Hospitality Industry is the Most Popular and Shows High Performance in Mon.itor.Us Indices

The most popular industries in Mon.itor.Us Industry Benchmarks are Hospitality (307 sites monitored), followed by Retail (253 sites monitored) and Technology (241 sites monitored).

Average availability of Hospitality sites is the highest - 96.76%, with 416 milliseconds response time. Retail sites are up for 98.94% with average page load of 413 milliseconds. Surprisingly, Technology sites are the third. They demonstrate 94.98% uptime with the lowest average page load of 389 milliseconds.

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.

Online Marketplace Performance During Valentine Day Shopping Peak

As today's shoppers become more discriminating about their interactions online, the e-commerce sites are required to provide more consistent, positive and more sophisticated experience to their visitors. According to a study conducted by Forrester Research, Inc. among 150 retailers the top priorities include fixing website designs and performance issues and improving the efficiency of online marketing.

Web shopping marketplace traffic increases especially during holidays. Soon Valentine’s Day will approach and from a commercial standpoint it is one of the most lucrative holidays for businesses. According to the National Retail Federation’s 2008 Valentine’s Day Consumer Intentions and Actions Survey, conducted by BIGresearch summarized at MC Marketing Charts on average, each consumer plans to spend $122.98 on Valentine’s Day (similar to last year’s $119.67) resulting in total spending of $17.02 billion.

Valentine’s Day is big business for companies who specialize in seasonal gift items. The most profitable Valentine's Day items are gift cards, candy, flowers and jewelry.


Last year Mon.itor.Us published a report on Flower Delivery Websites: What’s the cost of downtime? Here it summarized information about the availability and performance of 13 of the most popular flower delivery websites during the Valentine season.

Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks these days to show website performance statistics of online shopping marketplace for websites tagged as "greeting cards," "chocolate stores on-line," "jewelry stores," "gift shops Valentine day," "retail." "flowers and gift sites." During the peak of the online shopping season it is possible to compare websites performance and find out how prepared are online shoppers for growing traffic.

Greeting cards sites showed quite good results, but http://www.bellaonline.com_http/ for example was the slowest in a 2 week reports. While several websites in Chocolate stores online, such as http://www.serenatachocolates.com/ and http://www.chocolatefetish.com/ had some availability issues, and were up only 93% and 97% respectively. Jewelry stores report the following websites http://www.glimmerrocks.com/, http://www.preciousglow.com/, http://www.topjewelshops.com,/ http://www.claddaghstore.com/ loaded below 2000 milli-seconds in average. http://www.topjewelshops.com/ was available for 96% of the time. In the Gift shops http://www.valentinesgift.co.uk/ website showed even lower availability last week at 86%, meaning almost 24 hours downtime. From Flower Sites http://www.florist.com/, and http://www.fromyouflowers.com/, http://www.virtualflorist.com/, http://www.1800flowers.com/, http://www.virtualflowers.com/ and others were really good in both website load speed and uptime last week. However, http://www.flowersdirect.co.uk/ showed below average load speed and 96% availabilty.

Availability and performance are important indicators for websites' web success.

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.

Travel Media Sites Experience Performance Issues

Mon.itor.Us Benchmarks are useful tool to generate and receive reports on industry web availability and trends. Users can compare and evaluate how the sector players demonstrate their competitive advantage in high uptime and excellent performance.

We visited Travel Media Sites to find out how they operate presenting travel related information to there customers. According to the results of monitoring in the 1st week in January, the highest uptime was at http://www.travelgirlinc.com/, which was at 98.54%. While all the other ones, including http://www.btnonline.com/, http://www.traveltrade.com/, http://www.tntmagazine.com/, http://www.gotravel.com/ showed lower figures. The table also displays the fact that all the sites had longer time outages in January's 1st week, then a week before. Obviously they are experiencing performance issues.

Free website monitoring by Mon.itor.Us helps website owners to find out these problems on-time and correct them before they adversely affect their business reputation. It's worth visiting Mon.itor.Us Benchmark Reports to browse to learn what's happening in the different industries and sectors. By creating your own benchmark, site owners can every week get generated report on sites they benchmarked to be able to compare and gain competitive advantages by showing higher performance and uptime.

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.

Hotel Reservation Sites Show Lower Uptime

Revisitng Mon.itor.Us Benhmarks one of the popular tags called Top Hotels Sites shows that http://www.hotels.com/ and http://www.hotels.it/ had been experiencing performance problems three weeks in a row.
For example http://www.hotels.com/ were 32 and 40 milliseconds slower (from US and EU locations respectively) in week 46, compared to week 45. Website load speed was improved in week 46 by 103 and 136 milliseconds respectively, but in week 48 it slowed down again by 90 and 58 milliseconds respectively. Uptime of http://www.hotels.com/ went down from 100% to 99.5% in week 47 and to 99.2% in week 48. About 11 hours off!

The diagnostics of the problem would help to find the reason and correct the situation.

On 28 November the monitoring report showed for example that the site was down from USA and Germany several times during the day. It was also quite slower Austria 5.6 - 6.5 seconds load time. See the chart below:

Mon.itor.Us also provides free visitor statistics counter. If calculating hourly traffic how much visitors has the site has been loosing during 11 hours downtime.

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.

Destination websites at evidence of 208.7% internet usage growth rate

With the enormous growth of internet users worldwide from 208.7% compared to the year 2000, indicates that websites have become major business generators. There are 1,114,274,426 internet users worldwide representing about 16.9% of the world population as of March 2007.

Let's analyze uptime of the European Tourism Boards' websites, based on Mon.itor.Us benchmarks. In May 2007 Mon.itor.Us published a report Not all European Tourism Boards are ready for summer rush. It showed low performance for Finland and Denmark country sites just before the start of active tourism season. Mon.itor.Us indicated the necessity to monitor the websites for knowing and prevention of any problems that would hinder visitors to use the website and potential visitors to those countries.

Let's visit back Mon.itor.Us benchmarks and find the report. It is tagged under Tourism/Tourism Boards. By the way, these tags and reports are customer created, so anyone can create benchmark reports. And most importantly it's free. You can notice that these reports are generated weekly, and the history of the previous weeks are available to browse. 9 weeks' reports are already in history.

The forty-second week report shows that already in one week the Belgium Official Tourism site has been down about 10% of the time and the performance of the website is down by 9.88 points. The Iceland Board follows them, and shows 90.35% uptime and its performance had worsened by 9.65 points. Syria and Lithuania had been up, but quite slow, and their performance was down by 137 ms and 67 ms respectively.

Growth of travel web sites in the past year has soared by 25%

Now travel planning and booking are among the most popular online activities. Let's just browse the facts.

•US$115 billion worth of travel products are sold worldwide online
•Online leisure/unmanaged business travel sales in the US, Europe and the Asia-Pacific region in 2005 (in billions and % increase vs. previous year)
–US: US$ 65.4 billion (25.5%)
–Europe: US$ 34.5 billion (49.0%)
–Asia Pacific: US$ 15.9 billion (31.4%)
•9 out of 10 consumers in the US used the web in the summer of 2005 to plan trips or purchase

Mon.itor.Us benchmarks aggregated reports which provides very useful information and the possibility to compare weekly reports for all hospitality related sites that are benchmarked. This week for example the Iceland tourism board site was available only 90.35%, Belguim Tourism Board was at 90.12% and the most popular tourism and travel media Travel and Leisure magazine had only 85.55% availability.

Not all European Tourist Boards are ready for summer rush

Tourists do lots of research on the web before traveling and National Tourist Boards websites are the number one web destinations. How well are National Tourism Boards’ websites prepared to pick out the best vacation seasons? MonitorUS conducted research to check speed and availability of European countries official websites out of several locations in the US and Europe.
National Tourist Boards’ websites have become very significant and critical gateways; they make the first impression, share information across geographical, linguistic and technological boundaries, creating the electronic market place. A good performing website entices potential tourists to use their services and to come to their country. Effective websites show close to 100% availability. MonitorUS has been monitoring European National Tourist Board sites during the 1-12 June 2007 and showed the following uptime results.

Finland http://www.visitfinland.com/ was at 91.5% which meant that the site was down more than a day during the for mentioned period, and while we might think, 98% is good it actually means the site being down approximately 6 hours during 12 days! How many customers were lost during that time? High uptime is not only possible it is absolutely necessary to be effective. Finland http://www.visitfinland.com/ and Denmark http://www.visitdenmark.com/ official tourism sites seem to have had serious issues during the first twelve days in June.

Mon.itor.Us also measures website load speed which is an important metric in delivering a quality web experience. Web customers aren’t going to stand in the “queue” to reach you. Slow loading means longer time waiting in the line. Table below presents official websites’ load speed for 12 days.

Several sites demonstrated poor speed which is almost equal to being down; the worst were Greece and UK websites.
On-going monitoring and measurement of website uptime and load speed is a best practice, if businesses want to be competitive. It is not only important to monitor your own sites but also sites which directly or indirectly may affect your performance. For example tour operators or hotels’ website traffic may be significantly affected by the Country Tourist websites low availability.

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.