Ikon Hits Back at Epic With 50% Off Buddy Tickets; Includes Deer Valley, Steamboat
Promotion limited to select resorts; 11 more mountains offer 40% off, including Big Sky, Sun Valley; skiers must book by Oct. 30
Well the ski-day cost calculus isn’t getting any less confusing.
A couple of months after Vail dropped an exclamation point on the return of disruptive CEO Rob Katz with 50 percent off lift tickets for friends of Epic Pass holders every day of the season, Alterra hits back with a similar offer for Ikon Pass holders.
Alterra’s promotion is in some ways more generous than Vail’s:
More tickets: Full Ikon Pass holders have 12 Friends and Family “Blitz” tickets to deploy, and Ikon Base Pass holders have eight, regardless of when they purchased their pass. Unlimited Epic Pass holders (Epic, Epic Local, Northeast Value, Tahoe Local, Summit Value, etc.), who purchased their pass prior to April 14 have 10 “Epic Friends” tickets to share. Epic Passes purchased after April 14 have six discounted tickets to share.
Passholder attendance not required: This one is big. Epic Pass holders must scan their pass first on the day their Epic Friend redeems their ticket, but Ikon Pass holders do not have to be present for their friends to use their discount.
Select non-Alterra mountains included: The Epic discount is limited to Vail-owned ski areas. Ikon’s half-off offer includes most of Alterra’s ski areas, plus some big-time partners, including the three Banff resorts, Panorama, Copper, Bachelor, Snowbird, and Killington.
In other ways, Vail’s product is cleaner and more generous:
Half off for all: Epic’s discount is uniform and easy to understand: 50 percent off at Vail Resorts’ 37 North American ski areas. Ikon’s offering is more splintered, with discounts at 41 total ski areas, but varying rates: 30 mountains offer 50 percent off, and 11 more offer 40 percent off (charts below). An additional 21 Ikon Pass ski areas will continue to offer their standard 25 percent discount, which is always available at all but 17 Ikon Pass partners (again, keep going for charts).
Use it on yourself: Epic Pass holders who are blacked out on select days can apply one of their 50 percent off tickets to themselves. So if an Epic Local passholder, who is holiday blacked-out from Park City, finds themselves in Utah on Dec. 27, they could redeem one of their Epic Friend tickets for 50 percent off the window rate and use it themselves. Ikon Friends and Family discounts only move from the passholder to a friend.
No blackouts: Epic Friend discounts have no blackouts and no restrictions, regardless of which Epic Pass a skier holds. So someone with a Northeast Value Epic Pass, which has no access to Beaver Creek, could dispense a 50 percent off voucher to a friend to use at Beaver Creek. The passholder would, of course, have to be present, and use an additional Epic Friend voucher for themselves. Ikon passholders have no such flexibility – discounts are limited to resorts and dates when their Ikon Pass is valid. So an Ikon Base Pass holder could not, for example, offer a discount voucher to Deer Valley, or to Mammoth on a holiday blackout.
Turn in your ticket: Maybe the lynchpin of Vail’s whole program is that friends who redeem a 50 percent off lift ticket can then flip the full cost of that into a down payment for a 2026-27 Epic Pass. The Ikon discounts offer no such benefit.
Limited dates: The Ikon discount “must be shared, claimed, and purchased” betweeen Oct. 9 and 30, according to Ikon’s FAQ. While this is entirely sensible, as it allows resorts to calibrate holiday operations and ticket availability to the number of pre-sold discount Blitz tickets, Vail’s half-off discounts can be claimed any day through the end of the 2025-26 ski season.
Confused yet? Here’s a chart to help differentiate between the Epic and Ikon discounts:
And here’s a full breakdown of which Ikon ski areas are eligible for which discount tiers from Oct. 9 to 30:
The list includes some notable surprises:
Alterra includes all of their owned resorts (except, oddly, Snow Valley), including their precious Deer Valley, where peak-day lift tickets are set to hit $329 this winter, and forever-pricey Steamboat, where day-of lift tickets max out at $309.
Many of Alterra’s partners elected to join the half-off tier, including Powdr’s Copper and Snowbird, Boyne’s Brighton, and now-independent Killington and Pico. Each of those, it’s worth noting, competes directly with at least one nearby Vail-owned ski area.
The 40-percent-off list includes Sun Valley and Snowbasin, which have steadfastly declined to join Ikon Base or Ikon Session.
And here is a look at all Epic and Ikon ski areas where passholders can grant their friends discounts:
However we break this down, a few things are clear:
Epic aggression is back: after several years in what looked to be Epic Pass Surrender Mode, it only took Rob Katz a couple of months as Vail’s once-again CEO to reposition the Epic Pass as the catch-me-if-you-can apex predator on the ski pass food chain. Alterra, which had been outmaneuvering Vail on partner roster and pass access, has been once again forced into chase mode.
Alterra is gathering influence: Convincing some of its big-time partners to jump onto this discount blitz could portend more unity across the Ikon pass suite. Specifically: Alterra could flip this temporary discount into a better version of the beleaguered Ikon Session pass.
LOL Europe: or maybe I should say LOL North America. It’s telling that none of the Epic or Ikon discounts apply to any of the European resorts on either pass, including Vail’s owned properties in Switzerland. Why? Because lift tickets on the continent are still priced for consumption by average humans.
There’s a lot more to consider here, including:
What will the sudden mass availability of half-off lift tickets at formerly unreachable-without-a-ski-pass mega-destinations mean for the independent, rationally priced ski areas that had been gathering momentum from the popular backlash to $200-plus lift tickets? Will they lose skiers?
What will mass discounts mean for the mega-destinations themselves, which for years had been positioning high walk-up lift ticket rates as a lever to manage peak-day volume?
What does this OK-you-win-lift-tickets-are-too-expensive concession by Vail and Alterra mean for long-term window-ticket pricing? Vail CEO Rob Katz spent a good chunk of last week’s quarterly earnings call admitting that the company blew it by just going stupidly up up up forever on pricing. Is a new age of pricing nuance upon us? And does that mean that 2025-26 will represent peak walk-up lift ticket rates?
How is everyone else responding? Buddy tickets are suddenly everywhere – Mountain Collective quietly added eight 25-percent-off buddy tickets (with holiday blackouts), to its 2025-26 passes. Many independent ski areas, including Magic Mountain, Vermont (two free tickets); Great Divide, Montana (two free tickets); Bluewood, Washington (two free tickets); Mission Ridge, Washington (two free tickets); and Mount Hood Meadows, Oregon (one free ticket) all offered completely free buddy tickets for early-bird full season pass purchasers. Several more, including Plattekill, New York (four 50 percent off buddy passes), and Taos (six 40 percent off tickets), have rolled out programs of their own.
Will these discounts sell more Epic or Ikon passes? It’s unclear so far whether passholders are incentivized to buy a ski pass so that their friends can save money. Personally I doubt such benevolent motives will inspire pass purchases this season. Vail, however, seems to be better positioning itself to sell more 2026-27 passes, simply by allowing skiers to flip the one-day ticket cost into a down payment on next year’s pass.
This is a rapidly evolving world, and one worthy of a lot more future analysis. Stand by.
Epic Pass prices, by the way, supposedly increase on Thursday, Oct. 9; Ikon prices are set to increase the following day.
"The Ikon discount “must be shared, claimed, and purchased” between Oct. 9 and 30" is a huge constraint. This restriction alone makes the buddy pass far less attractive than Epic's version. If you know in October where you will be skiing in winter/spring you are probably buying a pass that includes those areas. The whole point of the buddy discount is to get spur of the moment people to try a day or two at an area which they would otherwise dismiss out of hand if they had to pay window price.
I think a clarification is needed. The "Ikon discount 'must be shared, claimed..." paragraph in the Ikon FAQ applies only to the "Blitz" discount offer (note the title of the paragraph). This paragraph implies that the name "Blitz" applies only to the 50% off (or 40% off at some ski areas) discount, and is not the "regular" 25% off. That FAQ paragraph concludes with, "Regular 25% Friends & Family discount will apply for purchases made after October 30, 2025." That felt much more user friendly, although at a lower discount point. I agree completely with Tony Crocker's comment. I couldn't possibly plan my skiing friends in October, so will not benefit from the "Blitz" discount.