I’ve heard more than one person describe Snowshoe Mountain Resort as being in the middle of nowhere. While I’m guessing these folks have never spent time near four-corners out West, the fact that even the closest metro areas in West Virginia are 2-3 hours away is saying something.

So, when you’ve got a popular destination with lots of lodging and amenities but no easy way to get there, their recent pass offering begins to make more sense.

Loss Leaders or Ancillary Aggregators?
Vail Resorts sells the Epic Pass in more than 80 countries to a rumored 300,000+ skiers. Ten mountains for less than $700 is an insane deal that leads to stages of spending: if you can hook someone on a discounted pass they want to make the most of that expense. But to use it they’ll need to fly thousands of miles, book hotel rooms, and dine in your restaurants.

The words that may come to mind are “loss leader” from the retail world where a store actually loses money on each gallon of milk they sell with the hope that as you walk to the back of the store to get it, you’ll snag a few other items as well that will make your overall transaction profitable.

In this case, with so many fixed costs associated with skiing, I don’t know if a discounted season pass is necessarily defined this way. Instead, it’s the tradeoff where the discount offered on the pass isn’t made up just by the increase in pass sales, but the ancillary spend from those extra passholders as well.

Some Quick Math
So, here’s my simple math to help me wrap my brain around this concept. If I sell 1,000 passes and each pass costs $500, I’ll make $500,000. In a perfect world, a 10% discount to $450 would increase sales by 10% as well to 1,100 for $495,000 in revenue. Slightly less than the original.

But let’s say you know that the average passholder also spends $500 in food, lodging, parking, and lessons, all other things equal, at $500 a pass I’ll make $1,000,000, and at $450 a pass I’ll now make $1,045,000 – 4.5% more than the original.

Back to Snowshoe
That, in effect, is what Snowshoe seems to be counting on with the new $199 Ridiculous Pass. One of their property owners passed along this quote from a release sent by Snowshoe’s marketing director, Dave Dekema:

“By reducing the variety and costs of Snowshoe season passes, we believe we can make Snowshoe as accessible as possible to all enthusiastic skiers and snowboarders within a 6-hour drive radius around us. We are confident this plan will help us to re-grow winter visitation in the coming seasons, driving more guests who will rent vacation properties, shop in retail stores, rent, take lessons, and in general support additional growth and opportunity for the community as a whole.”

For an almost purely destination resort like Snowshoe, I love this strategy. I really do.

In many ways, it simplifies Dave’s job. By selling super discount passes up front, you’ve given guests who were thinking about coming this next winter a way to softly commit to doing so with very little risk.

Then, instead of working all winter to find people to come, their job is simply to take that list of “leads” and get them there as many times as they can, boosted by the natural inclination of the passholders to make the most of their purchase. Good 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.