Los Angeles (Ski Press)-Steve Bellamy, Chairman and CEO of The Ski Channel announced today that the network has launched one of the most revolutionary web apps in the history of sports and travel.

The Resort Rater is a travel information portal that helps consumers learn about ski resorts and plan for ski, snowboard and mountain resort trips.

Its engine is a complex algorithm that ranks resorts by hundreds of different criteria as rated by experts, consumers and through hard data.  The algorithm weights expert’s opinions within their fields of expertise higher and then blends those with ever changing consumer ratings and hard data like annual snowfall, uphill capacity, bed count, etc. to create the most accurate analysis of what resorts a consumer should choose to experience.

Click here to go directly to the resort rater: www.theskichannel.com/resort-rater/

“Over 10,000 hours of coding, planning, designing and content building have gone into the Resort Rater to date and we are just scratching the surface,” said Bellamy. “It is a beast, yet the most simple, intuitive and incredibly functional web app I have ever seen. We want more people taking ski and snowboard vacations as well as creating lives for themselves in the mountains.  This is the ultimate tool to facilitate that as it truly makes a science project out of what is typically an art project.”

The Resort Rater is similar to a Google search in that a consumer can completely customize a search and instantly get a ranking at the click of a button. A person planning travel could search for the best resorts with an airport, daycare, ski school, blue runs and dining. Instantly, the Resort Rater would rank over 500 resorts for those specific search criteria.