Compare Ikon, Epic, Mountain Collective, and Indy Passes. Our interactive comparison tool helps you find the best pass based on your skiing style, budget, and favorite destinations.
We use your budget, travel habits, preferred regions, and pass restrictions to score every major pass and recommend the best fit.
This wizard combines home-base distance, region coverage, budget, travel appetite, blackout tolerance, and access style into one recommendation engine.
We use your hometown to estimate which pass puts more ski days closer to home.
Enter the city or ZIP you most often ski from. We’ll use it to estimate nearby resort coverage for each pass.
Pick the mountains that are realistically on your calendar this season. We’ll score every pass on coverage, price pressure, and whether the access style matches a focused or multi-stop season.
Add 3 to 6 resorts to get the clearest recommendation.
The calculator gets most useful once you’ve picked a realistic set of mountains you actually expect to ski.
Start with the big picture, then scan the details that actually change which pass fits your season: price, access style, blackout rules, and how travel-heavy each option is.
Unlimited at select resorts, limited at others
Budget skier who wants access to major Vail resorts with some blackout dates
Mostly unlimited access
Frequent skier or traveler who wants full access to Vail resorts worldwide
Unlimited at select resorts, 5 days at others
Budget Ikon skier who wants access to major Alterra resorts
Unlimited at select resorts, 7 days at others
Frequent travelers and destination skiers wanting full Ikon access
2 days per resort
Road trippers and budget skiers exploring independent resorts
2 days per resort
Flexible travelers who want independent resorts without blackout dates
2 days per resort + 50% off additional days
Destination travelers visiting premium ski resorts
This view keeps the same passes aligned row by row so you can compare the fine print without flipping between cards.
Swipe horizontally on smaller screens
These tools help you validate the pass decision from a few different angles: where you ski, how you travel, and which specific mountains you care about.
Rank passes by the distance to their nearest covered resorts from your home base.
Line up 2 to 3 resorts across vertical, snowfall, lifts, ownership, and pass coverage.
Browse quick pass guides for budget skiers, families, destination travelers, road trippers, and locals.
Model cost per day, cost per resort, and a sample season shape for each pass.
Explore the full ski pass map on its own page to browse every resort, filter by pass family or region, and click into individual mountains without slowing down the homepage.
The dedicated map page keeps the full interactive Mapbox experience in one place, with live markers, resort popups, brand colors, and filters for pass type and map region.
A quick gut-check before you buy. These questions cover the tradeoffs that tend to matter most once you move past price alone.
Pick the pass that best matches where and how you ski most of the time, not the one that looks best in a perfect-case scenario.
Ikon Full and Mountain Collective are usually the strongest starting points for destination-focused skiers because they lean into premium resorts and broader travel value. Ikon Full gives more total access days, while Mountain Collective is often a better fit for fewer high-end trips.
Unlimited access usually matters more if you ski the same mountains repeatedly. Total resort count matters more for travelers and road trippers. A pass with fewer resorts can still be the better choice if those resorts match where you actually plan to ski.
They can be. If you ski around holiday periods, long weekends, or school breaks, blackout dates are one of the fastest ways to eliminate a pass from consideration. If you mainly ski midweek or off-peak weekends, they may matter much less.
Indy is often the best value for skiers who want lower upfront cost, smaller independent mountains, and flexible road-trip variety. It is usually less about unlimited repeat laps at one mega resort and more about broad exploration at a lower price.
They can add planning friction, especially if your trips are spontaneous. If you like to decide last minute, passes without reservation requirements are easier to live with. If you already plan trips well in advance, reservations may be less of a drawback.
Price is important, but it works best when paired with access style, blackout rules, and where you actually ski. A cheaper pass can be a worse value if it forces extra lift-ticket purchases or misses the mountains you care about most.