Snow Partners Launches 3-Day Pass for Mountain Creek, Big Snow, More Ski Areas TBD
Pass will cost $199.99 for three anytime days at Big Snow and Mountain Creek, non-holiday days at select partners
The miracle of the Big Red Shed
The New York metro area is famous for bad ideas built at unnecessary scale for impossible cost. A $4 billion subway station? We have one. An $11 billion tunnel? Sweet. A $1.6 billion football stadium to replace a 34-year-old football stadium that the State of New Jersey still owed $110 million on? Yeah we needed that. So when a red, orange, and yellow building resembling the jetway for an interstellar spaceship materialized off the Jersey Turnpike in the mid-2000s, our collective response was “well there’s another dumb expensive thing we don’t need: an indoor ski area in a region that has 200 outdoor ski areas.” But at least, in this Land of Misfit Infrastructure, it fit in.*
But damn it, did they show us, when, a mere 15 years after construction began, Big Snow American Dream opened to the public.
At first I thought it was kinda dumb. Then I decided it was potentially the most important ski area in America. What could be a greater generator of new participants for a pastime in desperate need of them than an always-open snosportskiing center in the dead-ass center of a diverse, active, and cash-rich region of 20 million people?
Two years later, Joe Hession, CEO of Snow Partners, the outfit that rescued the New Jersey Snowdome from probable teardown and transformed it into a functioning entity (and had nothing to do with building it), came on The Storm Skiing Podcast and told us that, yes, this was one hell of a good business.
How good? Hession joined me on the pod again last week with some updated numbers: Big Snow clocks 280,000 skier visits per year. “On like, four acres,” he said, sounding amazed himself. But the more impressive number Hession gave me was this: Big Snow creates 100,000 new skiers per year.
“We’ve been open for five years,” he said. “That’s 500,000 skiers.”
That’s great. But that success generates a new problem: now what?
“You start to think about where are [these new skiers] going to go and what’s their next step?” Hession said on the podcast, which I will release in the coming days.
Indeed, where do new skiers go from Big Snow? There is no obvious path. The multi-mountain pass universe is big, confusing, intimidating, and feels like overkill for a novice. Walking up to a ticket window – or even booking ahead online – can make a day of skiing seem as repeatable as a rocket launch. “OK I did this fun thing once, but I didn’t realize it was an activity reserved for the heirs of railroad fortunes. I guess I’ll try bowling.”
Introducing the Snow Triple Play
Snow Partners will attempt to solve this next-step conundrum with the $199.99 three-day, multi-resort Snow Triple Play product. For the 2025-26 ski season, the pass, according to internal documents reviewed by The Storm, will give skiers access to an estimated six to eight “premium” Northeast ski areas. The maximum per-resort, per-skier redemption will be two days, “encouraging trial and travel,” according to the documents. Snow Partners will announce its inaugural roster at a later date, but Big Snow and nearby Mountain Creek – which the company also owns – will both participate with no blackouts. Partner resorts may black out holidays, and will be paid 60 percent of their weekend/holiday window rate for each lift ticket redemption. The pass, which Snow Partners will administer through their Snow Cloud resort management software, is scheduled to be on sale from Labor Day through Dec. 24.
While the majority of public, chairlift-served U.S. ski areas (217 out of 372) have joined the Epic, Ikon, Indy, or Mountain Collective passes, Hession says that he sees room in the market for an additional frequency product. He views the Snow Triple Play - which he refrains from characterizing as a “pass” - less as a competitor and more as an additional sales channel available to any ski area, regardless of their current pass affiliation. That includes, Hession told me, Vail and Alterra.
“I think most people in the ski industry making these decisions are looking at it the wrong way,” Hession said. “I think they're not being open-minded ... Maybe a product like ours introduces them to completely new people. And if they look at it as consumer acquisition or the ability for us to be almost an OTA [online travel agency], they might … say, ‘Wall Street will love this.’”
Snow Partners modeled the product after their Mountain Creek Triple Play, which granted three anytime days at the big and busy New Jersey mountain for an early-bird price of just $89 last winter. The resort sells 55,000 of these passes, which Hession calls “an amazing ladder product,” annually.
The Snow Triple Play arrives in a lift-served American ski market now flush with multi-mountain frequency products, many of which overlap with one another. Indy and Mountain Collective offer skiers two days each at 192 and 29 ski resorts, respectively. The Epic Day Pass, Ikon Session Pass, and Boyne Explorer Pass allow skiers to pre-purchase one to seven non-specified dates redeemable at up to several dozen partner mountains.
Here's a deeper look at how Snow Partners’ newest product - which unites their two ski areas for the first time - fits into the current frequency pass market. Plus a little speculation on potential partners and how this product could evolve long term.