Travel Websites Performance Report 2008

Performance Tracking

2018 Holiday Season

2018 Hurricane Season

2018 Vacation Planning

2018 Mother's Day

2018 Tax Websites

2018 Valentine's Day

2017 Holiday Season

2017 Hurricane Season

2017 Vacation Planning

2017 Mother's Day

2017 Tax Websites

2017 Valentine's Day

2016 Holiday Season

2016 Hurricane Season

2016 Vacation Planning

2016 Mother's Day

2016 Tax Websites

2016 Valentine's Day

Reports Archive 2005-2015

Performance Tracking > 2008 Vacation Planning

WebSitePulse 2008 Vacation Planning Websites Performance Report Summary

For a third consecutive year WebSitePulse monitored twelve of the leading online destinations providing research, reservations, and online travel and accomodation bookings during the most active vacation period of the year.

For the purpose of this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured not only the performance of the websites home pages, but a typical complete web transaction representative for the End Users' interactions with the website. The Reports measured Uptime and Response Time as the most important metrics for the availability and the reliability of any web-based operation, critical for the End Users' overall online experience. Measurements of the multi-step online transactions were made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from four different monitoring locations.

The conclusions in brief:

- This year no website was able to reach 100% uptime. All of the included websites had at least one incident detected by our monitoring agents.
- Again this year there was no "scheduled downtime" period from 3am till 6am - the monitoring run uninterrupted 24/7. Some of the websites had periods of downtime during these hours.
- Most of the detected problems were brief, and usually the recoveries were detected with the next check performed by the monitoring agents.
- The average response times showed improvement for several of the monitored websites compared to last year's results.
- The longest downtime periods during this year's report were recorded for Cheaptickets.com.

The overall performance of the monitored websites demonstrated that there is room for improvement in their effort to meet the challenges of increased web traffic during the most intense vacation planning period.

The summarized numbers and averages for the entire monitoring period are shown in the tables below:

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington		Avg. resp. time
1	venere.com	2.700	1.550	1.823	4.448	2.630
2	travel.yahoo.com	2.216	5.329	2.452	9.141	4.784
3	expedia.com	1.446	5.130	1.966	11.354	4.974
4	hotels.com	4.320	5.649	4.063	7.440	5.368
5	travelnow.com	3.076	6.416	2.335	11.530	5.839
6	priceline.com	5.273	5.317	2.982	11.178	6.187
7	travelocity.com	5.040	6.909	5.078	10.551	6.895
8	booking.com	8.176	5.223	4.983	13.634	8.004
9	wotif.com	7.818	14.115	10.338	3.851	9.031
10	bookit.com	5.710	10.879	3.589	20.159	10.084
11	cheaptickets.com	13.071	14.930	11.618	20.750	15.092
12	orbitz.com	13.114	15.308	11.688	21.576	15.422

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington		Avg. uptime
1	booking.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.995%	100.000%	99.999%
2	travel.yahoo.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.990%	99.995%	99.996%
3	expedia.com	99.995%	99.987%	99.986%	99.981%	99.987%
4	travelnow.com	99.853%	99.824%	99.857%	99.841%	99.844%
5	venere.com	99.841%	99.818%	99.826%	99.820%	99.826%
6	priceline.com	99.791%	99.832%	99.855%	99.800%	99.819%
7	bookit.com	99.487%	99.508%	99.607%	99.598%	99.550%
8	wotif.com	99.464%	99.540%	99.492%	99.533%	99.507%
9	orbitz.com	98.980%	99.087%	99.080%	99.046%	99.048%
10	travelocity.com	99.994%	97.304%	99.986%	97.262%	98.637%
11	hotels.com	98.394%	98.496%	98.616%	98.375%	98.470%
12	cheaptickets.com	97.885%	97.909%	97.857%	97.899%	97.887%

Best regards, and takeITeasy™ with WebSitePulse™

Iavor Marinoff, CEO

Methodology:
Performance and availability are measured for a typical travel-related booking web transaction at 15 minute monitoring interval, every day, 24/7. The WebSitePulse application monitoring service is used to collect data and to create the reports.
The steps in each transaction are comparable for all websites, and reflect the real online buyers' experience. The simultaneous monitoring is performed from four locations of the WebSitePulse global monitoring network: San Francisco, CA; Washington, DC; Sydney, Australia, and Amsterdam, Netherlands. In case of a detected malfunction or unavailability, the system performs automated error verification from four independent resources and only after the above procedure is performed and has returned consistent results, the detected error is confirmed, recorded, and included in the daily performance reports. In these cases, an advanced WebSitePulse exclusive feature comes into play - Forced Monitoring -, which automatically switches to a 3 minute monitoring interval for increased accuracy.

About WebSitePulse:
WebSitePulse is a leading provider of global, independent, and objective availability and performance monitoring of web sites, servers, network components, web applications, e-business- and email round-trip transactions.

Contact:
For more information about this report please contact:
George T., CTO
phone: 1-407-380-1600
email:

Reproduction:
WebSitePulse launched the Performance and Uptime Reports program to keep the general public and the Internet community informed about the performance of specific websites and the challenges their webmasters, owners and operators are facing on a daily basis, especially when the web traffic intensifies due to some special events through the year. Some of the most popular web destinations, related to each particular event, are selected for the purpose of the Reports, and data from their performance measurements is made available on the WebSitePulse public website.

With the intention to broadly disseminate this information for the benefit of the Internet community, we encourage the use of this information without prior approval and under the following Terms and Conditions:

WebSitePulse should be referred as the "Source" of the information;
WebSitePulse should be acknowledged as the owner of the copyrights of the information in the Reports;
The texts of the Reports could be changed or altered to better suit the needs and the style of the publisher without prior notice to WebSitePulse. However, the integrity and the meaning of the information should be preserved;

The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is".