Synthetic Monitoring

Simulate visitor interaction with your site to monitor the end user experience.

View Product Info

FEATURES

Simulate visitor interaction

Identify bottlenecks and speed up your website.

Learn More

Real User Monitoring

Enhance your site performance with data from actual site visitors

View Product Info

FEATURES

Real user insights in real time

Know how your site or web app is performing with real user insights

Learn More

Infrastructure Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Instant visibility into servers, virtual hosts, and containerized environments

View Infrastructure Monitoring Info
Comprehensive set of turnkey infrastructure integrations

Including dozens of AWS and Azure services, container orchestrations like Docker and Kubernetes, and more 

Learn More

Application Performance Monitoring Powered by SolarWinds AppOptics

Comprehensive, full-stack visibility, and troubleshooting

View Application Performance Monitoring Info
Complete visibility into application issues

Pinpoint the root cause down to a poor-performing line of code

Learn More

Log Management and Analytics Powered by SolarWinds Loggly

Integrated, cost-effective, hosted, and scalable full-stack, multi-source log management

 View Log Management and Analytics Info
Collect, search, and analyze log data

Quickly jump into the relevant logs to accelerate troubleshooting

Learn More

Record sales and high competition make downtime expensive for travel websites

With online travel sales set to reach $94 billion in 2007, downtime is more costly than ever for travel websites. A four-week survey of 16 travel websites shows that only four had no downtime.

Online travel sales are at an all-time high and the market is becoming increasingly competitive. In this competitive climate it is more important than ever before for travel websites to not have any issues and always be available to their customers. Website downtime is basically the same thing as closing the shop and will drive both sales and customers away to competing services.

We (Pingdom) have performed a four-week survey of popular travel websites, which shows a large difference in availability between the different sites. OneTravel.com turned out to have the most downtime by being unavailable for a total of two and a half hours, while four of the surveyed websites had no downtime at all. Those sites were Travel.com, Priceline.com, Site59.com and LastMinuteTravel.com. Giants Travelocity.com, Orbitz.com and Hotels.com had a mere five minutes of downtime.

Uptime chart of travel websites

US online travel sales will reach $94 billion in 2007 according to eMarketer. This means that downtime costs more money for travel websites than for many other types of online services. Also, since there is so much competition, there are plenty of options for customers to take their business elsewhere if one website fails to respond.

That said, most websites in the survey had very good availability, so it is clear that they are taking the issue seriously. Ten had less than six minutes of downtime during the period. Only OneTravel.com, Kayak.com, Hotwire.com and StaTravel.com had more than one hour of downtime.

This survey also shows that not even Yahoo is perfect. Yahoo Travel (travel.yahoo.com) was unavailable for a total of 11 minutes.

How much money a travel website loses as a result of downtime depends on many factors, such as the time of day and the amount of visitors that get turned away. Availability issues may also damage the trust users have in a website, leading them to choose another travel service in the future. As competition between travel websites heats up, the negative effects of downtime will most likely increase.

About the survey:
The survey period was May 22 to June 19, a total of four weeks. Expedia.com was originally part of the survey, but the results have been omitted since the service blocked monitoring during part of the test and the results would therefore not be fair. To be considered down, a website would either not answer within 30 seconds, or reply with an error.

Introduction to Observability

These days, systems and applications evolve at a rapid pace. This makes analyzi [...]

Webpages Are Getting Larger Every Year, and Here’s Why it Matters

Last updated: February 29, 2024 Average size of a webpage matters because it [...]

A Beginner’s Guide to Using CDNs

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Websites have become larger and more complex [...]

The Five Most Common HTTP Errors According to Google

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Sometimes when you try to visit a web page, [...]

Page Load Time vs. Response Time – What Is the Difference?

Last updated: February 28, 2024 Page load time and response time are key met [...]

Monitor your website’s uptime and performance

With Pingdom's website monitoring you are always the first to know when your site is in trouble, and as a result you are making the Internet faster and more reliable. Nice, huh?

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL

MONITOR YOUR WEB APPLICATION PERFORMANCE

Gain availability and performance insights with Pingdom – a comprehensive web application performance and digital experience monitoring tool.

START YOUR FREE 30-DAY TRIAL
Start monitoring for free