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.