SAM Magazine—Montville, N.J., May 1, 2026—Snow Partners is launching a new multi-mountain frequency product, Snow Pass. The pass will provide two days of access to each partner ski area and operate as a cooperative. The company is also expanding its three-day multi-mountain product Snow Triple Play to the Midwest after a successful inaugural season in the Northeast.

Snow Pass enters a growing segment of multi-resort frequency products, including Mountain Collective and Indy Pass. It’s expected to launch after Labor Day at a sub-$400 price point and will be on sale through December. Snow Partners will announce the price and a full list of partners this summer.

The planned cooperative structure will return 80 percent of total revenue in its first year to Snow Pass partner ski areas based on ticket price and visit redemptions. 

“We’re really focused on collaboration, and we’re also extremely focused on independence,” Snow Partners CEO Joe Hession told SAM.

The company’s push into a cooperative model for the new product was driven largely by what it learned from Snow Triple Play, said Hession, specifically that Snow Triple Play breakage (i.e., unused visits) was higher than expected. “We had a moment where we're like, ‘we should rethink how we do this,’” he said.

Based on first season data, Snow Triple Play consumers used an average of roughly 1.6 visits. “The byproduct,” Hession said, “is a lot of breakage doesn’t flow to the resorts. And that’s kind of an issue.” 

Snow Pass is designed to address that by redistributing all revenue to participating ski areas, less an approximately 15 percent marketing budget and a 5 percent administrative fee in year one. In subsequent seasons, Snow Partners anticipates returning 85 percent of revenue to pass partners. 

“In the Snow Pass model, there’s no breakage—whatever goes into the pool gets distributed to the resorts,” said Hession.  

In year one, payouts will be distributed in three installments (25 percent pre-paid on Jan. 1 based on estimated usage, 25 percent on March 1, and a final reconciliation on May 1); in subsequent years, ski areas are expected to receive up to 50 percent of projected revenue prior to the start of the season, with the balance trued up based on actual usage in subsequent installments. 

“We want to get the resorts their revenue when they need it,” said Hession.

“Absolute full transparency—open books, every dollar, every cent” will be a cornerstone of the program, he continued. And the cooperative-style model will be codified into the partner operating agreements to ensure participating ski areas collectively control the product and its administration.

Snow Partners’ SnowCloud software platform will be used to administer the pass, which Hession framed as a potential downstream opportunity for the company. “Every resort that isn’t on SnowCloud will get to interact with it … and hopefully one day say, ‘we’d love to use this everywhere,’” he said.

Snow Pass holders will go direct to lift at SnowCloud-enabled ski areas, and a web-based SnowCloud portal will be used to validate visits and issue tickets at ski areas using other operating systems. This functionality is already in use for Snow Triple Play. That product has a different payment structure than Snow Pass will, and the system also enables real-time revenue allocation for Triple Play partners that are also SnowCloud users. 

To streamline the guest experience, Snow Partners has plans to develop a guest-facing app and multi-day redemption features for Snow Pass, although the overall direction of the product will be shaped by its partners, said Hession, some of whom will hold seats on a planned board of directors.

Hession said the goal for the inaugural partner list is not volume, but the pass will need a compelling roster of resorts with some regional density to compete in the multi-mountain product landscape—a fact of which Hession is mindful. (In the world of frequency products, Indy Pass, while currently sold out for 2026-27, has more than 270 global alpine and cross-country ski area partners; Mountain Collective has a more modest but top-tier lineup of 27 destinations across five continents.)

He expects there will be some partner crossover between Snow Pass and Snow Triple Play, which included access to 16 ski areas this winter, mostly along the Northeast’s I-87 corridor. He also anticipates participation from some Ikon Pass Bonus Mountains and members of Mountain Collective, and said he has been in conversation with the administrators of both products. 

To that end, there will be no exclusivity clauses for Snow Pass partner resorts, said Hession. 

Snow Triple Play partners Pleasant Mountain, Maine, and Mount Southington, Conn., have already signed on as Snow Pass partners.

“I like the structure of the Snow Pass,” said Mount Southington general manager Jay Dougherty. “The whole co-op concept is good, and the revenue comes in at the correct time.”   

Dougherty also noted partnerships such as these help expose more people to Mount Southington. Everyone that redeemed Snow Triple Play visits there this winter bought their card through another ski area, so the concept worked as designed—as does the Freedom Pass coalition of ski areas that offer reciprocal benefits to each other’s season pass holders, of which Mount Southington is also a part.  

Boyne Resorts chief marketing officer Nick Lambert opted to include Pleasant Mountain, Maine, on the two Snow Partners products to broaden the ski area’s reach. “We look at all those multi mountain products as distribution channels reaching new customers, new markets, and they vary by resort for [Boyne Resorts], between Ikon, Mountain Collective, [the two Snow Partners products] and some other things,” Lambert said. 

On the consumer side, Snow Pass represents another rung in Snow Partners’ broader product ladder, designed to move skiers from entry-level experiences like first turns at the company’s indoor ski area Big Snow in New Jersey to more frequent participation. 

“The Triple Play is targeted at the 70 percent of skiers who ski fewer than five days,” said Hession, citing a stat from NSAA’s Kottke End of Season and Guest Experience report. “The Snow Pass is the next step for more committed skiers” looking to ski multiple days in a season but retain flexibility at an economical price point. 

That market positioning is part of what makes Snow Triple Play and the forthcoming Snow Pass appealing propositions for the New York Olympic Regional Development Authority’s (ORDA) three mountain portfolio, Belleayre, Gore, and Whiteface, said VP of marketing, communications and sponsorships Tait Wardlaw. 

“Strategically speaking, the ability of the group behind the Snow Pass and Snow Triple Play to target audience segments that are an ideal fit for us in terms of geography, skill, frequency, and a variety of other socioeconomic factors is important to our marketing plans,” he said. 

The flexibility of the Snow products and the partner program are also attractive, said Wardlaw. ORDA participates in other reciprocal programs and pass products; notably, Whiteface is part of Mountain Collective. 

All three ski areas will return to Snow Triple Play for 2026-27, and ORDA is in discussions to include some or all three on the new Snow Pass. “We see some great alignment for sure,” said Wardlaw, noting that ORDA saw strong Triple Play redemptions this winter. 

After “a really good first year,” said Hession, all 16 Snow Triple Play partners have signed on for year two. Plans include adding a few more targeted ski areas in the Northeast, and a new Midwest version is expected to access 10-15 ski areas in that region. Snow Triple Play retailed at $199 for 2025-26. Pricing for the Northeast and Midwest Triple Play products is not yet finalized.

Snow Triple Play offers three total days of skiing or riding to be used at any of its partner areas, with a maximum of two visits to any one area. Partners are compensated at 60 percent of their weekend window rate for each redemption. 

Hession said he never planned to get into the multi-mountain frequency product game. In launching Snow Triple Play, though, he said, Snow Partners heard from enough skiers and riders that wanted more days at the product’s partner lineup to suggest there was room in the market for a new frequency pass. At the same time, the company heard feedback from ski areas that were looking for a partnership arrangement that worked for their needs and market. 

Snow Pass came to be when “we started to realize there was a gap in what people were really looking for—and there was an opportunity,” said Hession. It was too important to (ahem) pass up.