Travel Websites Performance Report 2015

Performance Tracking

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2018 Vacation Planning

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2018 Valentine's Day

2017 Holiday Season

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2017 Vacation Planning

2017 Mother's Day

2017 Tax Websites

2017 Valentine's Day

2016 Holiday Season

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2016 Vacation Planning

2016 Mother's Day

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2016 Valentine's Day

Reports Archive 2005-2015

Performance Tracking > 2015 Vacation Planning

WebSitePulse 2015 Vacation Planning Websites Performance Report Summary

Vacation season is over and we are finished monitoring 11 of the most popular websites for travel and tourism for the period between May 18th and June 30th, 2015.

For a month and a half we were “watching” closely the performance and availability of some of the most popular websites for vacation planning. Website performance is measured by response time, which is the time it takes for a web page to load. Availability, on the other hand, indicates how long a website is up or down and is measured by uptime.

Performance

The response time of the targets during the monitoring period varied between 3 and 12 seconds. Tingo.com demonstrated enviable speed as it took only 2 seconds on average for its webpages to load.

Surprisingly, Booking.com scored the lowest response time – 12 seconds – which means the website possibly experienced unexpectedly high traffic volume and was not ready to address it.

Availability

As far as uptime is concerned, it varied between 99.974% and 99.415%. This time, Tripadvisor.com had the highest uptime of 99.974% meaning it was well-prepared for possible high traffic volume.

Choicehotels.com, on the other hand, had 99.415% meaning at some point it may have experienced outages due to maintenance or high traffic load.

It may seem that 99% of uptime is quite high but when your business depends on your website, a difference of 0.001% may mean a lot. Competition is huge on the Web, and if a user is having trouble accessing your website, he is likely to switch to a competitor in seconds time.

The same counts for response time – 12 seconds is not a long time, but when we talk about response time, it has a whole new meaning. Users lose patience quickly when they have to wait for a webpage to load, and if your website is not prepared to load fast even during season, you may lose some of your clients.

For more details, see the reports below:

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. resp. time
1	tingo.com	2.541	2.570	1.677	4.875	2.916
2	tripadvisor.com	3.011	3.806	3.244	5.465	3.882
3	choicehotels.com	3.347	4.087	2.827	5.410	3.918
4	airbnb.com	4.761	4.832	3.566	7.879	5.260
5	travelocity.com	5.136	4.874	4.123	7.354	5.372
6	www.ebookers.com	4.462	4.522	4.036	9.537	5.639
7	expedia.com	5.815	6.746	4.993	8.427	6.495
8	homeaway.com	5.476	9.102	3.737	14.729	8.261
9	cheaptickets.com	7.512	9.443	5.939	13.584	9.119
10	hotels.com	8.511	10.465	7.864	11.781	9.655
11	travelzoo.com	8.838	12.999	7.212	17.424	11.618
12	orbitz.com	9.653	12.443	7.943	16.586	11.656
13	booking.com	13.425	6.626	8.997	18.971	12.005

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. uptime
1	tripadvisor.com	99.920%	100.000%	100.000%	99.976%	99.974%
2	expedia.com	99.987%	99.972%	99.963%	99.973%	99.974%
3	hotels.com	99.915%	99.953%	99.967%	99.956%	99.948%
4	tingo.com	99.926%	99.937%	99.969%	99.940%	99.943%
5	airbnb.com	99.911%	99.878%	99.893%	99.901%	99.896%
6	travelzoo.com	99.880%	99.827%	99.878%	99.824%	99.853%
7	booking.com	99.695%	99.960%	99.965%	99.620%	99.810%
8	travelocity.com	99.751%	99.838%	99.729%	99.688%	99.751%
9	homeaway.com	99.658%	99.713%	99.751%	99.707%	99.707%
10	cheaptickets.com	99.743%	99.649%	99.648%	99.669%	99.677%
11	orbitz.com	99.825%	99.172%	99.815%	99.885%	99.674%
12	choicehotels.com	99.345%	99.399%	99.506%	99.412%	99.415%
13	www.ebookers.com	58.390%	78.430%	77.880%	78.070%	73.192%

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".