CEO Katz makes major Vail Resorts stock purchase while company continues to pursue buybacks in effort to stop sliding share prices
Vail Resorts is continuing to be aggressive in share repurchasing while top executives are simultaneously buying stock, a combination that signals renewed internal confidence even as the publicly traded company’s share price remains well below its post-pandemic highs.
CEO Rob Katz, on Monday, purchased 37,500 shares in a transaction valued at nearly $5 million, while CFO Angela Korch acquired an additional 190 shares for $25,051. Korch now has just over 5,000 shares, while Katz has roughly 285,000 shares, worth about $40 million at current prices.
Katz’s aggressive approach to purchasing Vail Resorts stock marks a stark contrast from previous CEO Kirsten Lynch, who received high-profile criticism from an investor in 2025, saying Lynch had “not once purchased MTN shares,” and therefore had “no skin in the game, signaling zero conviction in Vail’s future.”
Vail Resorts as a company has continued to aggressively repurchase its own shares, as well, retiring roughly 3–4% of its total outstanding stock each year since instituting its stock buyback program in fiscal 2022.
Stock buybacks have been controversial in recent years, with Colorado Sen. Michael Bennet lobbying against the practice. At a campaign event in Eagle in 2022, Bennet said if “you’re a publicly traded corporation” performing buybacks, you’re doing so “to engineer your results.”
By buying its own shares, a company attempts to make the remaining stock owned by shareholders more valuable through supply and demand, but the opportunity cost of buybacks — the investments in labor and technology which the company could have otherwise used the money it spent on share repurchasing — is what draws controversy to the practice.
When Southwest Airlines was forced to cancel 5,000 flights over the Christmas holiday season in 2022, blaming an outdated IT system, critics pointed to the billions the company had spent on stock buybacks as money that could have been used to upgrade that system.
Vail Resorts’ most aggressive period of share repurchasing came in fiscal 2023, when the company bought back approximately 2.2 million shares — about 5.4% of shares outstanding — for roughly $500 million at an average price near $229.
Since fiscal 2022, Vail Resorts has repurchased more than 5 million shares, spending more than $1 billion in doing so.
But over that same period, the stock has declined materially from the $240–$250 range in 2021–2022 to about $130 today. A large portion of those buybacks were executed at significantly higher prices than the current stock price, and did not prevent a multi-year decline in the stock.
That has led to Katz and Vail Resorts at large believing that the stock is undervalued at the moment, with the combination of renewed insider buying and continued buybacks signaling that management has confidence in the company.
Whether that marks a turning point or a continuation of a longer trend remains to be seen. But after years of repurchasing shares at higher prices, Vail Resorts is now buying back stock — and seeing insiders buy alongside it — at a markedly lower valuation, and is likely to continue doing so, Korch said in an earnings call March 9.
The company “will remain opportunistic on buybacks,” Korch said, “as evidenced by repurchasing .3 million shares for a total of $45 million year to date.”
