Vacation planning season is now finished and so is our 2018 Vacation Planning Season Report where we monitored 12 of the most popular international websites for travel and tourism during the vacation planning period between May 25th and June 30th, 2018.

The 2018 vacation planning season was a busy one. According to GiftCardGranny’s survey 60% of the Americans were planning to go on vacation, 20% were not planning any vacation and 20% were not sure yet. 44% from the people going on vacation were planning to go only on one vacation, 27.5% on two and 28.5% on more than two vacations.

These numbers suggest the 12 websites for travel and tourism we monitored during 2018 vacation planning season were quite busy and got many visitors, so their availability and good performance were crucial for their business.

For the purpose of 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 important 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).

The overall performance of the monitored travel booking websites demonstrated their preparedness to meet the challenges of the expected heavy web traffic during the whole 2018 vacation planning season.

We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 5.023 sec. The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 3.311 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 4.314 sec
• Sydney (Australia) – 7.855 sec
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 4.613 sec

This year hostelworld.com was the speed leader among the 12 monitored websites with an average response time of 1.878 seconds, followed by choicehotels.com (2.673 sec) and tingo.com (2.821 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table was edreams.com with 9.455 seconds average response time which may have caused some lost profit.

Comparing to the last year’s performance, the 3 leaders prolonged their response time by average of 0.891 seconds while the slowest site this year performed on average 1.111 seconds faster than in 2017 vacation planning monitored period.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 12 websites for 2018 travel planning season was 99.89%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.89%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.88%
• Sydney (Australia) – 99.90%
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 99.90%

We have two winners with 100% average uptime for this year’s vacation planning season and they are flipkey.com and tripadvisor.com (for a second consecutive year), followed by vrbo.com (99.974%) and homeaway.com (99.972%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands travelzoo.com with 99.139% which means it was not accessible to its customers for nearly 8.5 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	1.892	1.668	1.631	2.322	1.878
2	choicehotels.com	1.552	3.947	2.936	2.259	2.673
3	tingo.com	2.164	3.350	2.125	3.647	2.821
4	flipkey.com	3.164	3.878	1.284	7.136	3.866
5	hotels.com	3.021	5.960	3.048	6.344	4.593
6	tripadvisor.com	4.004	4.803	3.599	6.655	4.766
7	travelzoo.com	4.851	5.919	3.383	5.934	5.022
8	airbnb.com	4.191	4.419	2.305	11.173	5.522
9	homeaway.com	4.736	6.370	4.151	8.964	6.055
10	booking.com	7.108	3.953	4.479	11.658	6.800
11	vrbo.com	5.558	7.163	5.017	9.540	6.820
12	edreams.com	9.521	3.919	5.759	18.622	9.455

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	flipkey.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	vrbo.com	99.971%	99.978%	99.956%	99.991%	99.974%
4	homeaway.com	99.969%	99.985%	99.953%	99.980%	99.972%
5	hostelworld.com	99.961%	99.973%	99.967%	99.966%	99.967%
6	booking.com	99.960%	99.940%	99.973%	99.989%	99.965%
7	airbnb.com	99.943%	99.951%	99.990%	99.960%	99.961%
8	edreams.com	99.953%	99.926%	99.962%	99.982%	99.956%
9	choicehotels.com	99.932%	99.925%	99.930%	99.941%	99.932%
10	tingo.com	99.892%	99.907%	99.901%	99.909%	99.902%
11	hotels.com	99.850%	99.904%	99.885%	99.885%	99.881%
12	travelzoo.com	99.143%	99.124%	99.150%	99.138%	99.139%

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".