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Performance Tracking  > 2009 Vacation Planning  > Introduction

WebSitePulse 2009 Vacation Planning Websites Performance & Uptime Report


According to a J.D. Power and Associates Report, the percentage of travelers making online airline, rental car and hotel reservations has increased with 15 percentage points during the past year. However, this year, due to the economic downturn, more and more users are starting to look for better prices and value-added offers, which is bound to result in a fierce competition between the most popular and used vacation planning sites.

While price is a key factor for customer satisfaction, travel websites should make an effort to problems with excessive content and tools which can make it more challenging for customers to easily navigate through sites and make travel reservations. Availability will also be a major issue. The easy navigation and fast reservation process will prove successful in satisfying customers and this also will lead to an increased likelihood that customers will return to make travel reservations in the future and give positive recommendations to others.

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 18 through June 30, 2009 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.