Travel Websites Performance Report 2010

Performance Tracking

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Reports Archive 2005-2015

Performance Tracking > 2010 Vacation Planning

WebSitePulse 2010 Vacation Planning Websites Performance Report Summary

What began as an experiment is now a tradition and so here we are, for a fifth year running, presenting the results from the monitoring of the 11 leading sites which provide research, reservations, 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.

This year our measurements show that one site managed to reach a 100% uptime. Along with that, this site also registered the best average response time with a result of 2.133 seconds raising the bar very high for next year.

One thing worth noting is that the statistics indicate that most of the monitored sites have significantly improved their performance in terms of uptime compared to last year. The most notable outages were for periods less than 15 minutes, but were nevertheless serious as the error messages appeared on the home pages. And this is never good news if you are in a rush to book your flight or hotel. All the other detected outages were minor and were mostly the result of search engine delays.

The overall performance of the monitored websites shows that there is still work to do if the travel and vacation planning sites are to meet the great expectations of their clients and the ever-increasing challenges of high trafiic during the most intense vacation 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	2.723	0.935	1.594	3.281	2.133
2	travelocity.com	2.234	4.037	1.866	6.585	3.681
3	travel.yahoo.com	1.786	4.430	1.704	7.224	3.786
4	cheaptickets.com	3.411	5.146	1.925	8.281	4.691
5	booking.com	5.118	3.614	2.936	8.912	5.145
6	expedia.com	4.709	5.997	5.329	6.603	5.660
7	wotif.com	6.696	11.320	8.870	1.881	7.192
8	hotels.com	5.406	8.693	6.219	9.888	7.552
9	travelnow.com	5.112	9.799	6.079	10.864	7.964
10	orbitz.com	8.613	11.653	7.237	15.647	10.788
11	priceline.com	10.348	10.649	3.611	18.568	10.794

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington		Avg. uptime
1	venere.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	priceline.com	100.000%	99.986%	100.000%	100.000%	99.997%
3	booking.com	99.982%	100.000%	99.995%	99.995%	99.993%
4	travel.yahoo.com	99.961%	99.938%	99.966%	99.956%	99.955%
5	travelocity.com	99.933%	99.948%	99.962%	99.944%	99.947%
6	hotels.com	99.955%	99.961%	99.965%	99.602%	99.871%
7	expedia.com	99.850%	99.852%	99.846%	99.806%	99.839%
8	cheaptickets.com	99.813%	99.771%	99.753%	99.772%	99.777%
9	orbitz.com	99.646%	99.656%	99.588%	99.674%	99.641%
10	travelnow.com	99.622%	99.616%	99.704%	99.609%	99.638%
11	wotif.com	99.606%	99.613%	99.596%	99.641%	99.614%

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".