Zoom in on any ski resort while using any of the existing online satellite-image map applications and you’re likely to see a summer, rather than winter image of the resort and its surrounding ski area. You should be able to make out most of the streets and buildings, sometimes even the shadows of ski lift towers & cables on the surrounding mountainsides.

Although it’s usually fairly easy to locate the centre of a resort village on a street map or satellite image, it’s often much more difficult to discern where the pistes should be, and it’s not easy to identify specific properties in order to see whether or not they are as close to the action as they may claim to be.

That challenge prompted the ski-specialist author Francis Johnston to develop a new mapping application which aims to give skiers and snowboarders an enhanced view of the layouts of popular ski resorts.

By designing his own detailed maps and then accurately overlaying them on top of existing street maps and satellite images, he has created an interactive snow-cover effect, illustrating the positions of ski lifts and routes of access pistes; he has also plotted the precise positions of all hotels, apartment buildings and resort amenities, together with the locations of shops, cafes, restaurants, bars and clubs, and soon will be highlighting individual ski chalets too.

“Accurate information about the location of a given hotel, apartment or chalet, in relation to proximity to the ski lifts and the slopes, is of prime importance to snow sports enthusiasts; with ski-in/ski-out locations definitely preferred,” said Mr Johnston.

“Many ski resorts tend to look a bit barren and unappealing in the off-season periods between their winter and summer seasons. Unfortunately, that appears to be the points in time when most published satellite images of them were recorded,” he added.

Each of the buildings marked on Johnston’s maps can be given an interactive marker which can be linked to any URL and/or booking system.

The application’s publisher, Ski-Ride Media, is seeking investors to help develop the project, and will supply the maps under license to selected partners. They believe that the application should be of great interest to online travel businesses that specialize in ski holidays, and/or to those that wish to target that market.

So far one map has been completed and published, for the resort of Les 2 Alpes in the French Alps; it can be viewed online at http://ski-ride.co.uk/guides/les-deux-alpes/street-map

Further maps currently in production will cover most of the major resorts in the French and Italian Alps, plus all of the major resorts in Andorra and the rest of the Pyrenees. Maps of Austrian and Swiss resorts will then follow.

www.ski-ride.co.uk

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