Gómez Performance Index For Hotels: December 15, 2003 - January 15, 2004

To read the complete methodology for the Hotels GPI, please click here.

A new response time leader emerged in this edition of the Gómez Performance Index (GPI): outperformed the multi-step hotel room search benchmark and bested a group of nine top competitors. Meanwhile, Starwood.com proved to be the most reliable site, posting a 99.9% success rate during the December 15, 2003 to January 15, 2004 timeframe.

The Marriott site processed all pages in the transaction on average in just over four seconds across a high-speed Internet connection. Rivals Expedia, Choice Hotels and Hotels.com, however, were close on Marriott's heels in terms of end-to-end response time. Expedia placed second in our response time rankings with an average transaction time of 5.1 seconds -- a full second behind Marriott.com. Choice Hotels followed suit with an average transaction time of 5.9 seconds, while Hotels.com placed fourth at 7.4 seconds, which marks the separation between the fastest performers and the rest of the field.

Orbitz.com ranked fifth on the index, just missing the 11-second industry benchmark. Ramada, Best Western and Travelocity trail in the response time rankings; each site weighed in with transaction averages above 15 seconds for the online hotel room search task. Overall, the industry average increased by a second and a half over the previous Hotels GPI , due largely to these three industry laggards.

A total of five companies monitored by Gómez maintained 99% transaction success rates over the 30-day time period beginning December 15, 2003. The success rate metric measures the percentage of successful tests during the measurement timeframe that were executed without encountering errors such as connection timeouts, server unavailability or DNS lookup failures. Starwood was the top performer, with near perfect availability of 99.9%; Hotels.com was a close second at 99.8%.

Choice Hotels, Hilton and Best Western all underperformed the benchmark average with average success rates of 97% or lower (Travelocity's success rate was inconclusive during this time period). Although these success rate averages were lower than the industry average, the most prevalent error across all of these sites was a Socket Timeout, where data transfer stalled for greater than 25 seconds. Thus, patient customers may have been able to complete their transactions if they were willing to wait.

Gómez, the Internet Performance Management Company, is a trusted leader in measuring effectiveness of corporate and e-commerce Web sites for the world's largest companies. Since 1997, Gómez has provided performance measurement, benchmarking and strategic insight to help build successful e-businesses. From the industry's strongest, most respected heritage of Internet performance measurement, Gómez -- via the Gómez Performance Network -- is the only company to monitor across last-mile connections, delivering faster, actionable intelligence through its proprietary service. To learn more, www.gomez.com.

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