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Travel and Tourism: The Best and Worst Performing Websites

Posted: 10th April 2019 12:04

Travel and Tourism is a huge industry, and getting away has become a rite of passage for many people. Indeed, with the online revolution, over 80 percent of British people who booked a holiday in 2018 did so over the internet, and the statistics are similar in other countries as well. Flights and hotel rooms – often booked together – are sold based on real-time availability, which relies on a fully-functioning website to make a successful booking.

For people who receive a dissatisfactory online travel booking experience, Akamai found that 79% would avoid that website and almost two-thirds would make a booking on another site instead. This clearly indicates the need for travel sites to operate efficiently, quickly, and with minimal web hosting downtime.

Accordingly, StatusCake examined the average performance for travel websites to see which were the best (and worst performers). Let’s dive into the details.

How Were Sites Tested?

StatusCake is a business that offers uptime website monitoring. It examined 47 travel sites from January 21 to February 21, 2019.

All sites in the study were checked every 10 minutes to see whether they responded. If they did, this was noted and if they didn’t, it adjusted the uptime percentage.

Response time from the web address lookup to when the site was loaded in a web browser (excluding external elements like JavaScript) was calculated to get a picture of the quickest and slowest sites.

The Results

The travel sites tested had an average uptime of 99.91% during the testing period.

The minimum average uptime set by StatusCake is 99.90%. Therefore, the sector’s average only just beat this benchmark. The uptime result isn’t great. It still means six full hours of downtime every month and three days over a 12-month period.

The average site load time was 0.46 seconds. This is much better than the sub-two second time required to maintain the interest of most visitors.

The Best Performers

23 out of 47 sites suffered zero downtime during the testing period.

The list of sites included:

The fastest site (Carnival Corp.) loaded in 0.08 seconds and the slowest uptime performer (CV Villas) loaded in 2.03 seconds. Almost all the 100% uptime performers had extremely fast loading times too.

The Worst Performers

About half the sites tested experienced some downtime.

18 of the remaining 24 sites not in the top performing group achieved at least a 99.90% average uptime.
Surprisingly, First Choice (firstchoice.co.uk) was one of the poorer performers with a 99.29% uptime yet a pleasing 0.31 second loading time. The bottom performer was NST Group (nstgroup.co.uk) with a disappointing 98.74% uptime but a respectable loading time of 0.48 seconds.

Conclusion

The majority of travel and tourism websites studied had an average uptime of 99.90% or better. Indeed, almost half had zero downtime over a month of study, which is impressive. Only six sites failed to achieve an average uptime of 99.90%.

Site loading times were impressive. Almost no sites failed to achieve a two second loading time and the majority came in well under one second. Overall, travel customers are likely to be pleased with the performance of travel sites.