$5.15
$23.80
bear $5.15
base $14.47
bull $23.80
margin of safety $6.00
market price* $55.02
Pursuit Attractions and Hospitality is the business that used to be Viad Corp. At the end of 2024 it sold its exhibitions and marketing businesses and now only owns and runs leisure destinations: glacier and mountain attractions and lodges in Banff and Jasper (including the Columbia Icefield, Banff Gondola and Jasper SkyTram), lodges in and around Glacier National Park in Montana and Denali in Alaska, the Sky Lagoon and FlyOver Iceland in Reykjavik, FlyOver theaters in Vancouver, Las Vegas and Chicago, and, since July 2025, the Tabacon thermal resort in Costa Rica, bought for $108.6 million. Most of these sites sit inside or next to national parks and would be very hard to copy. Pricing has been strong: in 2025, same-store attraction ticket prices rose 8.6% and lodging revenue per available room rose 7.1%. Revenue was $452 million in 2025. In the first half of 2026 revenue rose 20%, mostly because of Tabacon, and the seasonal first-half loss narrowed. How we measure earnings. We start from operating cash flow, take out working-capital swings and stock compensation, and subtract the capital spending needed to keep the properties as they are. Pursuit spends heavily: $75 million in 2025, with $121 to $127 million planned for 2026, of which management calls $88 to $93 million growth projects. We do not use management's split. We use a consistent rule based on how much the business spends per dollar of revenue, applied only to that year's revenue increase. On that rule, about $60 million of 2025's spending counts as upkeep, more than the $41 million of depreciation. That gives 2025 owner earnings of $23.6 million, or $0.83 per share, and $33 million before interest. This is deliberately cautious: if the upkeep figure is closer to management's roughly $34 million, earning power is nearly twice as high. Earlier years (2022 to 2024) were close to zero, but they still carried Viad's head-office costs, the slow recovery from COVID and, in July 2024, the Jasper wildfire evacuation. They describe the business less well than 2025, so we treat 2025, plus a full year of Tabacon, as the starting point and do not take a median across the weak years. About a third of after-tax profit belongs to minority partners in ventures such as Sky Lagoon and FlyOver Iceland ($13.6 million in 2025), so we take that share out of every case. Base case. Cash flow before interest of about $40 million in year one (the 2025 level plus a full year of Tabacon, still using our cautious upkeep figure), growing 3% a year from price increases the business has achieved every year since travel reopened. We give no credit for the 2026 growth projects or for future acquisitions. They are not yet earning anything, and buying properties is a new habit for this company rather than a long-standing record. Owner earnings grew from a loss to positive in 2025, so a 3% first year is well below the latest growth rate. The parks and the company's rights to operate in them are lasting assets, so earnings are assumed to continue past year ten. The business is worth about $843 million. The minority partners' share is about $278 million and net borrowings, including finance leases, are about $160 million, leaving $405 million, or $14.47 per share. Bear case. Earnings stay at about $33 million with no growth. Then, in year three, a travel shutdown like 2020 hits. That year Viad's attractions and lodges lost most of a season, so we model a $10 million cash loss followed by two recovery years. After that a lower $30 million is permanent, reflecting repeated wildfire and closure risk: Jasper in 2024, and the Denali park road closed by a landslide since 2021. The business is worth about $454 million. After about $150 million for the minority partners and $160 million of debt, $144 million is left, or $5.15 per share. The $300 million revolving credit line runs to September 2030 and can carry one lost season, but borrowings already swing from about $99 million in December to $192 million by June. That is why a bad season matters. Bull case. If the growth projects now being built in Banff, Jasper and Glacier earn normal returns, cash flow before interest reaches about $50 million and grows 5% a year from continued pricing power. The business is worth about $1.23 billion, leaving $666 million after the minority partners and debt, or $23.80 per share. Margin of safety price: $6.00. We are only moderately confident in the earnings level: there is only one clean year as a standalone company, and owner earnings change sharply depending on how much of the heavy spending is really upkeep. The worst plausible event is a lost season from a shutdown, a fire or a park-access closure at a time when the revolving credit line is near its seasonal peak and a $90 million building program is under way. The company would very likely survive that, because its assets are physical, hard to replace and lightly borrowed against, but owners would gain nothing for years. If we are wrong about the upkeep spending, Tabacon's earnings and the minority partners' share all at once, the shares are worth roughly the bear figure. The company pays no dividend, so all of the return has to come from growth in value. At $6.00, the price sits close to the bear-case value, and the base case implies about 20% a year over five years. That is why we picked this number. It is slightly higher than the previous margin of safety price because the Tabacon acquisition has now added a full half-year of earnings, and the first half of 2026 confirms that pricing is holding. The previous case values were built on a different basis and are not directly comparable.