Ski Sunday River, Sugarloaf, Loon on 27 Passes & Counting
The New England Pass is a sprawling, wonderful mess
Decoding Boyne’s New England Pass
Boyne’s 2026-27 New England Pass suite dropped last week. As usual, it is the most expensive topline season pass in New England, with a $1,499 pricetag ($1,449) for unlimited adult access to Boyne’s four East Coast resorts: Sugarloaf, Sunday River, and Pleasant Mountain, Maine; along with Loon, New Hampshire.
Which could be a headline, but not a very good one. Because what I like about the New England Pass (NEP) is its very broad price spectrum. Boyne offsets the expensive top-end adult access with 22 additional pass variations and price tiers, along with a no-blackout day-pass product:
Boyne tends to include three days at each of its far-flung ski areas for top-tier season passholders. Here’s how that sorts out for Boyne’s 11 ski areas for each version of the NEP - along with (for reference) Ikon and Mountain Collective:
I especially like NEP’s choice of unlimited (Gold), no-holidays (Silver), and no holidays or peak weekends (Bronze) passes at various price points tiered by age. The afternoon pass adds an additional dimension to spread skiers not only around the calendar, but around the operating day.
This is not, of course, a perfect strategy. First, it’s very confusing, especially when you factor in all the additional passes skiers can use to access this same bucket of resorts (more on this below). Second, no one is accusing any of these mountains - other than Sugarloaf - of being uncrowded, basically ever. Loon, especially, is incredibly easy to access for an enormous population. But Boyne is doing everything it can here to incentivize off-peak visitation, which has a finite constituency.
This is the pass-pricing strategy that I wish Vail Resorts would follow for the Epic Pass. I appreciate that Epic Passes are affordable, but should the no-limits Epic Pass ($1,089) really be priced 30 percent below the top-shelf Ikon Pass ($1,399)? Imagine an Epic Pass tiered like New England, where unlimited access to Whistler, Vail Mountain, etc. were in the $1,500 range, an Epic Local was more in the Epic $1,000 range (where Ikon Base already is), and a national midweek Epic was $500 to $700, depending upon whether you limited the number of days at big fellas like Stowe and Park City.
Vail already acknowledges that it’s possible to offer value and protect the majority-skier experience. Its local Epic Pass suite is filled with examples, including:
A Northeast Midweek pass that is unlimited at most mountains but is limited to five Stowe days
A Tahoe Value Pass that cuts Saturdays and holidays at Northstar and Kirkwood, but only holidays at larger Heavenly
A Stevens Pass Select pass that blacks out peak weekends
These are the sorts of nuanced products that could help Vail reach its goal of putting more skiers on its mountains, while avoiding a repeat fallout like 2021’s 20-percent-off-everything-all-at-once sale that maxed out too many of its ski areas during peak times.