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.