So the response time of your online travel business’ website is a second or two slower than your closest competitor. Nothing to be overly concerned about, right? Think again.

Recent research from Gomez, the Web performance division of Compuware, reveals that today’s consumers have higher expectations for their overall Web experiences than ever before, including during periods of peak traffic when they know a website is likely inundated by visitors. In fact, 78 percent of consumers reported switching to a competitive site due to poor Web performance at peak times.

Peak Internet Usage Trends

Poor Web performance during peak traffic times puts customer satisfaction, brand and revenues on the line – precisely when online travel sites often have the most to gain (or lose). With consumers scrutinizing every dollar spent on travel and leisure, online travel sites can scarcely afford to give a reason to switch to a competitor.

Other key findings from Gomez’s research include:

- Consumers do the lion’s share of their online spending during peak traffic times. In fact, 35 percent of online travel users make bookings during peak times including the summer (Memorial Day, Labor Day, 4th of July), the winter holidays, spring break and school holidays.

- Consumers’ expectations for quality Web performance were not met during 2009, with slowness emerging as the number one performance issue. 24 percent of online travel users had a negative experience on a travel website during a 2009 peak travel season.

- Unacceptable website performance during peak traffic times leads to a slew of negative actions and perceptions on the part of consumers, including not only the tendency to leave for a competitor’s site, but also being less likely to return to a site, having a less positive perception of the company and/or discussing the experience with family, friends and peers, or online on social networks. 53 percent of consumers using the Web for purchasing vacations, flights and hotels will only tolerate one or two bad Web experiences during peak times before booking on a different travel website.

Why Web Performance Matters – and Why It’s So Challenging

Even performance lapses that may seem slight can have a severely negative business impact. Consider what a “mere” two percent downtime can mean to your business. At that rate, your site would effectively be out of business eight days over the course of a year. For an online travel site generating $100,000 a day, that translates into a loss of $800,000 in yearly revenue. And research tells us that it’s not good enough for your site to simply be available – it also has to be fast. Aberdeen Group recently determined that a one second delay in response time can reduce online conversions by seven percent. For a major hotelier offering online room searches and bookings on a global basis, the revenue impact can be substantial.

However, ensuring superior Web experiences – whether during periods of peak or normal traffic—can be extremely difficult. Today’s websites and applications are increasingly complex, having rapidly evolved from limited functionality tools to “composites” incorporating content and services from inside the data center as well as from third party service providers beyond the firewall.

For example, a hotel website today may incorporate numerous services from third parties including flight reservations, car reservations, photos and tours of event settings and even budget calculators for event planning. While these features can enable a richer, more satisfying online experience, they can also present a liability since external components are estimated to comprise an overwhelmingly large portion of the time a consumer waits for a website or application to load.

Many online travel sites are global businesses, meaning their Web applications traverse long, complex and widely varied paths (including ISPs, CDNs, connections speeds, carriers, devices, desktops and browsers) before ultimately being delivered to consumers around the world. Together with third party services, these network elements comprise a complex Web application delivery chain. In the event of poor performance, consumers won’t care who or what element is to blame. They will simply blame you, the online travel site, putting your customer satisfaction, brand image and revenues in jeopardy.

In order to ensure consistent, strong performance for consumers around the world, online travel sites must proactively manage performance and stress test across the entire chain—or all of the elements that ultimately touch the end-user’s experience—not just the elements behind the firewall.

However, it’s not just the performance of the traditional “fixed” Web that online travel sites need to be concerned about. Across industries, the mobile Web is growing at a breathtaking pace. By giving consumers the “anytime, anywhere” convenience of searching for and booking travel accommodations, online travel sites have a huge opportunity to leverage the mobile Web to attract new customers; forge deeper, stronger relationships with existing ones and increase sales.

But beware, recent studies show that consumers increasingly expect their mobile Web experiences to match the excellence of PC’s. Consumers expect to be able to search for, and book, travel accommodations on the mobile Web in the time it takes to wait at a cross-walk or hail a cab. Unfortunately, today’s mobile Web comes nowhere near the levels of speed and reliability that characterize the PC Web. Online travel sites that fail to manage mobile Web performance can risk significant investments in mobile Web initiatives, while inadvertently trading a lucrative opportunity for a significant liability.

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