry standard for guest experience? Katz said he welcomes the challenge.

“Having Deer Valley right next door to us is a huge opportunity,” he said. “I think it helps to build the success of the broader Park City community, which I think we all benefit from.”

Kirksey said Deer Valley was built around limiting the number of skiers and finding ways to bring them back again and again. He said some employees have been there more than 30 years, and that the service-oriented environment found there would be difficult to replicate even over the course of many years.

“A lot of companies want things to happen really quickly for them because of all the reasons, all the demands that are on the backs of so many companies to perform,” Kirksey said. “But this is one of those things that I think you have to be committed to over the course of time.”

So, is Kirksey worried that the Deer Valley Difference soon will not be so differentiating?

“Our focus is on the guest,” he said, “and that’s where it should be.”