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Ski at more than 100 European ski resorts on new pass.

ski diva

Administrator
Staff member
I’ve been in Europe for two weeks now, so I’m in a European state of mind. Anyway, I just learned that the first (I think it’s the first) European multi-resort pass will be going on sale May 12. The Snowpass Card will give skiers and riders access to more than 100 resorts in 8 European countries, making it the biggest multi-resort pass out there. There is a limit of 10 days at each resort or group of resorts.

For more info, go here: https://www.snocountry.com/news/ent...-than-100-european-resorts-with-snowpass-card
 

marzNC

Angel Diva
Interesting that the news is being pushed out a bit before the announcement of exactly which ski resorts will be included. Wonder if they will get 50,000 people to "pre-book" to get the early bird launch price, a savings of 500 euros or about US$550.

". . .
The list of the partner ski resorts will be announced May 8 at the Snowpass website and will go on sale May 12.

The official price of the Snowpass Card is 895 euros ($1006 at current exchange rate), but the first 50,000 people who pre-book before the sales start can get the reduced launching price of 395 euros ($444) per adult.
. . ."

The Snowpass mission statement includes a quote from Steve Jobs.

"We believe in a world where people could come together like a big family with the same passion in common.

We want to give people the chance to live those unforgettable moments that only fresh fallen snow can give us…

Steve Jobs once said: “the only way to do a great work is to love what you do” and therefore, after lots of years of ski practice among friends, SNOWPASS.com began."
 

santacruz skier

Angel Diva
For those US citizens skiing in Europe for a week or two, keep in mind it is way cheaper than skiing in the US..... even at the most expensive resorts. Yes really.
 

DeeSki

Ski Diva Extraordinaire
Interesting. It would probably be worth it if you were going to ski at least 8 days in Austria. It will be interesting to see which resorts are covered. If you were to take 2 week long trips per season to 2 different ski areas, you would make a saving at the reduced rate - at the full rate it would still be marginal. The 10 day limit suggests that it won’t be much use to people who do regular day trips or weekends at their nearest ski area. You’d need to know where you were planning to ski before booking a child’s ticket for small children. At least in Austria, there’s quite a lot of variation in the discounts available. Obergurgl this season charged just €2 per day for children born since 2011 for a full lift ticket.
 

DeeSki

Ski Diva Extraordinaire
Hmmm. Lots of small ski areas. I’ve skied two of them: Sierra Nevada and Galtür. The best thing about Sierra Nevada is its proximity to the Mediterranean. It’s only about an hour and a half from the coast so you can literally ski and go to the beach on the same day. Not sure what the lift tickets usually cost but if you were a European snowbird on the Costa del Sol who wanted to do a bit of local skiing, it might be a good deal.

Galtür in Austria is an absolute gem. High altitude so you are pretty much guaranteed snow, small quiet village. Our hotel had the best food - all beef and dairy products came from their own farm! Cheese! I digress. Downside is that it’s tiny and mostly intermediate terrain. You can also get multi day tickets that cover Galtür and Ischgl. If you were planning 10 days in Galtür, this would be the better option - assuming your main focus is on skiing rather than on cheese.

Overall the list seems to be of small ski areas. This is fine, I like small ski areas. However, I think the economics of this are only going to work for skiers who are committed to skiing a few different small areas in one season. I’m not sure these people exist but I have only ever lived far away from the mountains so I may be wrong.
 

marzNC

Angel Diva
Overall the list seems to be of small ski areas. This is fine, I like small ski areas. However, I think the economics of this are only going to work for skiers who are committed to skiing a few different small areas in one season. I’m not sure these people exist but I have only ever lived far away from the mountains so I may be wrong.
Well, the goal of combined marketing certainly seems to be working. Fair to say that more people are seeing the names of the small ski areas/resorts on the Snowpass list than is usual for May.

When the Mountain Collective was conceived back in 2012, the idea was that by having 2 included days at each of the four locations (Aspen, Alta, Squaw, Jackson) people would do a trip to one or two places for 4+ days since the additional days were 50% off. The locations were deliberately far apart. But by the time the list grew to 10 locations, it was clear there were some people who would spend only 2 days at 3-4 locations over the course of a season. It was quite a shift when the MCP days around SLC for 2017-18 could cover a week (Alta, Snowbird, Snowbasin) with a couple more locations a half-day drive away (Sun Valley, Jackson). I know of Australians who planned to fly to N. America to ski 2-3 days at a bunch of MCP locations in 2-3 weeks, with a lot of driving in between.

The Powder Alliance in western N. America includes locations that are spread very far apart. Of course, it's a different business model because no extra money is required. Just a premium season pass for one of the members. The perk is 3 non-holiday days, free midweek and 50% off on weekends.

Certainly will be interesting to see how the Snowpass gets used. It's more like Epic/Ikon at around US$1000 than the MCP at about $450. Although with so many locations it may be hard to tell the first season. All the multi-resort passes in N. America keep evolving so there seem to be noticeable changes every year in recent years.
 

DeeSki

Ski Diva Extraordinaire
I’d love to see the list of ski areas set out on a map. The pass is only interesting if you can cover a few areas on one trip or enough of them are close enough to major population centres or airports served by low cost carriers from Northern Europe and especially the UK to make weekend trips viable.
 

DeeSki

Ski Diva Extraordinaire
Haha! The flags are hard. Feels a bit like a school geography test. It looked like you could sort by country on the website but it didn’t work on my phone.
 

marzNC

Angel Diva
Discovered that the map on the Snowpass homepage is interactive. If you click on a country, that takes you to the list for that country. The number of countries went up to 9.
 

Belgiangirl

Ski Diva Extraordinaire
I got really excited - then I checked the resorts on the pass. There's a couple interesting ones but nothing that really piques my interest tbh. Sierra Nevada seems to be an outlier, but that's out of my regular range of ski resorts I can drive to.

What worries me a bit is they decided to add La Bresse-Lispach and Todtnauberg but not their respective main resorts, La Bresse-Hohneck and Feldberg. They're just bunny hills, would've been way more interesting to at least include the main ski areas.
 

marzNC

Angel Diva
What worries me a bit is they decided to add La Bresse-Lispach and Todtnauberg but not their respective main resorts, La Bresse-Hohneck and Feldberg. They're just bunny hills, would've been way more interesting to at least include the main ski areas.
Looking at it from the perspective of the resort, if having the bunny hills on Snowpass encourages people to give the area a try, with the potential for wanting to check out the main mountain for at least a day or two, then the multi-resort pass has value.

The Powder Alliance for western Canada and America are a collection of independent ski areas that do not naturally fit together. The idea is that people who get a season pass at any one of the ski areas gets 3 days at all the others. Presumably, makes it more likely that someone with a season pass would do at least one trip to explore another area for the first time. It's been around since at least 2014.

The Snowpass founder has said it's taken 3 years to get to the point of being able to actually sell Snowpass cards. Presumably, he's been researching how other multi-resort passes work in order to offer something slightly different based on what's been effective already.
 

DeeSki

Ski Diva Extraordinaire
The website works much better on my iPad, so I’ve taken a better look at it now. There are quite a few ski areas near Stuttgart or Munich included so maybe it will appeal skiers in these metro areas. A lot of the ski areas included are really tiny, though, quite a few with less than 10k in runs, so really, small local ski areas. These places are struggling in Europe in the same way as the are in the US so if this is a way of keeping them going, great.
 

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