Travel Websites Performance Report 2014

Performance Tracking

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2017 Holiday Season

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Performance Tracking > 2014 Vacation Planning

WebSitePulse 2014 Vacation Planning Websites Performance Report Summary

Have you planned your summer vacation already?

If you haven’t yet, you can still do so but hurry as vacation season is half gone already.

The fastest, easiest and most efficient way to book your trip is via the Internet – you can reserve a hotel, buy tickets for tourist sights, rent a car, compare prices, and what not. Sometimes, however, booking your vacation online might become a hustle as some of the vacation-booking websites are scams designed to collect personal data, or they might not be functioning properly – either being slow or down for a certain amount of time and thus disabling you from processing your order. Either way, you must be careful when choosing a travel website. Even when you find a legitimate website with great deals, if its performance and availability are not flawless, you are likely to waste time and thus go to a competitor one anyway.

It is then extremely important for travel websites to be up and running 24/7 during the whole vacation period – just to ensure their visitors would not leave due to bad availability or performance. As promised, we kept a close eye on the performance and availability of some of the most popular travel websites during the busiest booking period, from May 19th to June 30th, 2014. Airbnb.com demonstrated great response time as its average was 4.6 seconds, compared to travel.yahoo.com that reached 24 seconds due to content errors in the middle of June. The content errors consisted of “keywords not found” meaning that one or more keywords that should have been in the URL content were missing.

As for the uptime, tripadvisor.com scored 100% uptime, while travel.yahoo.com had 98.32% as a result of its high response time.

See the table below for details on all monitored targets for the whole vacation season below:

Average Response times for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. resp. time
1	airbnb.com	4.012	3.648	3.018	7.878	4.639
2	tripadvisor.com	4.517	3.973	3.240	8.119	4.962
3	expedia.com	4.248	6.764	3.726	5.178	4.979
4	choicehotels.com	6.019	6.976	7.367	8.798	7.290
5	travelocity.com	5.931	6.020	4.660	12.816	7.357
6	travelzoo.com	5.712	10.300	9.244	13.278	9.634
7	hotels.com	7.087	9.182	7.203	17.119	10.148
8	cheaptickets.com	9.293	11.654	7.970	18.646	11.891
9	orbitz.com	9.856	11.951	8.087	19.013	12.227
10	booking.com	17.044	8.319	12.811	29.894	17.017
11	travel.yahoo.com	22.352	23.808	21.080	29.201	24.110
12	airgorilla.com	25.514	32.126	23.973	49.238	32.713

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. uptime
1	tripadvisor.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	travelocity.com	100.000%	99.996%	100.000%	100.000%	99.999%
3	airbnb.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	99.980%	99.995%
4	hotels.com	99.989%	100.000%	99.988%	99.976%	99.988%
5	expedia.com	99.989%	99.994%	100.000%	99.965%	99.987%
6	cheaptickets.com	99.985%	99.979%	99.960%	99.963%	99.972%
7	travelzoo.com	99.958%	99.980%	99.968%	99.973%	99.970%
8	orbitz.com	99.967%	99.955%	99.966%	99.964%	99.963%
9	choicehotels.com	99.822%	99.836%	99.827%	99.850%	99.834%
10	booking.com	100.000%	100.000%	99.230%	99.934%	99.791%
11	travel.yahoo.com	98.291%	98.246%	98.328%	98.415%	98.320%
12	airgorilla.com	74.736%	73.737%	74.617%	73.369%	74.115%

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".