Skiing Hits Peak Day Pass – Which Are The Best?
114 ski areas have joined the day-pass versions of Epic, Ikon, and Snow Triple Play
Sometimes a solution causes more problems. Take for example the horse. Among the wonders that the Euros unloaded from their big-masted wooden ships on the New World shores were these amazing four-legged vehicles that can run for hours and barely sleep and require only grass and water to survive. And the natives were like dang it why didn’t we think of that? So everyone went to Ferdinand’s Horse Shoppe and exchanged a bundle of beaver furs for a brand-new horse. And this opened up travel and trade and more violent means of plunder and warfare. All good so far. But then the horses started pooping all over the place and that slick old Ferdinand had never mentioned that just like he had never mentioned the malaria. The shoppe had a strict no-return policy but the disgruntled horse buyers tried anyway only to find that Ferdinand had fled the city which was now mysteriously empty. So the horses stayed and just pooped all over the place for the next 400 years until someone invented the car which has its own problems but at least makes its toxic emissions invisible and airborne instead of leaving them in a pile on the street.
Lift tickets are the horse poop of American skiing. It wasn’t always this way. But 10 to 15 years ago Vail said hey I bet if we make lift tickets cost more than a season pass then skiers will just buy the season pass. And that worked so everyone else was like yeah we’re gonna do that too. Well not everyone but at least everyone whose business model depended upon hundreds of thousands of people purchasing an expensive nonrefundable product that they may or may not use six to 15 months later. As a result, the average lift ticket price of the 37 American ski areas measured on the S&P 50 increased 391 percent from the 2000-01 winter, from an average of $53 then to $258 for the 2025-26 season.
“Wait what is the S&P 50?”
Oh you haven’t heard of the S&P 50? Sorry. It stands for “Storm & Horse Poop 50,” and it’s an annual average of peak walk-up lift ticket rates at 50 American ski areas:
“Dude you can’t use ‘S&P.’ That name is taken by an actual weighted stock exchange. And besides you only have 37 ski areas measured here.”
Man you are ruining all my fun. Are you the same guy who’s about to write me an email saying he reads this newsletter at lunch so please don’t talk about horse poop?
Anyway as the S&HP 37 index has ascended to catastrophically high levels for the casual skier, operators have conceded that not everyone will eventually buy a season pass even if you give them away with a tank of gas at Maveriks. Plus the media is obsessed with window rates and this makes ski people very mad like WHY DO YOU KEEP WRITING HEADLINES ABOUT $356 LIFT TICKETS and us media folks are like well because it’s a $356 lift ticket and I don’t know that seems excessive in relation to anything not sold in a Fabergé egg store.
In an attempt to get us to stop talking about lift ticket window rates, the ski industry did what it’s best at: conjured a solution to a problem of its own making and marketed it as a bargain. And its best answer so far to the Stop-Talking-About-My-Horse-Poop problem is the limited-days ticket pack, in which a skier purchases a set number of nonrefundable lift tickets with no specific date attached, priced at a big preseason discount.
It’s a cool product, and comes in many forms, mostly branded as discounted versions of larger passes such as Epic and Ikon. Why they couldn’t just, you know, make these the window-rate prices I have no idea. But the concept is rapidly spreading: many ski areas offer their own versions of ticket packs, and the new Snow Triple Play bundles a menu of 15 ski areas onto a three-total-days pass.
But, again, solutions nearly always create new problems. Cars replaced horses and got the poo off the streets, but also vastly expanded the developed human footprint, dehumanized transportation, and pumped out enough CO2 to possibly end life on the planet. So I don’t know maybe not a great trade-off. Fortunately, in the case of ski day ticket packs, the tradeoff is merely annoying, rather than catastrophic, and the tradeoff is this: a better value than window-rate lift tickets, but a far more confusing menu.
Right now, choosing a ski day pass is like cracking open one of those 18-page NYC diner menus. And you’re like hmmm I’ve never seen a restaurant that will serve an entire dressed turkey and a sushi & sashimi dinner platter and falafel cheeseburgers and spaghetti with a choice of eight sauces and a Mexican Pizza from Taco Bell and wait can they even do that? Because 114 ski areas – 82 of them in the United States – are now members of one of the major day-pass products, which I’ll classify here as any version of Epic or Ikon day passes, as well as Snow Triple Play and Boyne’s Explorer pass:
And you’re like well that’s not helpful. And I’m like I see your point but we have to start somewhere. Because where we’re trying to get to is how can I SnoSportSki for the least amount of money? And some of these day-pass products are amazing deals and some of them are literal horse poop. Which ones? Let’s take a topline survey of the rapidly evolving day-pass landscape. Today I’m focused on adult passes, but I’m working on a little thing around kids state passports and other fringe passes.*