Tuesday, March 18, 2008

Tour and Travel sites Performance Issues According to Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks

All tourism players are busy now in travel planning and booking; hotels, bed and breakfast sites receive reservation requests, travel trade magazines promote travel destinations. Hectic tour and travel booking season influences travel sites' uptime.

Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks for Hospitality Industry show large number (about 1500) of sites being up in average 96.5%. On Week 11 only 2 websites demonstrated 100% availability: http://www.welcomearmenia.com/ and http://www.bbcanada.com/. Welcome Armenia landing page performance is above average load time for the week (405 millisecond) and shows 206 milliseconds. 21 sites' availability for last week was below 97%, so the downtime was more than 3 hours.

http://www.opodo.co.uk/ page load is the slowest throughout at least 3 weeks, showing above 4000 milliseconds average load time and the lowest uptime for the period is recorded for http://www.travelclass.co.uk/ (85%), http://www.visitcyprus.org/ (down to 37%) and http://www.laprovence.co.uk/ (23%).

Websites tagged UK Tour Operators all experienced at least 60 and up to 660 minutes downtime during last week. Top Airline Companies average uptime was 90%, National Tourism Boards 93%, Top Hotel Sites and European Tourism Board 98%, Irish Hotel, Hotel Booking and General Travel Sites 99%.

It was obvious all these sites being busy handling customers: visitors book online, make reservations, browse the web pages for more information, download brochures, check availability. Customer experience should be monitored to improve service and increase web revenues. Frustrated customers' abandoning slow websites result in on-line sales decline, lost revenue potential and credibility damage.

External monitoring at Mon.itor.Us us free, and performed from 3 geographic locations: Germany, Austria and USA, every 30 minutes. Email, IM notifications and RSS feeds alert the site problems to site owners. SMS text messages alert about site issues when administrators do not have access to internet.