New Gold Regional Passes at Six Flags, thoughts?

Six Flags announced today they're changing the season pass structure, again. This time regarding multipark access

Silver pass, should your local Six Flags offer it, will be just a local park pass from what it seems like. I don't see any changes to how it functions yet, but the pass changes haven't been rolled out chainwide yet.

Gold Pass. Gold passes will now be regional, based off of 4 regions. Those 4 regions are East, Midwest, Texas, and West, and your gold pass will work at all parks located within the region. For example, your Cedar Point Gold Pass will work at Kings Island, Michigan's Adventure, Canada's Wonderland, Valleyfair, Worlds of Fun, Six Flags Great America, Six Flags Darien Lake, and La Ronde. IF you've purchased a Gold Pass and paid for APP seperatly, you will be upgraded to prestiege. If you bought your pass during the MVP Sale, (August-October? 2025) your pass is unaffected by these changes.

Prestige Pass. Prestige is, in simple terms, the new Platinum Pass from years ago. It comes with all park access, and other perks. it appears to be largely unchained from 2025.

To simplify, the new pass structure looks to be as follows:

Silver->Local Park

Gold->Regional

Prestige->All Park

Personally, I don't mind these changes. I think it fixes Prestige and how it wasn't really worth it outside of the SFL you got each visit. My parents only really visit Cedar Point and Kings Island, and this doesn't affect them as they live in Cleveland. I go to other parks, so my pass won't be changed for 2026, and knowing I'll get some new perks for 2027 upgrading to Prestige, I don't mind so much. I wish Gold would get discounts on admission outside of the region (think 5-10%) but I don't mind the new structure.

I saw this earlier online. I live in Huntington, WV, so I am in the middle of two different regions. Cedar Point is 5 hours. Kings Island is 3.5 hours. Then in another region, Carowinds is 5.5 hours, and Kings Dominion is 6.

So, in the future, if I want to visit all the parks within a day's drive for me, I need the (all park) Platinum Pass.

People who live in the center of each region will get a better deal than people who live on the outside edge of each region.

This is essentially the pricing mechanism they needed to account for market cannibalization, and money being left on the table. A non-trivial amount of people had passes to both Magic Mountain and Knotts, KI and CP, and Carowinds & Over Georgia, etc.

However, I am skeptical that this program actually causes more visits. If they couldn't get the visits with unlimited access in 2025, this doesn't help in 2026. At this point they need the guaranteed revenue of a strong pass sales year and just hope for the best on visitation.

How many different options have they offered since 2026 passes went on sale last fall? My head hurts just trying to figure it out.

I do think the regional park passes are a good idea and this is how they should have structured it post-merger from the beginning rather than the all or nothing model with "all" being the same price. The One Park, Your Region Parks and All Parks model is good - it's all of the "but if you already did this" options right now that just make it way more complex than it ever should have been.

Giving away multi parks on a season pass hasn’t worked for them in the past I don’t see this working any better.

The current all oatks pass was a $100 upgrade, so this isn’t even a price increase for that. I just looked at Kings Island’s website and a prestige passes $225 which is less than a platinum pass sold for several years ago..