An Epic Pass Friend Ticket That Won’t Make Your Friends Hate You
Unlimited Epic Pass holders can deploy 6 or 10 Epic Friend tickets for half off the window rate any day of the 2025-26 ski season; friend can apply cost to a 2026-27 Epic Pass
Couches are the worst. Expensive, awkward, heavy. Always either too big or too small, too stiff or too soft, too formal or too thrown-out-the-window-during-a-housefire trashed. A couch is at once necessary and almost impossible to buy – the last three couch salesman I engaged with presented the intelligence of a broomstick dressed in a collared shirt and khakis. I retreated to the internet, a head-on collision with the fact that couch designers’ aspirational lounging dimensions often far exceed those of doorway, stairwell, and elevator designers – I had to saw the new couch in half to move it up to the apartment. A couch is the biggest thing in most homes but also the most fragile: a housecat can reduce a $5,000 couch to kite string in under 90 seconds. Couches stain and tear like printer paper but cannot be repaired for less than the cost of the couch itself. “Crashing on the couch” is one of our most heroic cultural memes, but also part fiction – ask anyone 6’2” (me) how much those two inches matter when attempting to “crash” on the standard six-foot-long couch. People do unspeakable things on couches. But also lots of speakable ones and the under-cushion and under-couch catacombs time-capsule lost food and change and pocketstuff. Yet we almost never clean these sedentary lifestyle chariots. And after 15 years and seven apartments and three cats who used it as an occasional litterbox, you list the couch for $300 on Facebook Marketplace. Five people say they’ll take it but only one shows up and he's driving a motorcycle and can’t believe the couch won’t fit on his luggage rack and offers you $10 if you’ll let him come by later with his buddy’s Corolla. This is why you never want to own a couch but also why you never want to own a pickup truck.
Buddy tickets are the couches of skiing. They sound nice, but they end up being inconvenient and awkward and expensive. “So what you’re saying is that even though I have a season pass to Copper and A-Basin and Winter Park, you want me to come ski Vail with you because you can get me a ‘discount’ with your Epic Pass, which you paid four dollars for last spring, and my ‘discounted’ lift ticket will be $199?” Ikon Ian says to his pal Epic Eddie. “Bro this sounds like the time you asked me to help you walk that couch 10 blocks and up to your fifth-floor walkup.”
“Well, if you want to be a cheapskate, we can save you a little by going to Breck and I can hook you up for just $182!” Epic Eddie exclaims.
Here’s a sampling of the discounts Epic Eddie could offer his buddies and friends with last year’s Epic Pass:
This chart inspires more questions than Stonehenge: who is paying this peak rate? What is the difference between a “buddy ticket” and a “ski with a friend” ticket? Why is skiing more complicated than the federal tax code? What happens when, at his bachelor party, Epic Eddie’s Bros add up how much they’ve collectively spent to buy buddy tickets and paint him green in his sleep as a revenge prank, but he dies of asphyxiation and it turns out that Epic Eddie’s family invented doorknobs and has a net worth of $48 trillion and their lawyers sue Ikon Ian and his Bros into the 29th century and everyone has to sell their kidneys to change their identity and flee to Mexico City? Whose idea was it to make lift tickets cost more than the Human Genome Project? And why aren’t they bunking with Ikon Ian at Alcatraz?
Well this is no kind of world to live in. So Vail Resorts, after igniting and leading the race to the Peak Dumb Lift Ticket finish line, is taking its first tangible step in years toward rationalizing the cost of skiing for people who don’t plan their ski days further in advance than NASA’s Mars Rover. For the 2025-26 ski season, Vail is giving unlimited Epic Pass holders 10 (if they bought before April 14), or 6 “Epic Friends Tickets” redeemable for 50 percent off that day’s window rate at any of Vail’s 37 North American ski areas any day of the season. The friend, who must ski with the passholder, can then apply the full cost that they paid for that ticket toward the purchase of a 2026-27 Epic Pass. Friends tickets will replace Buddy Tickets, but early-bird passholders will retain six (if they bought before April 14) or two (before May 27) Ski With a Friend Tickets for the 2025-26 ski season.
This is an example Vail Resorts at its best. When it fixes a broken thing through unexpected means that are easy to understand. Never mind that, in the case of lift tickets, they’re the ones who broke it in the first place. The Epic Pass solved the problem of the season pass as a highbrow, single-mountain, hyper-local product. The multi-tiered Epic Day Pass solved the problem of even a cheap unlimited pass delivering more access than Brooklyn Bob needed for his five-day annual ski trip. Vail’s nationwide resort network solved the problem of local and destination skiing existing as disconnected universes. Epic Friend tickets don’t solve the problem of soul-crushing walk-up lift ticket rates, but they do offer something that has grown more elusive in the past decade: an in-season hack for casual or lapsed skiers who examine day-of prices and decide to take up hating the world as their primary hobby instead of skiing.
A renegotiation of the consumer relationship to the in-season, last-minute lift ticket is also a strong signal that Vail Resorts is, under newly re-appointed CEO Rob Katz, returning to the product innovation mindset that defined his first tenure, from 2006 to 2021. This shift is especially welcome after three-and-a-half underwhelming years under his successor and predecessor, Kirsten Lynch, in which the Epic Pass lost crucial resort partners and failed to replace them and, perhaps coincidentally, suffered the product’s first unit-sales decline in its 18-year history.
Epic Friends is also a partial solution to walk-up lift ticket rates that took a wrong turn on their way to the year 2075. It’s not some huge idea like launching the Epic Pass itself or connecting the two sides of Park City or buying Whistler. Vail will still leave many skiers stranded at the ticket window, wondering why they didn’t plan a less extravagant vacation, like orbiting the planet or raising the Titanic. Vail still has work to do.
Here’s a deeper look at the new Epic Friends discount lift ticket program and what it signals about Katz’s second run as Vail Resorts CEO: