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12 December, 2024
Performance Tracking > 2007 Vacation Planning > Introduction WebSitePulse 2007 Vacation Planning Websites Performance & Uptime ReportAccording to Forrester Research, in 2007, nearly 40 million US households will book travel online, spending $86 billion on airline tickets, lodging, cars, intercity rail, cruises, and packages. Up-selling will be a major goal of product strategy, Web site redesigns, kiosk launches, and mobile marketing will be used to justify implementing online customer service applications like click-to-chat and click-to-callback. According to BCD Travel, a leading global travel management company, business is generally booming and worldwide business travel keeps growing stronger. Business travelers are finding it increasingly hard to book seats on near-capacity flights, and securing hotel rooms in popular business destinations. This leads to higher prices and more searching online for the best deals. With at least 25 major airports at or above their pre-9/11 traffic levels by mid-April, the 2007 vacation season looks to be at least as busy as last year. And with $3-plus per gallon gasoline, air travel will almost certainly increase from 2006. Add to that the confusing "à la carte" pricing airlines have imposed, and vacation and business travelers are likely to visit and revisit vacation planning and booking websites to do research, purchase tickets and check on flight departures and arrivals more frequently than last season. We believe that the most popular vacation planning and booking websites will have to respond to increased web traffic during the summer travel booking period. We have selected twelve popular travel websites from US, Europe and Australia that rank at the highest search engine positions. We will monitor these sites continuously from May 15 through June 30, 2007 and measure the performance levels and the availability of these websites independently and from various remote worldwide monitoring locations to best reflect the End Users' experience. The reports and charts will be updated daily showing the results from the previous day and for the entire monitoring period to the current date. The WebSitePulse Performance Reports measure Website Uptime and Website 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. The Reports reflect not only the performance of the websites home pages, but typically measure a complete web transaction representative for the End Users' interactions with a website. Measurements of the multi-step web transactions are made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 4 different monitoring locations. The WebSitePulse advanced monitoring system has automated, built-in false alarm prevention and error verification controls that ensure the reliability of the measurement results. The Reports reflect the most common website performance criteria - response time and availability. In-depth analytical information is also collected and stored in the WebSitePulse system for future references. The WebSitePulse Application Monitoring service is used to collect data and produce the Report. |
