Your Pool Is Empty Six Hours a Day. Someone Else Will Sell Tickets to It.

I watched a GM lose his mind over a pool towel inventory about fifteen years ago. Not the cost of the towels (though that was part of it). The issue was that his pool was packed on a Saturday afternoon, his housekeeping team was running towels back and forth like a bucket brigade, and half the people out there weren't even guests. They were locals who'd wandered in through a side gate. He had all the demand in the world and zero way to monetize it. He was giving away capacity for free and paying the labor cost to service it.

That memory is why this Long Island day pass story hit me differently than it'll hit most people. Newsday just profiled a handful of properties out there... Gurney's charging $150-$160 for spa day access, Hotel Indigo East End starting at $50 for pool time, Canoe Place selling daybeds at $500 with a $150 F&B minimum. Those numbers are real. And the platform driving most of this, ResortPass, now has over 2,000 hotel partners and just inked a multiyear deal with Marriott. This isn't a novelty. This is a revenue line that didn't exist five years ago for most properties, and it's growing fast enough that the big brands are building infrastructure around it.

Here's what I think people are missing, though. The upside is obvious... you're selling access to amenities during hours when they'd otherwise sit idle. The industry stat floating around is that day pass users spend two to three times more on property than overnighters. Think about that. Your pool bar, your spa retail, your restaurant covers... all incremental. A well-run day pass program at a resort-style property can generate north of $2M annually in ancillary revenue. That's real money. That changes your P&L. But the downside is the thing nobody wants to talk about in the press release. You are fundamentally changing who is on your property, when, and why. Your overnight guest paying $400 a night expects a certain experience at the pool. When that pool is now shared with 30 day pass holders who paid $50 each, you've got a math problem and a service problem happening simultaneously. The math works beautifully on a Tuesday in May. It gets dicey on a Saturday in July when your paying guests can't find a lounge chair.

The operational complexity here is where most properties stumble. Your PMS wasn't built to manage day guests. Your front desk team is checking in overnighters. Who handles the day pass arrival... the pool attendant you don't have? The hostess who's also running the restaurant? Towel distribution, F&B ordering, incident management, parking... every one of these is a workflow that needs to be designed, staffed, and managed. I've seen hotels try to bolt this onto existing operations without adding a single labor hour and wonder why their TripAdvisor scores dropped in the same quarter their ancillary revenue went up. You traded one problem for another. That's not strategy. That's whack-a-mole. The hotels doing this well... and some are doing it very well... treat day pass operations as a separate business unit with its own staffing model, its own P&L tracking, and clear physical boundaries between day guest spaces and overnight guest spaces. The ones doing it poorly are just selling pool access on an app and hoping it works out.

One more thing. The Marriott-ResortPass deal tells you where this is headed. The brands are going to start expecting this revenue line. If you're a franchisee at a full-service or resort property with pool and spa amenities, don't be surprised when day pass revenue shows up as a "recommended program" in your next brand review. And recommended today has a way of becoming required next year. If you're going to do this (and for many properties, you should), get ahead of it. Design it yourself. Control the guest experience on both sides of the equation. Because if you wait for the brand to hand you a turnkey program with a platform fee attached, you'll be paying someone else to sell access to your own pool.