The list of season pass types added to the resort menu each year is ever changing. One that keeps popping up yet leaves me scratching my head is the idea of a student midweek option. Some are no longer offered (like at Whitetail) but plenty are still on the table:

Alpine Meadows – TripleThreat

Alyeska – College Midweek

Blue Mountain – Student Midweek

7 Springs – Midweek College

Every time another turns up I wonder if people are thinking the same thing I am: doesn’t student-midweek seem a touch ironic? If you have to be a full time student to buy a pass, wouldn’t the time required to be a half-decent student render the pass virtually unusable? At long last I found some social support on a recent Facebook post for Alpine Meadow’s Tripl3Threat pass. A few of the responses included:

Its a college pass that isn’t valid on weekends… maybe if I was a music major and didn’t have school to do that would work.

‎$199 for a midweek pass for students, hooray. And how are students supposed to use that?

It’s a valid argument. For every one student that buys this pass, I’d bet you could find two parents who would pay double to prohibit their children from setting foot on your mountain during their scheduled class time. From personal experience, I know that a good snow season can cause a student to fail a class (or three, in my case). You save a few hundred bucks on your pass, but end up paying out your rear for each class you have to retake. Even then, these passes appear to be incredibly popular (for both resorts and students) for a few reasons:

• Affordable for a student budget
• Delays graduation due to retaking classes they skipped too much so they can keep buying passes and skiing your mountain
• Hardly used so it keeps slopes uncrowded

Clever idea. Not one I’d necessarily want my posterity to take advantage of, but interesting nonetheless.

Another option? Reward those who graduate with a Graduate Pass like Mount Sunapee does. Putting off entering the job market for a season of skiing? Now there’s something I can get behind.

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.