Mr. Bill BetcherHopefully 2007 is off to a good start. This month we look back at 2006 and focus our analysis on how consistently hotel web sites performed in the Gomez Hotel Performance Index.
Hoteliers strive for consistency of experience offline across different hotels and brands. The same is true when their guests come online to book and access special programs. Online consistency measures how much variation there is (regardless of where the end-user is) in terms of how long it takes to book a reservation online. The most consistent web sites vary by 3-4 seconds meaning it might take a user 6-10 seconds to complete a reservation, while laggards vary in the 12-20 second range. For users visiting these sites it might take anywhere from 20-50 seconds for the identical transaction.
Aside from being able to deliver a positive experience, web site inconsistency can indicate larger technology infrastructure issues related to general capacity issues, or inability to handle volume during peak times or large variation in geographic performance. While there are some notable inconsistent web sites, including the MGM Mirage and Hyatt, the benchmarked sites are showing solid consistency in their online reservation systems.
The Gomez Hotel Performance Index helps hoteliers keep an eye on the competition, measure customer experiences, and accurately understand the connection between web application performance, customer behavior and business results.
Gomez Hotel Performance Index
December Results (12/1/06 – 12/31/06)
Covering the top online hoteliers and aggregators, the Gomez Hotel Performance Index measures the responsiveness, availability and consistency of the benchmark participants along these metrics (see full methodology at end of report):
* Response Time – How much time elapsed while downloading each web page in the entire multi-step transaction process?
* Success Rate – How available were the web pages in the entire multi-step transaction process?
* Consistency – How much variation existed in the response time from visit to visit for completed transactions?
Success Rate Summary
The majority of the hoteliers had a success rate above the benchmark average of 98.50 percent, remarkably the same average as last month. Gomez considers a rate above 98.5 percent as excellent performance. In the month of December, 16 of the 25 hoteliers performed above the benchmark average. Those performing above the average include Hotels.com, Priceline, and Intercontinental. Notables that performed below the benchmark average were Days Inn, Harrahs, and Ramada. Rounding out the list was MGM Mirage, with 91.65% availability.
Response Time Summary
The benchmark average of 13.55 seconds shows little difference from the month before. Marriott, Expedia, Radisson and Choice Hotels continued to lead the pack for the second consecutive month with sub 6 second response times. Las Vegas.com, One Travel, and Hotel-Guides completed the benchmark with response times of 26.84, 32.04 and 34.97 seconds respectively. MGM Mirage has yet to return to its October performance and shows a slow response time of 20.7 seconds.
Consistency Summary
Consistency is a measure of the disparity of the response time from visit to visit for completed transactions. The average consistency for the benchmark in December was 7.15 seconds, essentially flat, from 7.17 seconds in November. The most consistent hoteliers for the period were Radisson and Expedia at 3.45 and 3.48 seconds respectively. 16 of the 25 hoteliers performed above the benchmark average. Some notables below the benchmark average included MGM Mirage, Cheap Tickets, Hyatt and One Travel.
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Methodology
Whom do we measure? The Gomez Hotel Benchmark includes the following companies:
AOL Travel
Best Western
Cheap Tickets
Choice Hotels
Days Inn
Expedia
Harrahs
Hilton
Hotel-Guides
Hotels and Discounts.com
Hotels.com
Hyatt
InterContinental Hotels
Kayak
LasVegas.com
Marriott
MGM Mirage
One Travel
Orbitz
Priceline
Radisson
Ramada
Starwood
Travelocity
Yahoo Travel
What do we measure?
For each hotel Gomez follows a specific task that a hypothetical user would attempt. Tasks are predetermined to ensure that no extraneous steps in the sequence occur and that an equal comparison is made across all firms. For the Gomez Hotel Performance Index, the testing scenario reflects a user’s intention to:
Access the company's homepage
Navigate to the hotel section of the web site
Initiate a search request for a hotel room in Boston on a date greater than three months away
Select the first hotel presented in the search results
Click to view rates
End the transaction
How we measure?
Gomez measures the transaction performance of the most popular online hotel web sites and travel aggregators by running multi-page transactions every 60 minutes between 6 a.m. and midnight Eastern Time seven days a week. Tests are initiated from seven strategic Gomez co-location facilities in the United States and capture the HTML, as well as scripting and object-level data (such as JavaScript, CSS, Flash, and third-party vendor tags), for every object on every page.
With nearly seven years at Gomez in various research, customer relations and marketing roles, Product Marketing Manager Bill Betcher has continually been at the cusp of the company’s customer interface. He has been a vital and influential presence in various departments, working directly with Fortune 500 companies to assist them in the areas of customer satisfaction, competitive intelligence, performance management and benchmarking. Today, Mr. Betcher’s works within the Gomez marketing group where he oversees various marketing programs, and serves as a spokesman and interpreter of benchmarking data and trends for customers, media and analysts. Prior to Gomez, he spent two years working on a Class A Tall Ship—the "HMS Rose", making multiple trans-Atlantic crossings. He holds a B.A. in Political Science from the University of Rhode Island. Mr. Betcher can be contacted at 781-778-2762 or bbetcher@gomez.com.
