“The image above says ‘2011’ like I’ve done this for years, but in reality, this is the first edition of such prestigious awards. Unlike other awards, you didn’t have to apply for these, just a judging panel of one (me) made a list of the best and eliminated them one by one until a winner was selected.”

I have dozens of resort apps on my phone. Many are incredibly well done, with beautiful designs, coding, and UIs. Deciding which one deserves such a prestigious award was no easy task. There is a long list of GPS run tracking apps, lots of slick resort-info apps, and even third party apps that provide resort info but were created independently.

This was by far the hardest award to choose, partly because I wasn’t sure where to put the priority. Some apps had one awesome feature but lacked another awesome piece other apps contained. In the end, I chose one that seemed to combine the right features in the right way.

After more deliberation than I expected, the winner is (humor me by clicking play first):

WINNER – Best Ski Resort Mobile App: Snowbird / WeLikeSmall

This one may have come out of left field for some of you as I’ve never mentioned it before. However, with a few updates in March of 2011, I feel they’ve got an app that is unique, useful, and easy-to-use. The one key feature, as shown at the top of the image below, that I love the most is the ability to take and share photos from within the app.

Aside from the photo functionality that lets user generated content be generated even easier, here are a few of the features I thought set this app apart from the rest:

• Day tracker (manual, but easy to use)
• Powder alerts
• Offers
• YTD snow total front and center
• Social sharing and integration

In the end, I love that this app gives you something to do, not just look at. Taking pictures, adding days, sharing content, new offers, etc. give users a reason to open this app even when they aren’t on the way to the mountain. You could argue that the design and layout could be cleaned up a bit, but the features are all there. Great work guys.

About Gregg & SlopeFillers
I've had more first-time visitors lately, so adding a quick "about" section. I started SlopeFillers in 2010 with the simple goal of sharing great resort marketing strategies. Today I run marketing for resort ecommerce and CRM provider Inntopia, my home mountain is the lovely Nordic Valley, and my favorite marketing campaign remains the Ski Utah TV show that sold me on skiing as a kid in the 90s.