Mr. Roger Lopez

In this overview, we will break down and compare the two sites with the best performance for the month of May, Marriott and Radisson, with the bottom two, Hyatt and Hotel-Guides. The topic is similar to last month’s article, which looked at the steps in a hotel sites’ business process transaction, but will focus more on individual pages and look at aspects such as page weight and response time.

A quick review of the methodology tells us that the business process is to go to the site, find a room and see the rates. The total transaction time is the sum of all the steps in the business process. You can read the full methodology here.

The first major difference between top versus bottom is the number of pages it takes each site to get through the transaction. To get rates and room details the Marriott site takes three pages, while Radisson takes only two pages. The bottom two sites take four pages to provide the desired information. Depending on the content, the extra page can add anywhere from one to four seconds or more to the total transaction time.

Additional differences appear when looking at sample page times for the last two weeks of the month; and doing a page breakdown identifies where the application slows down. For Marriott the average of the individual page times were 0.872, 2.741 and 1.398 for the home page, search results and rate page. In their case the slowest page is the search results page. For the other top site, Radisson, the home page took 2.308 seconds on average and the search results page took 1.886 seconds. The fact that Radisson’s site is designed to display the availability and rate information in the search results page saves them the extra step and at least a second in the total transaction time.

On the opposite end of the chart are Hotel-Guides and Hyatt. Hotel-Guides has a four step transaction whose times averaged 3.616, 4.884, 7.639 and 6.025 seconds. Hyatt had similar results with 4.917, 1.808, 10.691 and 4.991 seconds. In both cases the page that took the longest time to download was the search results page averaging 7.639 for Hotel-Guides and 10.691 for Hyatt. The comparable page in the Marriott and Radisson tests were 2.741 and 1.886.

The last comparison to look at is the page weight, which is a measurement of the file size (usually in kilobytes) of a Web page. Page weights do not necessarily determine speed but they play a big role in the sites performance. Radisson has the heaviest home page of the four with a weight of 404.250 KB but the second page of their transaction is only 76.965 KB which gives the transaction a total of 481.215 KB. This is very similar to the total number of bytes for the Marriott transaction which was 451.771 KB. Hotel-Guides’ transaction was significantly heavier averaging 707.532 KB that is about 226 KB heavier than Radisson and 256 KB more than Marriott. Hyatt was the heaviest with a total transaction weight of 711.672 KB.

The basic message is that the lighter the site, the faster it will go.

Gomez Hotel Performance Index

May Results (5/1/07 – 6/1/07)

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. Covering the top online hoteliers and aggregators, it measures the responsiveness; availability and consistency of the benchmark participants along these metrics (see full methodology):

Success Rate Summary

The majority of the hoteliers had a success rate above the benchmark average of 98.73%, which was lower than last months average of 98.97%. Gomez considers a rate above 98% as excellent performance. In the month of May, 16 of the 25 hoteliers performed above the benchmark average. Those performing above the average include Marriott, Priceline, Radisson and Expedia. Notables that performed below the benchmark average were One Travel and Hyatt rounding out the bottom of the list with 95.73% availability.

Response Time Summary

The benchmark average of 12.26 seconds is almost identical to the previous months 12.25 seconds. Radisson, Marriott and Expedia continued to lead the pack for the sixth consecutive month with sub 6 second response times. Hotel-Guides edged out Hyatt to the bottom of the chart with 23.77 seconds average response time.

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 May was 6.58 seconds, which is down a little from last month’s average of 6.50 seconds. Marriott tops the chart with a consistency of 2.35 seconds. 15 of the 25 hoteliers performed above the benchmark average. Notables below the benchmark average include Hyatt and One Travel.

Roger Lopez is a Benchmark Analyst in Gomez’s Professional Services Group. His role includes analyzing benchmark data reported by Gomez ExperienceFirstTM network and working directly with customers to optimize their testing. Prior to joining Gomez just over a year ago, Roger held positions as a technology support executive at TTG, Inc., a business territory design software company and in search engine optimization for BizX, a bartering service for online marketplaces. Roger has a degree in Systems Engineering from the Universidad de las Americas. Roger can be reached at rlopez@gomez.com