Back in 2019, Cedar Fair rolled out an interesting concept of Pass Perks, rewarding season passholders for visiting the parks. While the premise was cool and had potential, the implementation was abysmal.

For starters, there was no transparency for rewards. There was no way for guests to see what was required to work towards a rewards chart. The system worked on show up to your home park, and maybe in the future we will load something onto your season pass. However, what you get for visiting once could be way more interesting then those with 10 visits, if anything at all. The guest experience with Pass Perks has been anything but rewarding.

For those guests like our family, there was no additional benefits in the Pass Perks system for visiting other Cedar Fair parks.

The whole idea of rewarding guests for actually visiting and doing things like riding attractions, playing games, or buying merchandise seemed to have no real rewards associated with them.

What was worse is guests were often not even notified they received a Pass Perk. Guests had to physically log into the website to see if they earned anything, because there was no way to pull up the information in the mobile apps.

With the new apps being rolled out for 2024, the Pass Perks is possibly showing signs of improvement.

For starters, in the Wallet section of the new mobile apps, guests will now be able to pull up their Pass Perks directly. This will be a huge improvement, as most guests are not going to log into a separate website to look for the information.

Next, Cedar Fair plans to give us something aspirational to work towards.

For example, there will be a monthly rotating reward. For example, one of the options they propose is visit the park 5 times and get an additional 10% off purchases. That is interesting and could encourage additional spend when combined with existing passholder savings.

For example, Gold pass holders get 10% everyday. If a guest visited 5 times within the selected month and unlocked an additional 10% off, that means the parks could see quite an incremental spend if guests were saving 20% in total.

Another option they are toying with for monthly goals is visit 3 times and get buy one, get one ICEE. While this could be interesting for some, it really is not much of a reward for pass holders like us who already upgraded to the new Drink Plan Plus program that includes ICEE.

The key here is they are at least being open up front and disclosing what the rewards are and how to obtain them. The previous version of Pass Perks was sit and wait and maybe we will randomly send you a reward.

New Rewards

For 2024, the company is promising new rewards we have not seen before. For example, they are toying with the idea of priority show seating. Seems to be limited venues that could accommodate this, let alone it never really is much of an issue getting access to any shows, but we will see.

Overall, we are glad to see some more transparency of the Pass Perks program. It is still not the reward program we had hoped and dreamed of, but at least a step in the right direction.

April 2024 Pass Perks

Now that April is here, we have several Cedar Fair parks open and the first of the Pass Perks have rolled out.

Current open parks include California’s Great America, Carowinds, Kings Dominion, and Knott’s Berry Farm.

All rewards will be available in the app starting May 1 if you earned them in April.

Visit once, get entered into a “mystery bonus perk.”

Visit twice, get BOGO 50% off popcorn (Knott’s, KD) or pretzel (Carowinds, CGA).

Visit 3 times, get 15% of merchandise.

Visit 4 times and get one free bring-a-friend ticket.

In addition, Prestige passholders get the following perks.

Two visits gets 15% off midway games.

Three visits get BOGO free popcorn (Knott’s) or extra 10% off food & beverage at Leonardo’s (Carowinds) or extra 10% off food & beverage at Outpost Cafe/Grain & Grill (Kings Dominion).

The fourth visit gets extra 15% off merchandise + 15% off games.

What are your thoughts on the new and improved Pass Perks program?

* If you liked this post, join other readers who have signed up to for our free Newsletter…because then you will never miss another update!