Holiday Season and Online Perfromance Based on Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks

If according to some predictions 114 million customers are planning to make their Christmas purchases online. This means that websites, such as e-shops or vacation planners will need to be able to handle the crowd. Let's "Browse by Aggregated Industry" tags on Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks.

Hospitality has been tagged 285 different times, which makes it very popular. Hospitality Aggregated Report.

About 250 companies websites are now listed as engaged in different tourism areas, including hotel reservation, restaurants, travel agencies, tour operators, airlines, B&B booking sites, national tourism boards, entertainment sites, tourism and travel magazines, etc. Average performance of the websites is around 418 milliseconds during week 45 (second week of November) with 79 companies' websites showing below average results diminishing figure gong down to 4234 milliseconds with http://www.opodo.co.uk/, following by 2895 milliseconds http://www.explore.co.uk/ and http://www.syriatourism.org/, then comes http://www.travelandleisure.com/ 2268 milliseconds and http://www.restaurant-guide.com/ 2020 milliseconds average site load time.

In week 46 (the third week on November) more companies (89) dropped below the average, with the average itself dropping to 438 milliseconds. http://www.opodo.co.uk/ is again the lowest, but improved by 45 points. Explore!, Syria Tourism Travel and Leisure and Restaurant guide follow the rest with the same sequence. http://www.clareflorist.co.uk/ http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/, http://www.tourism.lt/ jointed them showing over 2 seconds average load time.

In week 48 (the last week of November and start of December) still the same sites are in the bottom of list. http://www.restaurants.co.uk/ was even off for about half of the week, showing 50.35% uptime.

Why websites performance is critical for tourism companies?

Travel planning and booking are among the most popular online activities. $115 billion US worth of travel products are sold worldwide online.

Market share of online leisure/unmanaged business travel sales in Europe, by country for 2006 (2003 figure in brackets) as follows:
UK: 32% (43%)
France: 23% (24%)
Germany: 20% (16%)
Scandinavia: 10% (9%)
Spain: 5% (4%)
Other: 9% (4%)

Websites' uptime is critical for staying competitive and pleasing customers. Mon.itor.Us aggregated benchmark feature http://indices.mon.itor.us/index/Hospitality/2007/47.html demonstrates the uptime of numbers of travel industry players. Travel and Leisure is still slow and is available 92-95% of the time. All European Travel for 2 weeks already has been experiencing problems. The same is for Norway Tourism, Virgin Trains, Italian Hotels and others.

Mon.itor.Us Benchmark is created by the Mon.itor.Us community. Anyone can use the feature to compare it with the competitors and showcase their website performance. There are many high performance websites, that consistently demonstrate their commitment to their web clients, such as Conde Naste, Amberley Musuems, Ireland B&B and others, as shown in Mon.itor.Us Hospitality Aggregated Benchmark report.