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As you may have seen, Vail Resorts made an announcement about the way they’re handling Buddy Tickets and Ski With a Friend Tickets this upcoming season. Let’s back up and give this change some context before we dig in.

If you were to buy an Epic Pass four years ago, you would have seen a table like this on the sales page.

Buddy tickets are a simple, powerful idea but Vail (and many other resorts to be fair) let them become a little more complicated than they probably intended. This complicatedness (totally a word) came in the form of increasingly complex rules for how they work, how much the discount actually is, and how many a passholder receives.

In the case of Vail Resorts, there are two types and each type has a different combination of those variables.

For example, take this chart from the 2022/23 season. It’s designed to help passholders understand the value of their buddy tickets on different days at different mountains.

And, honestly, this table does a really solid job of wrangling all of that information into a succinct overview. But humans struggle with complexity and stuff like this is only managing the complexity, not addressing it. It means that for someone to answer their buddy’s question of “how much would a ticket be, exactly?” they have to look up a chart like this one to give them an answer.

Here’s the trick with all of these tickets, though: Vail Resorts’ north star is not ticket sales, it’s season pass sales.

So while, yes, there’s a pathway to turn a ticket purchaser into a pass purchaser, that relationship was more implied than it was direct. This year, Vail Resorts made two meaningful changes to address both of these issues.

1. Clean, Simple Discount

First, they made the discount a clean 50% off. I also like that they are trying to hit refresh on the idea in folks’ brains by giving it a different name than previously used. Buddy Tickets are now called Epic Friend Tickets.

Even though they kept Ski With a Friend tickets for the upcoming season which I think preserves some for the complexity they’re hoping to avoid (perhaps this move was made too late to fully switch for the upcoming season), I think this move alone is fantastic. It’s a clean number, it’s a clean name, and it’s a great, fresh start for this perk.

2. Connecting to Pass Sales

But the really smart move is the way they’ve tied this new perk back to pass sales. This line on their website explains it well:

After your bestie uses their Epic Friend Ticket this winter, they can apply 100% of the cost of one redeemed Epic Friend Ticket toward a Pass for the 2026/27 season.

I love this change. Instead of relying on that loose connection between the two that puts the onus on your marketing team to turn a day ticket buyer into a season pass buyer, this idea is baked right into the perk that’s being handed to a skier. They get one layer of the value the day they ski, but that value sits in a little savings account ready to be unlocked once pass sales season arrives.

That’s a nice little account to be able to leverage if you’re on the Vail Resorts marketing team.

3. One More Layer?

Both of these changes are fantastic, but I want to suggest one additional layer that could be considered by any resort with a similar setup. If I’m a marketer at Vail Resorts, I want my passholder to give a boat load of these tickets out to their friend this year.

Now think about this scenario. We’ve added a ton more value for the friend who receives the perk, but in the end we really haven’t given much more to the crux of this whole plan…

…the passholders we’re relying on to give out these perks.

If I were a resort with buddy tickets (or some variation), I’d spend a good chunk of time thinking about ways to better incentivize my passholders to share these tickets with their friends. It probably wouldn’t take much – even a dining credit for every passholder who gives out all of their friend tickets would likely be enough to move the needle – but I think it’s an overlooked piece of the buddy ticket formula that’s worth some thought.

Even without that piece, though, I love what Vail Resorts has done with these tickets.

It simplifies the offer, it makes it easier for passholders to explain the value to their friends (and for friends to know when they’d be getting if they ask for one), and it neatly aligns this perk to their bigger, more important goal of selling season passes. That’s a really solid combination from the team in Broomfield.

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.