It’s back to non-themed content this week and at the top of the order is some news I was excited to see: the Powder Alliance got an upgrade.

It started as a partnership between six resorts. A partnership which, for the most part, was nothing new. Buy at season pass and get three free days of skiing at other mountains. Monarch has been doing this for years and features over 25 partners.

The difference come with two, critical pieces.

Friend w/ Benefits
First, the benefits were 100% reciprocal between all the partners. Rather than buying a pass to one resort with 1 partner versus their partner resort with 20, as part of the alliance, every pass is a partner to every other as I’ve indicated with this highly artistic rendering of the network:

Sharing the benefits upon joining the Alliance is a brilliant move.

The Brand Called Powder Alliance
These partnerships have existed in various forms between many of these resorts for years. Now, by creating a unified brand, they’ve been able to give these perks the attention they deserve while coordinating a massive marketing push very similar to what we saw with the Mountain Collective.

Perhaps the best part of the Alliance is that it’s free. It costs nothing more to get the passes, it simply makes each pass more attractive with very little work on the part of each resort.

Then, the move that really made me smile was the announcement that the size of the group had doubled. With 12 resorts, the Powder Collective is nearing a point that I talked about a few months ago that I’ll call “Crusher Status” because it sounds cool.

To Crush or Not to Crush
In a post a while back, I said that all these small partnerships alone carried little power. But, if someone could…

…rally the troops and put all these small partnerships into a product or system that every resort can benefit from individually but can also be pushed collectively to the world…”

They’d have a pass that could rule them all: including the EpicPass.

I stand by that. I love the direction the Powder Alliance is going and would expect it to continue to grow. Each pass gets instantly more valuable with one partnership negotiation instead of 12 (or 18 or 30) individual discussions. The more mid-sized resorts get on board, the more crushing power it will hold.

Awesome stuff.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.