British online holiday shops regularly closed for business

WatchMouse research shows that 79% of British vacation booking sites are unavailable for more than 1 hour per month

London, May 16, 2006 – More and more people are booking their holidays online, but the typical 24/7 travel shop in the UK is not the norm yet. Airlines sites did a far better job in the same period.

Only two travel sites are always up and running; ebookers.com and thomascook.com. Travelocity.co.uk, virginholidays.co.uk and expedia.co.uk have a good uptime of over 99,9%. But the rest of the companies researched perform below this industry standard rate, with the worst performer - the site traveljungle.co.uk- being unavailable for an equivalent of almost 3 days (69 hours) per month.

These are the conclusions drawn from the WatchMouse Site Performance Index for British holiday websites, created by WatchMouse, a company supplying monitoring services for websites and e-commerce applications worldwide. In order to determine the extent to which the sites achieve a satisfactory uptime, WatchMouse monitored the sites continuously between April 6 and May 9, 2006.

During the same period, WatchMouse monitored the British airlines websites. These perform better generally: 53% was above industry standards and 7 have perfect 100% availability. This shows the airlines realize the need for having a site that is continuously available.

Mark Pors, Chief Technology Officer at WatchMouse: "Nowadays 24 hour availability is achievable, so there is no need for a site being down. For companies who only do business online, and the website is a single source of revenue, downtime means you have no business."

He continues: “We are now entering the period in which traditionally most of the last minute bookings take place. This means the sites can expect even more traffic, with a negative impact on the site availability. Recent research has shown that e-shoppers are impatient, when a site does not download within 30 seconds, 75% of people take their money elsewhere.* So companies may not get a second chance.”

A complete overview of the monitoring results of the WatchMouse Site Availability Index, listing all the sites monitored, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2006/travelUK.php and http://www.watchmouse.com/en/SPI/2006/airlinesUK.php

*) research by TelecityRedbus, April 2006