Earn Bonus Miles for Skiing with This Offer

Tl;dr: Alaska Airlines will give you 5000 miles plus a free lift ticket for buying a ($630) Mountain Collective pass. 

We love to ski, but sadly it can be an expensive hobby.  So naturally we look to defray those expenses as much as possible, for example by using the free night award that comes with the IHG Premier card to book a nice room close to the slopes for, essentially, the $99 annual fee. 

But one of the biggest expenses is actually mountain access–either lift tickets or a season pass–and these rarely get coded as “travel” or any other spending category that might earn bonus credit card points to soften the blow of their high prices. 

So it was very cool to see that Alaska Airlines is offering a great incentive to sign up for a Mountain Collective pass. That $630 pass gives you 2 days of free skiing–with no blackouts–at each of 24 amazing ski resorts across the world. With lift tickets at those resorts tending to run over $100 per day, you’d only need to ski a handful of days to recoup the cost of the pass. By purchasing it through Alaska, you’ll get both 5000 Alaska miles plus a third free day of skiing at the resort of your choice. 

Without that promotion, the Mountain Collective pass can be a little difficult to take advantage of. Unless you live in Utah, Colorado, or Wyoming, you will only have one or zero Mountain Collective resorts nearby, meaning you would have to plan at least one trip to try to break even on the pass (and “breaking even” will get even harder if you include the cost of travel). 

With the Alaska offer, though, people in Denver and Salt Lake City could break even without leaving the state, and pocket 5000 miles (worth $50+ by most estimates) to boot. If you have one resort nearby, you could use the third day there, and probably start getting value on your first ski trip thereafter. For folks who regularly travel to ski, the numbers start penciling out fairly quickly. If you prefer quality over quantity, this may be a better bet than the crowded Epic/Icon mountains. 

Although I’ll be sticking with the Indy pass this year, I will definitely keep my eyes open for this promotion next year. For those folks who were planning on getting a Mountain Collective pass anyway, this is a no-brainer way to collect some lazy points.