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Whether it’s Mountain Collective or Indy or Freedom or Powder Alliance or Loam or a long list of others, there’s a key word within the sales materials of most pass partnerships that changes the story significantly.

…___ days at EACH of our ___ partners…

There are a few concepts that, historically, have floated around our industry.

• Unlimited season passes for folk who ski a ton
• Day tickets for folks who ski a little
• Multi-day products for folks who ski more than a little but less than a ton

To this point, most of these pass partnerships have taken that last concept – the multi-day product – and multiplied that value across all their resort partners. Instead of paying $200 for 3-days at one resort, you pay $300 or $400 for 50 days (or more) across dozens of resorts. As you can imagine, that makes for tricky math. Every skier using every day on their pass would break the model, so the concept is built on a calculated guess to ensure that, whatever use ends up looking like, it doesn’t end up being overuse and every participating resort comes out on top.

Honestly, that math has worked out pretty well so far.

But that’s just from the perspective of the resort because, behind the scenes, skiers are doing the same math for themselves individually. They’re lured by the idea of dozens of lift tickets for a few hundred dollars, but skiers are famous for overestimating how much they’ll ski. This is likely creating a large gap between each skier’s hopes (skiing dozens of days across lots of destinations) and their realities (skiing 3-4 days across 1-2 destinations).

With the Snow Triple Play, Snow Partners is addressing that gap by simply removing that word I mentioned at the top: each.

From their website:

The Snow Triple Play gives you 3 visits that can be used at any of our 15 participating ski areas.

In other words, it’s a heavily discounted 3-pack of tickets that isn’t limited to the boundaries of a single resort.

There’s a lot that I like about this change, but here are three things.

First, it gives Snow Partners pricing power. Most customers of these types of passes will only use a few days anyway, but instead of having to do all that tricky math about how much more they might use and then have to decide whether they want to pay for that uncertainty, the Snow Triple Play simply charges a fair price ($199) for those three days and nothing more. They don’t have to charge an extra $100-$200 for the uncertainty of dozens of lift tickets that may or may not get used.

Second, it keeps the exploration angle. One of the big goals of these passes has always been the desire to get skiers out to explore more resorts beyond their home mountain. This simple model gives skiers the same perk without the complexity or breakage from aspiring to visit five destinations and only visiting one.

Third, it aligns nicely with Snow Partners’ direction. In the same way that Indy has helped Entabeni’s growth, this pass aligns nicely with Snow Partners’ investment into SnowCloud. Pass partners, of course, don’t have to use SnowCloud, but, assuming ticket redemption and tracking is built with their tech, getting on the platform will likely make participation much easier and more seamless. This also ensures that the folks running the pass are getting enough extra value to justify the extra overhead of managing the project.

One last thought.

I think a unique challenge the Snow Triple Play will have is the fact that – like I mentioned at the top – most pass partnerships don’t work this way. In other words, they will likely have more than one person calling support this winter while standing outside the ticket office at Pleasant Mountain wondering why their pass is “empty” even though they’ve only used it at Big Snow and Mountain Creek.

Bridging that gap between the traditional 3-day, single-resort ticket pack and the market’s habit of expecting a 3-day, multi-resort pass to include the word “each” will take some time, but they’ve already done a great job in their copy of getting ahead of that.

I love this new concept, I love the direction, and I’m really excited to see where they take it from here.

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.