SAM Magazine—Vernon, N.J., May 9, 2025—Starting in 2025-26, Snow Partners will offer the Snow Triple Play Card (S3P), a new multi-property product designed for occasional skiers and riders that don’t participate enough to justify buying a season pass yet wish to avoid paying the price of ever-rising day tickets. 

According to data from the National Ski Areas Association (NSAA), of the roughly 11 million active skiers and riders in the United States, 73 percent only participate between one and five days—not enough to justify buying a season pass. The S3P will provide a total of three visits to a to-be-determined coalition of 6-10 ski areas in the East and Mid-Atlantic for $199. 

Snow Partners CEO Joe Hession said the idea addresses the complaint that lift tickets are getting too expensive. As ski areas have come to rely on selling lower-priced season passes to help ease the risk of weather dependency, “you basically need to have a high day ticket rate in order to justify the migration to a season pass,” he admitted. 

This prevailing strategy especially punishes new skiers and riders who, after being introduced to sliding on snow, are often left with the choice of investing in a season pass or paying a premium for a single day. “So, there's this gap in the market between the people who come once and the people that have seasons passes—there's no product for the people in between. I think we're missing the guests that we're creating; I don't think they have a place to go,” Hession told SAM.

The S3P Card is not completely new. It’s modeled after Snow Partners-owned Mountain Creek’s (N.J.) Triple Play Card, which provides three unrestricted winter visits to the resort. It cost $160 in 2024-25. Mountain Creek sells between 55,000 to 60,000 Triple Play Cards a year. The S3P will be restricted to non-holiday dates to manage peak-day visitation at partner resorts, and cardholders will only be able to use the card a maximum of two days at one resort to encourage trial of at least two partner ski areas.

Snow Partners chief marketing officer Hugh Reynolds says, “The S3P Card creates a critical rung in the product ladder of getting a skier and rider from one or two visits to three or more and potentially move them up the ladder to be a viable candidate for a resort season pass or other multi-pass product.”

Snow Partners operates North America’s only indoor ski slope, Big Snow American Dream in New Jersey. According to Hession, Big Snow introduces 100,000 people to skiing and snowboarding a year. The three-visit card has been a good offer for people who learned at Big Snow and want to move up to the next level and try Mountain Creek, said Hession. The S3P Card will expand the range of areas these beginners can sample.

The goal has been to convince Big Snow customers to buy a Mountain Creek season pass for the following season. “I also hope that they buy an Epic Pass, an Ikon Pass, or an Indy Pass, because I want skiers at Mountain Creek to travel, to go out West, to go up North. I want them to enjoy all different types of ski resorts, because the more active they are in the lifestyle of skiing and snowboarding, I know Mountain Creek is their backyard resort. It’s the place they go on Tuesday nights with their kids.”

Hession and Reynolds didn’t disclose targeted partners, other than saying that they’ll be in the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast and will be independently owned—the latter being another important aspect of the new product.

“We are in an absolute battle for independence right now,” said Hession. “Individual resorts that are owned by individuals or individual small companies that have smaller holdings, they should be independent. And what that means is, they should be able to work with whoever they want that's going to help their business do better and be stronger—they should have independence to be able to work with whatever is best for their business and their partners.”

These individual resorts hold all the cards, he said, “and their goal should be to get as many guests at the right time, at the right place, at the right price, as they can possibly get.”

The arrangement for partner resorts on the S3P Card includes no up-front fee. They will be compensated 60 percent of their weekend window ticket price per redemption. If partners promote and sell the S3P Card through their website, they also get 10 percent of those sales in addition to the per-visit redemptions. Snow Partners plans to commit more than $200,000 in direct marketing, focused on the New York, Philadelphia, Hartford, Albany, and Boston markets. The product will launch Labor Day weekend and be available to purchase through Christmas Eve.  

The product will be administered through Snow Partners’ SnowCloud resort management software. Each partner resort will get access to a resort-specific instance to validate visits and administer the program through an iPhone app. 

“Current pass products all really start to break even at five days or more,” said Hession. “This is a product that's designed for the more casual skier. It's that first step in the ladder that hopefully, eventually, gets them into other products.”