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14 December, 2024
Performance Tracking > 2013 Vacation Planning WebSitePulse 2013 Vacation Planning Websites Performance Report SummaryBooking a vacation is now easier than ever. Some would say the thrill of physically going from one travel agency to another, looking through paper brochures and talking to travel agents is gone. Others embrace the idea of booking their travel experience online as they can do it at any time of the day/night; they can compare choices; make an objective decision, and most importantly – they do not have to waste that much time anymore. The thrill to them is sorting out the vacation instantly and hassle-free. As time is the most precious asset to anyone today, smart businessmen know how to turn it into their advantage. That includes building a business that would save time to its customers and users. Clearly, online businesses – if managed properly – are the biggest time-saver for users and in that regard websites for booking holidays. And when we say “if managed properly”, we mean websites that are up and running 24/7. While arranging a vacation online was once a privilege, it is now a necessity and users have become more choosy and impatient than they have ever been. This is why we took the initiative to monitor 12 of the most popular vacation-booking websites – to see how they would perform during the busiest holiday-planning season – from May 19th until June 30th. And here’s what we discovered: Venere.com and Tripadvisor.com were 100% up during the whole monitoring period. Venere.com demonstrated same perfection last year as well. Its response time was also one of the best – only 5.298 seconds. Surprisingly, however, other well-known vacation-planning websites such as booking.com and hotels.com scored lower uptime results – 99.973% and 99.919% respectively. Hotels.com was with 100% uptime last year, meaning now either their web traffic was higher and it could not bear it, or a technical issue has affected the uptime. Travelnow.com was unfortunately the slowest and least available from all monitored websites during the vacation period. Its average response time was as high as 15.489 seconds which could be frustrating to some impatient users. Its uptime was 99.938% meaning it could have been down while some users have just been performing payments online which then translates into revenue loss for the website and unsuccessful transaction for the user. Last year, however, that website showed way better results so they are absolutely capable of being more prepared for the online traffic during the next season. As we now consider ‘slow’ a website with response time of 15 seconds, and we are likely to go to a competitor whose response time would be 5 seconds, imagine a life without Internet where booking your vacation takes days, weeks, if not months… The summarized numbers and averages for the entire monitoring period are shown in the tables below: Average Response times for the whole period
Average Uptime for the whole period
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:
The Data from the performance measurements cannot be changed or manipulated and should be used "as is". |
