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Performance Tracking  > 2009 Vacation Planning

WebSitePulse 2009 Vacation Planning Websites Performance Report Summary


For a fourth 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, just as the year before, no website was able to reach 100% uptime. All of the included websites had at least one incident detected by our monitoring agents.
- For the vacation planning period 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, with the longest being 10 hours and the shortest - 5 minutes.
- Most of the detected problems this year were due to maintenance of one or more of the monitored sites.
- The average response times showed improvement for all of the monitored websites, except for booking.com and priceline.com, whose response time has increased with over 2 seconds compared to last year's results.
- The longest downtime periods during this year's report were recorded for hotels.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
#TargetSan FranciscoAmsterdamWashingtonAvg. resp. time
1venere.com2.2991.0401.7073.7072.188
2travelocity.com1.9113.8001.8946.4253.508
3travel.yahoo.com1.5654.4161.9886.9243.724
4hotels.com2.9024.1322.9795.3383.838
5expedia.com2.4204.6944.4335.5684.279
6travelnow.com3.0227.9133.7009.1785.953
7priceline.com6.3307.2072.50413.9237.491
8wotif.com6.89912.9708.7872.1507.702
9booking.com8.5466.2006.01713.0048.442
10bookit.com6.42410.9994.90616.4339.691
11cheaptickets.com9.42311.0068.41014.88210.930
12orbitz.com11.45213.54610.26017.97613.309

Average Uptime for the whole period
#TargetSan FranciscoAmsterdamWashingtonAvg. uptime
1wotif.com99.995%100.000%100.000%99.994%99.997%
2cheaptickets.com99.976%99.988%99.974%99.976%99.979%
3venere.com99.995%99.964%99.969%99.981%99.977%
4booking.com99.971%99.988%99.965%99.978%99.976%
5priceline.com99.896%99.876%99.885%99.876%99.883%
6travel.yahoo.com99.860%99.911%99.887%99.860%99.879%
7bookit.com99.590%99.565%99.637%99.653%99.611%
8expedia.com98.995%98.929%98.937%99.154%99.004%
9travelocity.com98.975%98.974%98.988%98.990%98.982%
10orbitz.com98.675%98.688%98.776%98.788%98.732%
11travelnow.com98.401%98.543%98.631%98.443%98.505%
12hotels.com98.020%97.611%98.152%98.072%97.964%

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".