Vacation planning season is now over, and so is our 2019 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 23rd and June 30th, 2019.

The 2019 vacation planning season was busier even than the last year’s. According to HotelPlanner's 'Summer Vacation Habits' survey, 71% of the Americans were planning to go on vacation, 43% from the people going on vacation were planning to go on summer vacation, and 43% indicated they would be taking more than one summer trip.

These numbers suggest the 12 websites for travel and tourism we monitored during 2019 vacation planning season were quite busy and got many visitors, so their availability and good performance were crucial for their business.

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 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 heavier web traffic during the whole 2019 vacation planning season. We have found out the daily average response time from all monitored websites was 4.807 sec. (0.216 sec better than last year’s). The daily average responses by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 2.978 sec
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 4.018 sec
• Sydney (Australia) – 7.782 sec
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 4.451 sec

For the second year in a row, hostelworld.com was the speed leader among the 12 monitored websites with an average response time of 2.325 seconds, followed by vrbo.com (3.658 sec) and homeaway.com (3.808 sec). Far away at the bottom of the table once again was edreams.com with 8.064 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 0.806 seconds while the slowest site this year performed on average 1.391 seconds faster than in 2018 vacation planning monitored period.

The daily average uptime for the entire group of 12 websites for 2019 travel planning season was 99.97%. The daily average uptime by locations are as follow:

• Washington DC (US East Coast) – 99.97%
• San Francisco, CA (US West Coast) – 99.96%
• Sydney (Australia) – 99.96%
• Amsterdam (Netherlands, Europe) – 99.97%

We have five winners with 100% average uptime for this year’s vacation planning season, and they are booking.com, edreams.com, flipkey.com, hotelplanner.com, and hostelworld.com, followed by tripadvisor.com (99.992%) and tingo.com (99.985%). At the bottom of the availability chart stands homeaway.com with 99.839%, which means it was not accessible to its customers for only 1.51 hours during the whole monitored

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	2.045	2.733	1.648	2.876	2.325
2	vrbo.com	2.982	3.234	1.941	6.476	3.658
3	homeaway.com	3.130	3.811	2.000	6.290	3.808
4	flipkey.com	3.228	3.640	1.117	7.628	3.903
5	airbnb.com	2.761	2.767	1.250	10.214	4.248
6	booking.com	4.460	2.934	3.220	6.440	4.264
7	hotelplanner.com	2.289	5.873	1.846	9.043	4.763
8	hotels.com	4.123	5.673	3.953	7.240	5.247
9	tingo.com	4.874	5.761	5.167	6.282	5.521
10	travelzoo.com	4.335	7.238	3.874	7.259	5.677
11	tripadvisor.com	5.689	6.059	4.388	8.677	6.203
12	edreams.com	8.310	3.685	5.326	14.936	8.064

Average Uptime for the whole period

#	Target	San Francisco	Amsterdam	Washington	Sydney	Avg. uptime
1	hostelworld.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
2	hotelplanner.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
3	flipkey.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
4	booking.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
5	edreams.com	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%	100.000%
6	tripadvisor.com	99.984%	99.994%	99.989%	100.000%	99.992%
7	tingo.com	99.981%	99.979%	99.994%	99.988%	99.985%
8	airbnb.com	99.982%	99.989%	99.972%	99.982%	99.981%
9	hotels.com	99.965%	99.968%	99.972%	99.937%	99.961%
10	vrbo.com	99.861%	99.860%	99.848%	99.853%	99.855%
11	travelzoo.com	99.813%	99.888%	99.865%	99.799%	99.841%
12	homeaway.com	99.829%	99.840%	99.842%	99.846%	99.839%

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".