2007 Vacation Planning Report Highlights

• June 29, 2007 Priceline.com with no search results for 40 minutes: Instead of the expected listing of hotels in the Orlando area, a message stating that "We Cannot Process Your Request at This Time" was displayed. A manual check by WebSitePulse engineer showed that the message was displayed no matter what area was selected for search. The problem was first detected at 5:02am EST by our Amsterdam monitoring location, and was confirmed later by the other 3 locations participating in the report.
• June 25, 2007 Hotels.com and Travelnow.com with availability problems: During the whole day the response times of both sites were higher than usual. The worst period began at 2:40pm and lasted until 3:20pm. During these 40 minutes both sites were either very slow or not responding at all. The normal operation was restored after 5:30pm EST when the response times were back to their usual values.
• June 12, 2007 Bookit.com with difficulties handling traffic: the site experienced serious availability problems during the whole evening. Starting from 6:10pm, we were unable to finish the recorded booking transaction either because of extremely high response times or because the site didn't respond at all. Almost all of the checks were failures, confirmed by all monitoring locations. The normal operation of the website was restored at 10:20pm EST.
• June 4, 2007 Bookit.com with 2 hours downtime: Two serious periods of downtime were recorded: first, at 4:58pm we were unable to connect to the server from all monitoring locations. This condition lasted almost an hour, until 5:52pm EST. Then, at 8:38pm the website was unaccessible again, returning empty replies for an hour, until 9:40pm EST, when the normal operation was restored.
• May 30, 2007 Bookit.com experiences database backend problems for almost 2 hours: At 6:02pm EST the Sydney location detected extremely high response times. The next checks either timed out or returned multiple SQL errors on different steps of the monitored transaction. This behaviour was also observed by the rest monitoring locations participating in this Report. The normal operation of the website was restored at 8:00pm EST.
• May 27, 2007 Bookit.com with downtime and errors: Starting from 1:49am EST we were not able to connect to the website at all. It was back up at exactly 6am EST. One hour and 15 minutes later another error was detected: instead of the expected hotel description page we received a php error page regarding a missing file. This problem lasted for more than 6 hours, until it was fixed at 13:30pm EST.
• May 18, 2007 Wotif.com experiences availability problems: The australian website registered the first incident in this year's report. At 4:30am local time all four monitoring locations detected very high response times which after 10 minutes were replaced by an "Internal Server Error" page. The problem was resolved 50 minutes later, at 5:20am.