The vacation planning season just ended. It's been a rough year for the traveling and recreational businesses that suffered the consequences of coronavirus (COVID-19). The pandemic impacted negatively traveling and recreational market in two ways. First, the traveling and accommodating restrictions implemented by the government significantly reduced hotels' and restaurants' ability to accommodate tourists. Second, the high unemployment rate leading to financial instability caused by the virus forced many people to skip this year's vacations or even planning one for the next year.

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, the global travel and tourism market has taken a massive hit across the globe. In the United States alone, there was predicted to be a drop in travel spending of $355 billion in 2020, which is a percentage decrease of 31 percent. Travel spending includes transportation, overnight accommodations, retail, attractions, and restaurants.

Our 2020 Vacation Planning Season Report is ready as well. For the purpose of it, we at WebSitePulse have monitored 10 of the most popular international websites for travel and tourism during the vacation planning period between June 10th and July 15th, 2020.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites' home pages as well as a complete web transaction like an end-user would interact with the website.

The report measured Uptime and Response Time as the most critical metrics for the availability and the reliability of all web-based operations. Measurements of the multi-step online transactions are made every 15 minutes, simultaneously from 4 different monitoring locations: Washington DC (US East Coast), San Francisco, CA (US West Coast), Sydney (Australia), and Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe).

Regardless of the few downtimes, the overall performance of the monitored travel booking websites demonstrated their preparedness to meet the traffic during the whole 2020 vacation planning season.

We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 4.776 sec. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 2.824 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 4.163 sec
• Sydney (Australia) – 8.092 sec
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 4.031 sec

This year we have two speed winners among the ten monitored websites with an average response time of 2.631 seconds — vrbo.com and hostelworld.com, followed by airbnb.com (3.287 sec) and homeaway.com (3.365 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table once again was edreams.com with 8.310 seconds average response time, which may have caused some lost profit.

Comparing to the last year's performance, the three leaders prolonged their response time by an average of 0.409 seconds while the slowest site this year performed on average 0.246 seconds slower than in the 2019 vacation planning monitored period.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 10 websites for the 2020 travel planning season was 99.93%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.92%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.92%
• Sydney (Australia) – 99.91%
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 99.91%

The winner with 99.995% this year is tripadvisor.com, followed by hotelplanner.com (99.994%), and vrbo.com (99.983%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands hotels.com with 99.608%, which means it was not accessible to its customers for only 3.39 hours during the whole monitored period.

For more details, see the reports below:

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. resp. time
1	hostelworld.com	2.533	2.363	2.048	3.579	2.631
2	vrbo.com	1.796	2.077	0.872	5.780	2.631
3	airbnb.com	2.407	2.412	0.989	7.341	3.287
4	homeaway.com	2.137	2.871	1.137	7.317	3.365
5	flipkey.com	3.257	3.825	1.271	7.526	3.970
6	hotelplanner.com	2.334	5.878	2.128	9.076	4.854
7	booking.com	5.764	3.503	3.566	7.317	5.038
8	tripadvisor.com	5.503	5.298	4.489	6.355	5.411
9	hotels.com	6.779	8.352	6.666	11.264	8.265
10	edreams.com	9.114	3.734	5.080	15.315	8.310

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. uptime
1	tripadvisor.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	99.980%	99.995%
2	hotelplanner.com	99.988%	99.994%	100.000%	99.993%	99.994%
3	vrbo.com	99.979%	99.985%	99.983%	99.985%	99.983%
4	airbnb.com	99.961%	99.959%	99.971%	99.989%	99.970%
5	edreams.com	99.967%	99.950%	99.963%	99.977%	99.964%
6	booking.com	99.963%	99.955%	99.964%	99.953%	99.958%
7	flipkey.com	99.971%	99.934%	99.966%	99.925%	99.949%
8	hostelworld.com	99.926%	99.943%	99.945%	99.945%	99.940%
9	homeaway.com	99.831%	99.810%	99.783%	99.802%	99.807%
10	hotels.com	99.638%	99.601%	99.626%	99.566%	99.608%

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".