Consider an empty chair beside a hotel pool. The building may be full. Upstairs, guests are attending meetings, sightseeing or sleeping through the afternoon. Downstairs, the chair earns nothing. Outside, somebody who lives twenty minutes away would gladly pay to sit in it. Bringing those two parties together sounds almost embarrassingly simple. But the hotel has spent years deciding who belongs inside. Selling the chair means revisiting that decision.
ResortPass makes the introduction. It lets people reserve hotel pools, spas, cabanas and other amenities without booking an overnight room. The attraction is an afternoon of borrowed leisure. The business is a new way to measure what a hotel has available to sell.
- For guests: book the amenity and date you want, then go home.
- For hotels: sell day access while controlling prices and capacity.
- The catch: every pass has its own inclusions. A pool is not a room.
Across the U.S., Mexico and the Caribbean.
The guest who worried the hotel
Amanda Szabo launched ResortPass in 2016. In an early interview, she described a mismatch: people wanted hotel amenities without a room, while hotels lacked a way to serve that demand. The first obstacle was permission. What sort of person would a day pass bring through the lobby? Would admitting them disturb the experience the hotel’s existing guests had paid for?
“Hotels were very intrigued by the new concept”Amanda Szabo, founder, in a 2020 interview
Intrigue did not settle those questions. Szabo said she worked closely with hoteliers to understand their priorities and built around those concerns. The resulting proposition gave properties a say in how the new guest arrived. That distinction matters. A manager who can limit access is making a different decision from a manager asked to throw open the pool gates.
There is a useful lesson here for anyone with an underused asset. The customer’s enthusiasm gets the conversation started. The owner’s anxieties determine what must be built before a transaction can happen. ResortPass needed both parties to say yes to the same afternoon.
The afternoon has its own price
For the consumer, the pitch begins with passes advertised from $25. That is a starting point. A cabana, a spa treatment and a basic pool pass are different purchases; dates and properties change the price. The savings come from avoiding an overnight booking when all you wanted was the daytime experience.
For the hotel, ResortPass’s current partner site says joining carries no setup, monthly or annual fee. It takes a commission on bookings, while the property retains onsite spending. Lunch and drinks therefore matter to the proposition. A day guest can contribute beyond the admission price, although the size of that contribution will vary.
capacity & price
& prepays
by commission
onsite spending
The company’s financing gives a sense of what it took to expand this arrangement. A roughly $9 million Series A arrived in 2019. In November 2022, ResortPass announced a $26 million Series B, co-led by Declaration Partners and 14W. The same announcement introduced Michael Wolf as CEO. His previous experience included ClassPass, another business built around access to places somebody else operates.
Someone still has to count the chairs
The consumer sees photographs and a checkout button. The property needs prices, inventory, reservations and a workable arrival routine. ResortPass’s partner portal handles those decisions, while custom seating maps organize cabanas and daybeds. A hotel-branded booking site also lets overnight guests reserve amenities. The same chair can have several possible buyers; it still needs one accurate reservation.
Day guests pay at checkout, according to the partner support documentation. Once a reservation reaches the portal, payment has been collected. That removes a chore at arrival. It also makes the accuracy of the reservation more important: somebody has already paid for the experience the hotel is expected to deliver.
The company’s day guest playbook makes the limits concrete. It tells properties to communicate amenity closures and inventory shortages, and to offer comparable alternatives when necessary. An extra booking is valuable only if the operation can absorb it. A pool already at comfortable capacity offers little room for this model. Counting chairs is part of protecting the product.
Buy the day you actually want
ResortPass serves locals as well as travelers. Friends can arrange a pool day; a couple can choose a spa visit; a family can look for suitable amenities nearby. The destination may be familiar. The appeal is getting access to a place that ordinarily comes bundled with a room.
There are alternatives. DayPass also sells hotel pool, spa and beach-club access. Dayuse centers its offering on daytime rooms, some with pool access included. A hotel’s own booking channel may suit the same need. ResortPass’s distinguishing proposition combines amenity shopping with the tools hotels use to manage it. Compare the actual afternoon offered, rather than the label on the app.
A sensible booking starts with the inclusions. Check hours, age restrictions, food allowances, parking and cancellation terms. A standard ResortPass day pass does not include a room; a separately listed day room may. Decide whether you want a swim, a reserved seat or privacy, then read the final price. Otherwise, the inexpensive escape can become an expensive misunderstanding.
Marriott comes to the pool
In May 2026, ResortPass announced an agreement with Marriott International to expand access at participating properties, including spa and wellness experiences. Participation is the operative word: an agreement does not turn every Marriott pool into an available booking. It does give the day guest proposition another route into a large hotel portfolio.
By August, the product had added dedicated Experience Pages, support for six languages and a Claude connector for finding experiences in a chat. The engineering team also describes ownership of problems from concept through delivery. Its work reaches from discovery to the hotel’s seating map.
The idea readers can borrow is quite practical. Look for capacity that exists on a different clock from the main business, then make it purchasable without exhausting it. ResortPass applies that logic to the hotel day. The room can remain someone else’s. The empty chair finally has a customer.