Are There Any Discounts For Friends and Family?

[JG_Ski_Star]

Are there any discounts offered to the friends and family of MMSA seasonal employees? Discount lift tickets, rentals, food? If friends and family come up to visit are they subject to the full price for activites at the resort? Please fill me in!

[brahm]

Yes mid season we get Friends and Family vouchers, as far as other discounts no, unless it's a dependent.

[gowithapro2009]

If you are a returning employee you get a certain amount, and a significant discount at the retail stores. If you are a first year employee you still get f/f vouchers (unless it changes this year) you get a discount at the retail and food outlets and if you have dependents they ski free and get free lessons under certain conditions. (unless this has changed this year). MMSA does well by their employees when it comes to perks.

[JG_Ski_Star]

Hey, thanks for the info! Will you elaborate on the mid-season freinds and family vouchers?? What are they? What are they good for? When do you usually get them? How many do you get? How often? etc. Thanks very much!

[snowboardchic99]

i haven't worked for the mtn, but i have a lot of friends that do. eventually you get friend and family vouchers which are not sellable. each voucher is worth 1/2 a lift ticket, so you can use 2 for a full ticket. i'm not sure how many you get for sure, but it seems you get 3 tickets near the beginning of the season and then more later on. last year they changed the policy and you as the employee have to be present when the vouchers are cashed in for the ticket-this was to help prevent the sale of them. not sure about the rental discounts for your family, but most people up here make friends and usually have some hookups in town for rentals, plus there are rental discount coupons in the phone books and visitors coupon books. so there isn't a way to get a lot of friends or family members on the slopes for free unless you find other employees willing to GIVE you their vouchers-which some of the foreigners will do since they don't all have friends or family coming to visit.

if you really want to get vouchers for people, i'll tell you about an opportunity. i volunteer for disabled sports eastern sierra. they are not part of the mtn, but are heavily partnered with the mtn. it is a great organization and i recommend you look it up online and find out more about it. i had absolutely no teaching training, and didn't even really ski and i volunteered last year and had a great time. you go through training and then you get paired with another instructor to take out 1 student and ride with them and possibly try to teach them. if you become capable and comfortable and want to go out alone on a lesson, then you can. you take out everyone from those with cognitive issues like add, autism, fetal alcohol syndrome, to people with cerebral palsy, ms, or even paralyzation or missing limbs. we have also work with the local schools ski pe program as well. it is an amazing opportunity. you can even volunteer to help out in the office or with handyman type work. there are lots of area for everyone to participate. anyways, every 6 hours you volunteer (including your training hours) gets you a voucher for 1 free lift ticket (not 1/2 of one-it's a different voucher than the mtn's friend and family voucher). you could also get a voucher for free rental gear instead of the lift ticket. each lesson you go on is about 2.5 hours, so you could get 5 hours a day by going out to ski or ride with someone. they really need people over the holiday periods, so even if you couldn't volunteer that much, but might be able to find time over the busy periods (when it's typically less fun to be on the mtn anyways), then i would encourage you to look into this. feel free to call them and learn more about it. like i said, i started with then last year and it was so rewarding that i ended up volunteering a lot of my free time to them (not to mention you get to ride all the cool adaptive equipment!).

hope this may help a little. by the way, if your friends or family want to volunteer, they get a lift ticket and rentals for the day that they volunteer for a lesson. so if they did a morning lesson, they would be done by 12 and could have the rest of the day with that lift ticket and rental and still get 2.5 hours toward another lift ticket voucher.