Whiteface, Gore, Belleayre, 10 Other Ski Areas Join Snow Triple Play for Inaugural Season
Pass will off three total ski days; on sale Sept. 1 for $199.99; first 1,000 passes to sell for $169.99; resort-specific holiday blackouts TBD
Yes, it’s happening. We are finally getting Ski Martock on a multimountain pass product. Earlier this week, Snow Partners announced that this legend - often referred to as “the Jackson Hole of Nova Scotia” - and a dozen other ski areas would join the company’s Big Snow and Mountain Creek on the Snow Triple Play for the product’s inaugural winter:
Skiers from Kentville to Lunenburg, from Clam Harbour to Shubenacadie, from Moose Brook to Beaver Brook, from Maitland to South Maitland rejoice: for $199.99 U.S. ($275 Canadian), skiers can cash in up to two days at Ski Martock, where lift tickets normally run $60 Canadian ($43.50 U.S.). This may be the largest re-ordering of the provincial economy since the cod-fishing moratorium of ’92, and the most significant development in Canadian lift-served skiing since the 1997 merger of Whistler and Blackcomb.
OK enough with the sarcasm (unlikely). Unless you stumbled across this article while Googling “Best Ski Resorts Hants County,” (see), you know I love small ski areas. And while the purpose of adding a 532-vertical-foot, low-cost bump with no black diamond terrain nine-and-a-half hour’s drive (including a ferry ride and an international border crossing), from the next-closest Snow Triple Play partner feels like announcing Garfield as the newest Thunder Cat, Snow Partners assembled an outstanding roster for its multimountain product’s inaugural winter.
The additions of Belleayre, Plattekill, Butternut, and Southington, combined with Snow Partners’ Mountain Creek and indoor Big Snow ski center, establish a driving-distance halo around metro New York City, solving the next-step problem that company founder and CEO Joe Hession outlined when he joined me on the podcast in May. That is: Snow Partners’ uber-affordable, forever-open, approachable Big Snow indoor ski center in New Jersey mints 100,000 new skiers per year, but they often have no idea where to go next.
Farther north, Gore and Whiteface, New York’s largest and tallest ski areas, respectively, add an aspirational, let’s-do-a-weekend dimension to Snow Triple Play. Oak, also situated in the Adirondacks, complements these two larger mountains as a stepping-stone ski area.
So no big surprises in New York and its environs. I guessed all but Oak as probable Triple Play partners shortly after Snow Partners’ May product announcement. But Snow Partners delivered a big potential pass-sales catalyst by adding the four tightly bunched Les Sommets ski areas, which, clustered an hour north of Montreal, create a second beachhead for Snow Triple Play and advance American-based operators’ slow push into the huge eastern Canada market.
Here we have the bones of what could be a fifth major North American ski pass, joining Epic, Ikon, Indy, and Mountain Collective as wintertime adventure passports. As currently structured, Snow Triple Play is not that: passholders have three total days, only two of which can be redeemed at any one partner. Snow Partners does not seem to harbor ambitions beyond this – Hession insisted on the podcast that the company would “never” expand beyond three days, and that Snow Triple Play was not a “pass” at all, but a customer-acquisition tool for ski areas to attract less-frequent or novice skiers who are increasingly befuddled by the choice between day tickets that cost more than an engagement ring and cheap season passes that must be purchased nine years in advance.
This orientation toward trial, rather than volume, may explain why several multimountain operators who have in recent years largely resisted joining national pass coalitions signed on to Snow Triple Play, including New York State, the Murdock family, and Les Sommets.
This alignment of so many prominent operators, including Ikon pillar Boyne Resorts, is a subtle but powerful endorsement of Snow Partners. Via its Snowcloud resort management platform, Terrain Based Learning beginner system, and successful re-imagining of the orphaned New Jersey snowdome, the company has rapidly established itself as an important and respected player in the rapid modernization of North American skiing.
“We are very close to Joe (both as a friend and with his team), and we like the idea of collaborating in general with other industry innovators (Ikon, Mountain Collective), when it makes sense,” Boyne Resorts CEO Stephen Kircher wrote in an email to The Storm. “[Pleasant Mountain joining the Snow Triple Play] certainly is a vote of support to him and what he is trying to test.” Boyne has implemented Snow Partners’ Terrain Based Learning system at many of its ski areas, Kircher said.
The Snow Triple Play’s strong initial roster adds another compelling product to the rapidly growing suite of date-agnostic, limited-day, multi-resort frequency products that give skiers a middle ground between full season passes and over-the-top walk-up lift tickets. While these tweener passes, with their sales cutoff dates, still favor the prepared, their proliferation, combined with Vail Resorts’ decision to chop half off lift ticket prices for friends of Epic Pass holders, signal a renewed industry focus on casual skiers following a decade-long reorientation toward season passes that transformed the once-fringe locals product into a mainstream membership card that now accounts for half of America’s annual skier visits.
The Snow Triple Play will be on sale from Sept. 1 through Dec. 24, and the first 1,000 cards will sell for $169.99. Snow Partners will announce which resorts will have holiday blackouts once sales go live.
Here's a deeper look at the Snow Triple Play’s inaugural lineup and what its fantastic roster signals about the evolution of multimountain access products: