Holiday Travel 2015: Did The Travel Websites Deliver?

Airlines saw an additional 65,000 passengers per day over Thanksgiving. Were their websites up to the task of keeping up with all of that extra traffic?

How Did Airline Websites Perform During The Busy Holiday Travel Season?

Every year, families across the United States and the world make the journey to visit their families for the holidays. With airlines completely booked and bumper to bumper traffic on the highways, it can be hard to get where you want to go with ease. We performed website monitoring on some of the biggest travel sites in the United States to see how they were able to handle the influx of travelers.

Between November 20th and December 1st, an estimated 25.3 million people traveled by airplane, the highest number since 2007. About 10% of these people were flying internationally. This amounts to 2.1 million people per day, an increase of 65,000 passengers per day compared to the rest of the year. This increase led to many busy people during the holiday travel time.

Our website monitoring showed Uptime of 100% of the top airlines and travel sites during this 12 day period.

Our Key Findings:

Slowest Websites
Orbitz – 6.22s
Jet Blue – 7.42s
Expedia – 13.21s

Fastest Websites
Southwest Airlines – 3.52s
Delta – 4.43s
American Airlines – 5.47s

All of the websites, however, fell short of the target load time of 2 seconds. We monitored the home pages of the websites listed for uptime and performance throughout the Thanksgiving holiday travel period. Full page checks were used to calculate how long it took the page to fully populate with information. If pages aren’t loading at an optimum speed your customers could decide to go somewhere else. We’ve all done it before – Whether it was a funny video shared on facebook or the review page for a local car mechanic, if the website doesn’t load within a few seconds we’ve already moved on. Uptrends lets you know when your site isn’t operating at full capacity, so you don’t ever have to worry about it.

Uptrends uses a global network of over 141 checkpoints serving over 2,500 customers in 45 countries. We work hard to reduce downtime and increase performance. If you’re interested in trying us out, we offer a free and easy 30 day trial!

Relevant Sources:

The Tech Times

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