Mr. Roger LopezThis month we will take a look at the aggregator sites that are part of the benchmark. The reason we decided to put a focus on aggregators this month is because they play an important part on expectations for your sites performance. Users normally shop around and will more than likely start at the aggregator sites and then move on to the individual hotel sites. So it is fair to say that the performance of your site will be compared to the performance of the aggregator sites the user visits.
The most popular aggregator sites according to their Alexa rank are Yahoo Travel, AOL Travel, Expedia, Travelocity and Orbitz so we will take a closer look at their performance in this month’s benchmark report and compare them against the benchmark average.
The benchmark average for the month of June was 12.31 seconds for response time, 98.82% for availability and 6.53 seconds for consistency. Of the five aggregators only Yahoo Travel and Expedia performed better than the benchmark average with response times of 8.84 and 5.79 seconds respectively, their availability was 99.79 for Yahoo Travel and 99.69 for Expedia, and the consistency score was 2.14 seconds for Expedia and 3.79 seconds for Yahoo Travel.
Doing a page breakdown like we did last month reveals that one big advantage Yahoo Travel has over AOL Travel, Travelocity, Orbitz and even Expedia is the speed of the home page. While Yahoo Travel’s home page downloads in under a second, the rest of the sites deliver the page around the 2 second mark.
As it is to be expected the search results page is the slowest to load and here is where Expedia performs far better than any of the other aggregators. Expedia’s search results page downloads in about 2.5 seconds, Orbitz is the closest follower with a search results time averaging about 4 seconds. AOL Travel and Yahoo Travel deliver the results in 8 seconds on average with Travelocity having the slowest results at around 11 seconds. So already we can see Yahoo Travel loosing the advantage it had gained by having a fast home page.
Finally we come to the rates and availability page where Yahoo makes up some ground by displaying the page in under a second; Expedia has similar performance so the difference of why Yahoo Travel came in ninth place this month as opposed to Expedia who came in third is the search results page. Of the remaining sites AOL Travel displays rates and results in under a second, Travelocity averages 1.5 seconds and Orbitz averages 5 seconds.
Just like with hotel web sites, there are aggregators that are really fast and some that are not so much. When comparing your site to the benchmark ,make sure you not only focus on your direct competition but also how your site compares to these aggregators because you can be assured your customers will be doing it.
Gomez Hotel Performance Index
June Results (6/1/07 – 7/1/07)
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 98.82%, which was higher than last months average of 98.73%. Gomez considers a rate above 98% as excellent performance. In the month of June, 14 of the 25 hoteliers performed above the benchmark average. Those performing above the average include Marriott, Best Western, Radisson and Expedia. Notables that performed below the benchmark average were MGM Mirage and One Travel rounding out the bottom of the list with 97.40% availability.
Response Time Summary
The benchmark average of 12.31 seconds is a little slower than the previous months 12.26 seconds. Radisson, Marriott and Expedia continued to lead the pack for the seventh consecutive month with sub 6 second response times. Hotel-Guides is once again at the bottom of the chart with 20.42 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 6.53 seconds, which is a little improvement on last month’s average of 6.58 seconds. Expedia tops the chart with a consistency of 2.14 seconds. 14 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
