All you can ski and all you can eat, reserved parking, daily lessons? Porters in Canterbury, New Zealand, just went all Club Med on us with their all inclusive premium Season Pass.
Gone are the days when a lift pass was, well, just a lift pass. With multi resort passes, conglomerates and partnerships popping up across the ski world, ski resorts have to get creative with their lift pass offerings.
Enter Porters in Canterbury, an hour from Christchurch Airport. This Kiwi ski field is challenging the big boys of nearby NZ Ski (Mt Hutt) with a new PREMIUM Season Pass and the PLUS Season Pass and you won’t believe what they’ve included.
Think of the PLUS Season Pass as a ‘lunch ‘n lift’ with one plated meal per day and coffee, tea and snacks throughout the day every day that you ski on the season pass. But that’s not all, you also get a complimentary ski or snowboard wax and 15% off all on mountain purchases.
Not bad considering the traditional price of on mountain dining which is, well, a gazillion dollars for a bottle of tap water and a stale burger bun.
Porters have gone a step further with the PREMIUM Season Pass. Yes you get to ski all season, yes you get the lunch and all day snacks but you also get access to reserved parking, no ‘turn away’ policy even on capacity days, complimentary daily ski or snowboard rental, one private lesson, unlimited group lessons for beginners or unlimited skill improvement clinics for intermediates and advanced, on mountain equipment story, a ski/snowboard wax and 20% off all on mountain purchases.
Of course you pay for all these complimentary extras. The Premium Season pass is NZ$899 for adults and the Plus Season Pass is NZ$699 but you get to ride 230 hectares with 680 metres of vertical drop. These passes are never going to rival the ski per acre value of the mega resort passes like the Epic Pass, Mountain Collective or even the NZ$799 earlybird three peak pass from NZ Ski (Hutt, Coronet, Remarks) but if you are a Christchurch local then you’re being well looked after by a local resort. In a world of corporate ski expansion, this may be what the little guy is looking for.
