A strong year of earnings, sitting inside a shrinking valuation
What makes this genuinely interesting is that Thredbo isn't a struggling asset being quietly offloaded. In the 2026 financial year, the resort's normalised EBITDA rose 13.7% and group revenue from Thredbo increased 10.6% - solid numbers by any measure.
But EVT has still cut the value it places on the resort from roughly AUD 292 million (USD 209 million) down to AUD 143 million (USD 102 million), a reduction the company attributes to a difficult winter and the continued cost of infrastructure investment. Group-wide, EVT's overall picture for the year was strong too: normalised EBITDA came in at $174.4 million, up 8.4%, while net profit after tax jumped 51.9% to $50.7 million, and shares rose 10% on the results.
The property portfolio Thredbo sits inside is valued at approximately AUD 2.25 billion (USD 1.61 billion), and the planned AUD 800 million divestment represents roughly a third of that total.
EVT has said proceeds would go toward hotel growth and potentially shareholder returns - hotels are unambiguously the company's stated priority, with its brand portfolio now running to 84 hotels and 12,603 rooms, and its wider Australia-New Zealand footprint, including Connect Hospitality, reaching 101 hotels and more than 16,000 rooms.
Why the valuation dropped: a season the snow didn't cooperate with
Australian resorts broadly had a rough 2026, with below-average snowfall and warm, wet weather cutting into what natural cover there was. Thredbo managed to keep its beginner terrain running through the slow start thanks to an all-weather snowmaking system capable of producing snow at temperatures up to 20°C - technology Hastings described as "invaluable" during the slow start to the season.
Despite the tough conditions, Hastings pushed back on any suggestion that cost-of-living pressure was denting demand, telling analysts that skiing has never been an affordable holiday for Australians in the first place and that EVT isn't seeing the addressable market shrink. She also credited the 2026 Winter Olympics with pulling in new interest, noting that more than a fifth of the season's initial ticket sales came from first-time skiers. Thredbo's 2026 season is currently scheduled to run through October 5, weather permitting.
So who would actually buy it?
If EVT does eventually sell, the obvious name in most skiers' minds is Vail Resorts, which already owns Perisher, Mount Hotham and Falls Creek in Australia and sells access to all three through its Epic Australia Pass. Adding Thredbo would give Vail an extraordinarily dominant position in Australian skiing - and that's exactly what could complicate a deal.
Australia introduced a mandatory merger control regime on January 1, 2026, giving the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission real power to block acquisitions that substantially lessen competition, a marked change from the largely voluntary review process that existed before. Whether a Vail-Thredbo deal would trip that threshold depends on how regulators define the relevant market, but it's a genuinely live question given how much of the country's major lift-served terrain Vail already controls.
Alterra Mountain Company, which sells the Ikon Pass and has a Mountain Collective partnership history with Thredbo, is the other name that comes up naturally - Vail's acquisitions of Perisher, Hotham and Falls Creek followed a similar pattern of pass-network expansion, and Thredbo would be a logical Ikon addition on paper. Whether Alterra has the appetite for it right now is a separate question - the company has reportedly been managing its own cost pressures, including staff reductions at its Denver headquarters.
New Zealand operators NZSki and Ngāi Tahu Tourism's Real NZ are worth watching too, given how much of Thredbo's customer base likely overlaps with the high-spending Australian skiers both companies already chase across the Tasman - though running resorts in the same hemisphere and season as Thredbo raises a real question about whether an acquisition would grow their business or simply compete with the season they're already selling.
Nothing decided, EVT says
For now, none of this amounts to a confirmed sale. EVT has been careful to frame the announcement as the opening of a broad structural review rather than a decision to divest Thredbo specifically, and Hastings said no decisions have been made on any particular asset. What's changed is that the question is now officially open, in a way it hasn't been through years of prior sale speculation tied to Thredbo's Ikon Pass ties and the broader consolidation happening around it.
Whether that ends in a sale, a restructure, or simply a review that confirms the status quo is still entirely unresolved - but for the first time in a long while, Thredbo's ownership is a real question rather than a rumour.
