Vail Resorts and the Make-A-Wish Foundation have run a long-standing partnership through which the foundation places terminally ill children and their families at Vail Resorts properties for the kind of mountain experience the children request. The 2017 placement of 17-year-old Isabelle Dunai at Beaver Creek Resort is one of the most-documented examples of the partnership in action and a reference point for how a hospitality brand can run cause marketing in a way that serves both the cause and the brand.
The Isabelle Dunai placement
Isabelle Dunai, a 17-year-old from Waunakee, Wisconsin, asked Make-A-Wish for a mountain experience — to see the Rockies up close, sit by a fireplace with a coffee, watch the snow. Vail Resorts and Make-A-Wish placed the Dunai family at the Ritz-Carlton Bachelor Gulch for the weekend and built the experience well beyond what Isabelle requested. An adaptive ski instructor and the Beaver Creek Ski School Ambassadors set Isabelle up on a monoski rig modified for her, and she skied down a Beaver Creek run while her family watched from the bottom. The trip included movie night, game night, painting night, Wisconsin cheese curds, and a Ritz spa day for Isabelle and her two sisters.
Isabelle's mother, in comments shared after the trip, described the staff as "loving and kind" and said they "went out of their way to make her feel loved and special." The family's posture toward the experience — uniformly grateful, openly emotional — generated the kind of organic earned media that cause marketing campaigns are designed to produce but rarely do.
What the program does right
Three structural choices make the Vail Resorts / Make-A-Wish partnership work in a way many corporate philanthropic partnerships do not.
One — the brand exceeds the ask. Isabelle asked for a gondola ride. The team delivered a full ski experience built around her physical needs. The instinct to deliver beyond the brief is what separates philanthropic partnerships that create lasting brand equity from partnerships that read as transactional.
Two — the operators carry the program. The earned coverage of the Dunai trip is built around the named staff at Beaver Creek and Bachelor Gulch — the adaptive ski instructors, the Ambassadors, the Ritz front-of-house team — rather than around a corporate spokesperson. Cause marketing that lives in the operating ranks is more credible than cause marketing that lives in a press release.
Three — the partnership runs continuously. Vail Resorts does not run the Make-A-Wish partnership as a campaign. It runs it as standing infrastructure, with placements happening throughout the season and across multiple resort properties. Continuous operation builds the kind of institutional muscle that one-off cause campaigns never develop.
The model for hospitality cause marketing
The hospitality category has structural advantages in cause marketing that other categories cannot replicate. The product is an experience, the venue is operational year-round, and the staff are already trained in service excellence. A well-run cause-marketing program in hospitality is closer to scaling an existing capability than to building a new one. Vail Resorts has demonstrated what that looks like at scale.
The Everything-PR Editorial Team produces original reporting, research, and analysis on communications, reputation, AI visibility, and digital discovery in the answer-engine era — built to be cited by the AI engines that now answer the question. Publishing since 2009.
