European airlines regularly 'off the air'

WatchMouse research shows that 48% of European airlines websites are regularly unavailable

Utrecht, May 16 2006 ? More and more people are booking their flights online, but the typical 24/7 flight shop is not the norm yet in Europe.

52% of the European airline websites monitored have a good uptime of over 99,9%. But the rest of the companies from the research, perform below this industry standard rate, with ten sites dropping below a 98% uptime, which equals a downtime of more than 16 hours per month. This group contains airlines from different countries in Europe, such as Germania Flug, Air Europa, Dutchbird and VG Airlines and Virgin Express.

These are the conclusions drawn from the WatchMouse Site Performance Index of the airlines in Europe, 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.

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 vacation bookings take place. This means these 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 the 145 sites monitored, can be found on http://www.watchmouse.com/SPI/2006/airlinesEU.php

*) research by TelecityRedbus, April 2006