2006 Vacation Planning Report Highlights

• June 25, 2006 Bookit.com website fails under heavy traffic: Multiple transaction timeouts were registered from all monitoring locations in the morning, while monitoring the Bookit.com website. The website looked like under heavy load from online visitors, judging from higher than the average web transaction response times of all performance checks. No other events of particular importance or possible negative impact on the on-line vacation research, planning and booking process were detected today.
• June 21, 2006 Travelocity.com fails after 39 days of perfect performance: After 39 days of 100% uptime, around midnight the Travelocity.com web transaction timed out for 30 minutes from all four monitoring locations, leaving Priceline.com the only web site in the Group with uninterrupted website availability for the whole monitoring period. The other two websites with uptime problems were Venere.com, which timed out from all monitoring locations once in the morning, and Bookit.com website with 2 timeouts registered from the Brisbane, Australia monitoring location.
• June 14, 2006 Orbitz.com DNS system fails for more than an hour: With one exception, no events of particular importance or possible negative impact were detected today, and according to WebSitePulse, the Group delivered the expected levels of End-User experience and Customer satisfaction. The exception mentioned was “orbitz.com” domain, which was unavailable for more than an hour for visitors who tried to enter the site without "www." in front of the domain name. Apparently, the server which hosts the "orbitz.com" domain name, and which redirects to the "www.orbitz.com" domain was not responding. The recorded web transaction was modified and the monitoring agent no longer tries to enter the website via orbitz.com. A backup monitoring was set up to check when and if this redirect will be restored, without counting any more website downtime. An hour later the “orbitz.com” server was back online.
• June 13, 2006 Timeouts from half of the monitored websites: Short timeouts for half of the monitored websites were registered today, but no events of particular importance or possible negative impact during the reported period. According to the WebSitePulse experts, the Group delivered the expected levels of End-User experience and Customer satisfaction.
• June 8, 2006 Slow websites of Orbitz, Cheaptickets and Bookit today: The website monitoring showed no problems for the bigger part of the group. The problems detected with the rest of the websites were mainly timeout issues: Bookit.com showed web transaction response times higher than the averages for the last week, and the website timed out more than once in the afternoon. Multiple spikes in the response times from all monitoring locations for Orbitz.com and Cheaptickets.com websites in the morning were recorded, some of them triggering the timeout limit of the transactions.
• June 7, 2006 Slow website response times for Orbitz.com and Cheaptickets.com today: For the majority of the monitored travel websites no events of particular importance were detected today and according to WebSitePulse, the Group delivered the expected levels of End-User experience and Customer satisfaction. The WebSitePulse monitoring system detected unusually long response times for Orbitz.com and Cheaptickets.com web transactions late in the evening. The reason - the search pages on both websites took longer than expected to return results. The other member of the group with below the average website availability was the Australian Wotif.com, with a brief heavy load issue around 3pm local time, which combined with the distance to our monitoring location in Amsterdam resulted in a web transaction timeout event recorded for the website.
• May 25, 2006 Wotif.com website again has availability issues: The only downtime incident today was detected during the night, while monitoring the Wotif.com website. For the most part of it the website responded to Customer requests with a "Scheduled website maintenance" message, but before that some timeout issues were detected.
• May 24, 2006 Wotif.com website down for more than an hour: The most serious incident detected today was with the Wotif.com website - during the evening the website had timeout issues for more than an hour, detected and confirmed by all monitoring locations, even the local one at Brisbane, Australia. Orbitz.com and Cheaptickets.com also had sporadic website timeout issues.
• May 22, 2006 Bookit.com website experiences various problems: Half of the monitored websites showed some problems today, the most serious were the timeout and connection refused issues with Bookit.com and a couple of connection issues with Hotels.com around noon.
• May 20, 2006 Orbitz.com secure website down for more than an hour: The secure server at Orbitz.com was offline for at least one hour early in the morning, and judging from the fact that everything was back to normal at 7am EST, WebSitePulse experts believe that the downtime was a result of scheduled maintenance.
• May 18, 2006 Bookit.com website continues to be very slow: As previously reported, an unusual response time pattern at Bookit.com web transaction has been registered by WebSitePulse monitoring system. A careful analysis of the data revealed that the longer-than-usual daily average for this particular website resulted from the extremely slow response of one of the web pages included into the monitored web transaction. WebSitePulse contacted Bookit.com Customer Service notifying them about the detected malfunctioning of their website that could possibly affect their web traffic and revenues, but there was no change in the pattern. Therefore, WebSitePulse experts recorded another typical Customer web transaction, excluding the non-responsive web page. Thus, the End User perspective of the monitoring was preserved, while the source of the deviation in the industry daily averages was eliminated.
• May 16, 2006 Expedia.com and Venere.com experience intermittent problems; Bookit.com again very slow: There were some intermittent problems with the Expedia.com and Venere.com websites, which recovered quickly. Bookit.com website continued to be extremely slow in one part of the monitored transaction, and Wotif.com was in scheduled maintenance for most of the night.
• May 15, 2006 Bookit.com website extremely slow during the day: No events of particular importance or possible negative impact on the on-line vacation research, planning and booking process were detected today, and according to WebSitePulse, the Group delivered the expected levels of End-User experience and Customer satisfaction. However, we must mention the extremely long response times of Bookit.com, measured consistently throughout the day. Apparently, one of the web pages in the monitored transaction takes unusually long time to respond.