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.