Comparing Performance for Popular B&B Reservation sites in Europe and USA

On March 23, 2007 MON.ITOR.US published a blog named “Flower Delivery Websites: What’s the cost of downtime?” http://blog.mon.itor.us/?p=247 that talks about customer experiences with flower delivery services during one of their busiest business seasons the 1st of February until 10th March 2007. It showed that some sites were down from 23 minutes to even 5 hours and 15 minutes.
Here is similar research done for the top 12 Google ranked B&B reservations sites for availability and uptime right before the active tourism season began in April. Tourists increasingly use online services to book their holidays. Hundreds of millions unique visitors visit tourism sites to make reservations every month. Those running small hotels, bed and breakfasts set up a websites with an e-commerce capability. Bellow is the statistical information about popular B&B reservation sites:

BedandBreakfast.com (worldwide listing of B&Bs)
BnBFinder.com (worldwide B&B listing)
Visitus B&B UK (UK B&B listing)
Scotland’s Best (B&Bs in Scotland)
BnB, Switzerland (B&B listing in Switzerland)
Bed-And-Breakfast.it (B&B listing in Italy)
B&B Ireland (B&B listing in Ireland)
Ireland B&B Network (B&Bs in Ireland)
BBCanada.com (B&Bs in Canada)


The first fifteen days out of thirty shows a combined result of 100% uptime, and the rest of the days the sites were down for certain hours. Overall outage was 750 hours or about 31 days! Interesting to note, that all the outages occurred during the second half of April and the worse for all were the 18th and 20th of April.

100 % success rate for all the days showed:
Visitus B&B UK
BnB Switzerland
Scotland's Best
Ireland B&B Network
The National Network

Two of the successful websites are hosted on Linux and two on Windows servers. The remaining one is hosted on FreeBSD.

Other websites showed:
99.97% - BBCanada.com and B&B - UK, US, etc.
99.89 % - BedandBreakfast.com
99.77% - B&B Hotels
99.73% - B&B Ireland and BnBFinder.com
99.37% - Bed-And-Breakfast.it

Three of the above websites are hosted on Linux and three on Windows servers. The average uptime for the websites on Linux is 99.74% and similarly the average uptime for Windows is 99.71%.

The table below demonstrates full uptime reports for all twelve B&B reservation sites:
B&B Ireland shows very low availability in May from USA (49%) and Germany (48.8%). On May 4 and the 5th the site was inaccessible from Germany and on May 4-8 the site was inaccessible from the USA.
The National Network (US and Canada)
B&B Hotels (188 hotels in Germany and in France)
B&B (France, UK & Ireland)

How do the reservation sites know their ultimate customer experience? What did the customers experience when they enter the sites to make the reservations? How to measure your web success of the Internet?
The chart below shows combined results for the above twelve websites by day in month April.

It’s noteworthy that BnBFinder.com had network problem one day since it shows outage from Europe only for 30 days.