Gómez Hotel Industry Benchmark - Homepage Data - June 2003
The Gómez Hotel Industry Homepage Benchmark for June reveals several key trends. (1) Response time averages dipped slightly across high speed connections during the month of June. Network data center times exceeded 4 seconds, while corporate/Institutional Response times rose to 7.75 seconds.(2) Interestingly, the dial-up connection average for all hotel sites was appreciably faster compared with the previous two months.
The Gómez Hotel Industry Homepage Benchmark for June reveals several key trends.
- Response time averages dipped slightly across high speed connections during the month of June. Network data center times exceeded 4 seconds, while corporate/Institutional Response times rose to 7.75 seconds.
- Interestingly, the dial-up connection average for all hotel sites was appreciably faster compared with the previous two months. These trends could indicate decreased visitation to the hotel sites or simply fewer people concurrently attempting to access sites throughout the month.
- The Starwood Web site climbed from number five to number three in this month's Network Data Center response time ranking.
Gómez also added two new data points to this month's benchmark report. The first is a Residential High Speed Connection metric that represents users accessing hotel Web sites through cable modems (typically from home). The second is the inclusion of availability rankings for each hotel site included on the benchmark.
Below are Gómez availability rankings for each hotel site listed on the benchmark. Availability is a measure of the percentage of time Gómez synthetic tests were able to access the Web site without encountering any fatal errors, such as navigational problems, page not found malfunctions or other types of server side faults.
Analyst Comments: The industry averages for hotel Web site availability indicate that sites are highly accessible to the vast majority of customers. For each of our four line speed connections, availability exceeded 99.4%, which is well within the acceptable range. Although no one likes to visit a Web site and find its pages unavailable, during the month of June, less than 1 in 100 visitors met with this result.
Although availability metrics for this industry are very good, it is not uncommon to see percentages in the 99th percentile. Using performance monitoring tools such as the Gómez Performance Network, Webmasters can be alerted of site performance problems in real time. Alerts identify application or network infrastructure malfunctions, enabling Gómez clients to proactively reroute traffic to alternate servers or resolve problems before they significantly impact site visitors' online experience, which undercuts Internet channel effectiveness.
Gómez helps companies understand the impact of performance as well as usability and functionality relative to the online customer experience. The site elements we benchmark are instrumental in shaping overall customer satisfaction, and drive customers' willingness to utilize the online channel. Gómez follows the travel, retail and financial services industries, measuring the business effectiveness of Internet offerings. To learn more, visit