The summer vacation planning is ending, but the anticipation and excitement for the upcoming adventures are just beginning. 87% of Americans were expected to travel at least as much as they did in 2022, with half stating they wished to travel more.

WebSitePulse's 2023 Vacation Planning Season Report is also ready. For this purpose, we monitored 10 of the most popular international websites for travel and tourism during the vacation planning period between May 25th and June 30th, 2023.

For this Performance Report, WebSitePulse measured the performance of the websites' home pages and 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 all web-based operations' availability and reliability. 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).

The overall performance of the monitored travel booking websites demonstrated their preparedness to meet the traffic during the whole 2023 vacation planning season. We have found that the average daily response time from all monitored websites was 4.558 sec. (0.833 sec faster than last year's). The daily average response times by location are as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 3.493 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 4.590 sec
• Sydney (Australia) – 6.616 sec
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 3.448 sec

For the second year in a row, the speed winner in this report is hotelplanner.com, with an average response time of 0.602 seconds, followed by homeaway.com (3.094 sec) and hostelworld.com (3.187 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was again edreams.com with 9.475 seconds average response time, which may have caused some lost profit.

Compared to the last year's performance, the three leaders improved their response time by an average of 0.38 seconds, while the slowest site this year performed 1.5 seconds faster than in the 2022 vacation planning monitored period.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 10 websites for the 2023 travel planning season was 99.96%. The daily average uptime by location is as follows:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.95%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.93%
• Sydney (Australia) – 99.97%
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 99.98%

This year we have four websites with 100% uptime – hotelplanner.com, flipkey.com, airbnb.com, and tripadvisor.com. At the bottom of the availability chart stands booking.com with 99.749%, which means it was not accessible to its customers for nearly two and a half hours during the 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	hotelplanner.com	0.642	0.685	0.245	0.836	0.602
2	homeaway.com	2.918	2.994	2.285	4.178	3.094
3	hostelworld.com	3.669	1.704	2.623	4.751	3.187
4	vrbo.com	3.373	3.788	3.023	4.783	3.742
5	airbnb.com	3.791	3.134	2.198	6.039	3.791
6	tripadvisor.com	4.257	4.380	3.650	6.778	4.766
7	flipkey.com	4.859	0.998	2.871	10.513	4.810
8	booking.com	6.240	4.855	5.041	6.932	5.767
9	hotels.com	6.271	5.937	5.787	7.384	6.344
10	edreams.com	9.885	6.003	7.211	14.803	9.475

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. uptime
1	flipkey.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	airbnb.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	tripadvisor.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	hotelplanner.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
5	edreams.com	100.000%	99.987%	99.995%	99.989%	99.993%
6	hotels.com	99.995%	99.993%	99.988%	99.988%	99.991%
7	homeaway.com	99.974%	99.982%	99.952%	99.960%	99.967%
8	vrbo.com	99.977%	99.974%	99.990%	99.917%	99.965%
9	hostelworld.com	99.955%	99.974%	99.963%	99.963%	99.963%
10	booking.com	99.631%	99.865%	99.620%	99.881%	99.749%

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".