Hotels Are Selling Day Passes for Their Pools
September Is When They Get Cheap
Sabrina
In late May, Marriott signed a multiyear global deal with ResortPass, the company that sells day access to hotel pools, cabanas and spas.
Marriott already had more than 500 properties listed. Thousands more are being added. ResortPass says its Memorial Day weekend bookings ran 148% ahead of last year.
The nicest pool in your area is selling tickets for access to their pools now, and they start at around $25.
What a hotel pool day pass actually costs in 2026
There isn’t one price; there are six, and the gap between them is where people lose money. A standard pool pass gets you in the gate and a chair if you can find one. Everything reserved, shaded, or with someone bringing you things, well, that costs more, of course.
Real 2026 examples, all bookable without a room:
Canopy by Hilton Scottsdale Old Town — rooftop pool passes from $40 per adult, or $99 for a family pass
Caesars Republic Scottsdale — from $35 solo, $150 for up to five adults at the adults-only rooftop, one drink included
Renaissance Esmeralda, Indian Wells — from $31.50, booked on the hotel’s own website, parking $20
YOTEL Washington DC — a rooftop cabana for four, six hours, $100
Hyatt Regency Greenwich, CT — $50, indoor pool, hot tub and gym, which matters in October
The spread is the whole game. At Caesars Republic, going solo costs $35 and going as a group of five costs $30 a head, and the group gets a reserved space. Everything else is the same.
Why hotels suddenly want locals in their water
Foreign tourism spending in the US was projected to fall 8.2% in 2025, the only country in the world forecast to drop that year.
That’s a real hole in the revenue line, and hotels went looking for it in the one place that was already paid for.
The pool is built. The lifeguard is already on duty. The towels are already laundered.
ResortPass has pitched hotels on margins north of 90% on this inventory and says top properties clear up to $2 million a year in day-guest revenue.
It now works with more than 2,000 hotels across 400-plus US cities and has sold roughly 3 million passes, most of them in the last two years.
But the pass isn’t really the business. The average ResortPass reservation runs about $250 once food and drinks are counted. You’re an add-on to the hotel room customer who’s at the swim-up bar for four hours, buying all the food and drinks you can afford.
America has done public pools before
Here’s the part that makes this more than a travel hack.
From the 1920s through the 1940s, American cities built enormous resort-style public pools on purpose, as a public good, the same way they built libraries.
Then came integration. In 1959, Montgomery, Alabama filled its Oak Park pool with concrete rather than share it, and shutdown the entire parks system for over a decade.
It never rebuilt the pool. Heather McGhee calls it drained-pool politics in The Sum of Us, and the receipts run from Alabama to Ohio to Washington state.
The private version showed up right behind it: swim clubs, memberships, backyards.
Now fast-forward. There are roughly 309,000 public pools in the country, and in recent summers about a third of them cut hours or sat closed because cities couldn’t staff them.
New York opened its season with locked gates and half-staffed decks at neighborhood pools while the Parks Department insisted all 51 were open.
So the public pool gets smaller and harder to reach, and the luxury pool gets an app, dynamic pricing, and a Marriott partnership.
The pool never left. It just moved behind a checkout page.
That’s not a reason to skip the day pass, though. It’s a reason to be clear-eyed about what you’re buying: you’re renting back an amenity that used to come with the city for free.
That's not to say it's not worth it because it totally is. No screaming kids or waiting in line just to get in.
Get you some fancy drinks, a bite to eat…it's like a staycation every time you go.
The September window nobody books
Summer pricing is a seller’s market. September is not.
Kids are back in school. Weekday decks are empty. And in the Sun Belt, pool season runs another two months easy, which means Scottsdale, Palm Springs, Miami, Vegas and LA are sitting on inventory with no natural demand.
How to play it:
Book Tuesday through Thursday. Weekend passes at the same property can run double, and the chair situation is entirely different.
Go as a group, not a couple. Family and group passes are usually priced to fill a cabana, not to nickel you. Four people splitting a $100 cabana is $25 each with a reserved, shaded spot, which is less than a standard pass at the same hotel.
Check the hotel’s own site before the app. Some properties list day passes directly, sometimes cheaper, sometimes with longer hours. The Renaissance Esmeralda pass is a good example, booked straight through the resort.
Indoor pools are the October play. A $50 pass to a heated indoor pool, hot tub and gym stops being a summer thing and starts being a cold-weather thing nobody thinks to book.
The fine print that turns a $45 pass into a $160 day
This is where people get surprised, so run the numbers before you get there.
Parking. $20 is common at resorts, more downtown. It’s almost never in the pass price.
Food and drink minimums. Standard passes usually have none. Cabanas and daybeds frequently do, and it’s often most of the cost.
“First come, first served” seating. On a basic pass, that’s exactly what it means. Arrive at 1pm on a Saturday and you may be standing.
Time limits. Plenty of passes are four or six hours, not sunrise to sunset.
Kid hours. Some rooftops are adults-only. Others give kids a window, like Arlo Williamsburg’s morning swim slot, and that’s it.
Weather policies. Cancellation windows are tight and rain refunds are not guaranteed. Read them.
Punch your actual day into this before you book:
Who should skip it
If the goal is laps, or letting kids splash for three hours, the rec center is $5 to $15 and nobody is upselling you a frozen drink. A day pass is not a swimming purchase, it’s an afternoon-somewhere-nice purchase, and those are different budgets.
Also skip it if the pool is small, indoor and attached to a highway hotel. Some listings are genuinely just a pool. Look at the photos guests posted, not the ones the property posted.
And if spending $45 to sit somewhere you couldn’t afford to sleep is going to sit funny with you all afternoon, that’s worth knowing about yourself before you commit. I get it, sometimes that atmosphere is not relaxing.
For everybody else, this is one of the few things in travel that got cheaper and easier at the same time. The hotels found a new revenue line. You found a fun, relaxing Tuesday.
