What is a Guest Pass on Crunchyroll?

Following a strict budget can hurt sometimes. Especially when it doesn’t allow for non-essentials like a Crunchyroll premium membership.

But that doesn’t necessarily mean that a premium experience is beyond your reach.

If you’re lucky enough to get your hands on a Guest Pass, you can get premium access to the streaming service. The catch is that it’s only for a limited amount of time and you need to know someone with a paid membership to do it.

These were a coveted item in the early years of Crunchyroll. Nowadays, though, guest pass availability is a thing of uncertainty.

The Crunchyroll Guest Pass

Back when Crunchyroll first began, Guest Passes were a benefit of paying for premium membership plans. These passes allowed members to bestow perks like unlimited premium access to Crunchyroll’s library on family and friends. All it took was a simple gift code to unlock premium content.

It worked like this:

Premium members received one free 48-hour “Premium+” guest pass every 30-days of their paid premium plan. Each pass is valid for 90-days after issuance, so it was a way to get their service out there via their members. And it was a win-win situation while it worked.

Recently, Crunchyroll changed the names of their plans. Instead of a Premium and Premium+ plan, they offer Mega Fan and Ultimate Fan plans.

They amount to the same thing, but what else has changed since membership restructure?

As mentioned before, free passes were an expected perk of paying for the premium membership. That, however, is no longer the case.

According to the official Guest Pass thread in the Crunchyroll forum, Guest Passes are now a “complimentary service.” That means that it’s not guaranteed that you’ll receive them after 30-days or even 90-days of paid premium membership.

Crunchyroll went on to say that they’re no longer supporting them, nor do they know if they’ll continue to offer them in the future.

Where to Find Guest Pass Codes

Do you have Guest Pass codes accumulated?

It’s a simple thing to check.

Just go to the drop-down menu from the Profile icon and select Settings. On the left side of the screen, you’ll see a list of Profile and Account Settings. Click on Membership Guest Pass under Account Settings to see your codes.

Of course, you need to have a Premium membership to accumulate codes. But if you had any, this is where it’d be.

You can always try social media or the official Crunchyroll forum for codes, too. Members that still receive codes sometimes give them away, but you have to look hard to find them. And you need to act quickly because they’re grabbed and redeemed almost instantaneously.

Redeeming Guest Pass Codes

In the past, users who receive Guest Pass codes could go to a dedicated link on the Crunchyroll website. Now it’s a little unclear where you’d go if you did get your hands on a coveted pass.

You can still go directly to the Guest Pass webpage if you have it bookmarked. Simply input your 11-digit code to redeem the complimentary pass. However, there is no direct link to this old page.

Instead, you need to go to Crunchyroll’s main page and scroll down to the bottom. Under the Premium Memberships heading, select Redeem Crunchyroll/VRV. Click on Continue to see if it worked.

Just remember that even if you do manage to get your hands on a Guest Pass, it doesn’t guarantee you’ll be able to use it. Previously redeemed codes are probably the most frequent problem you’ll run into if you got it from a public forum.

Code expirations are another problem you may encounter because members don’t check for passcodes with regularity anymore. Odds are that if a person does receive a complimentary pass, they may not find out about it until after it already expired or is close to it.

Lastly, Crunchyroll has a cooldown period for users who redeem Guest Passes to keep system abuse at a minimum. You’re allowed to redeem a maximum of 10 passes per six-month period. It won’t allow you to redeem codes past this point until the cooldown of your tenth charge passes.

The Fate of the Crunchyroll Guest Pass

Crunchyroll does still give out complimentary Guest Passes from time to time, but they’re becoming fewer and far between. If you can get a hold of one of these coveted codes, count yourself lucky. Many users have given up on finding them, and Crunchyroll withdrew support for it.

By their own admission, they’re still deciding whether they want to keep this complimentary service going or not. For now, it looks like Crunchyroll is content to let the random dispensation of codes keep going.