Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Online hotel booking increased to 37%

Travel planning and bookings are among the most popular online activities. Last year more people booked hotels online than via travel agents (GDS) – Internet (37%), GDS (36%), phone (27%). Now booking websites are required to closely monitor their customers experience so they can increase there says by not disappointing their visitors.

Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks generate reports that allow you to compare the availability and performance of the hotel booking sector. Recently Mon.itor.us community added new Hotel Booking Websites report. Websites with 100% performance last week are: Choicehotels, Daysinn, Harrahs, Hilton, Kayak, StarWood Hotels, while some sites like http://www.hotels.com/ and http://www.expedia.com/ were off for 11 and 12 hours respectively. Compared to the previous week where http://www.hotels.com/ had been off 4.5 hours longer.

Since Mon.itor.Us is a free website monitoirng service, the community can create industry reports and tag them for search and comparison. Weekly reports on Mon.itor.Us Invoices reminds the authors of those tags to re-visits their reports and observe their competitive position in comparison with their competitors. If hotels had been registered by on-line booking sites, they will be able to understand how well the booking sites operate and keep customer satisfaction.