The Search For The King Of The Slopes

In light of the passing winter season, the Essential Travel magazine staff have been pouring over the task of rating ski resorts. We started off with a list of the best apres ski venues, which turned out to be a great talking point in the office. Everyone gathered round the water cooler and regaled tales of fun nights and silly memories from their personal trips.

Then we moved onto the Top 10 resorts for kids and the best all-round ski resorts which sparked the biggest office debate we have ever had. Nobody seemed to agree whole heartedly. What we concluded was that one employee's dream destination was another's prison. Regardless of the list that we came up with in the end, a ski resort's true worth always boils down to personal preference.

Just as we had reached a mature conclusion to the Great Ski Resort Debate, along comes Bing's ski resort gallery, which reopened the old wound. The gallery includes 486 venues worldwide. The image gallery allows you to flip through resorts quickly and fine tune your search, right down to particular details. Potential skiers can now compare resorts by checking out the seasonal snow-fall stats, number of black and green runs, working ski lifts, slope maps and more. As far as being a 'Try Before You Buy' website, it's about a close as you can get before a virtual reality game comes out that offers users a trial run.

Needless to say, when those games do come out, we will be ready to have this debate all over again (and again and again).