Gomez Performance Index For Hotels: June 15 - July 15, 2005
The prevailing goal for hoteliers in the Performance Index is overall consistency. With few notable exceptions, the benchmarked sites on our index demonstrate very predictable average application speed and success rates.
Since January 2005, the trend for the Hotel portals (Expedia, Hotels.com, Orbitz, and Travelocity) is a slight increase in overall response time by approximately 1 second on average. We feel this is due to a increase in undecided users starting their hotel search at these portals. The main brands show a trend (Choice Hotels, Hilton, Marriott, Ramada, and Starwood) of a faster response time of 1 second since January 2005.
To read the complete methodology for the Hotels GPI, please click here.
Success Rate
Even when success rates dipped among benchmarked hoteliers, the decrease could be isolated to a limited, discrete (but extremely noticeable) speed and/or availability event that was usually resolved in less than two hours. For instance, the top 5 hoteliers (Marriott, Hotels.com, Travelocity, Choice Hotels, and Starwood) in success rate indicate that they will almost always complete a customer transaction.
The hoteliers who had less than a 98% success rate suffered outages where for one or two specific days their success rate dipped to 96 % to 90 %.
Response Time
The top five hoteliers in response time (Expedia, Marriott, Starwood, Hilton, and Choice Hotels) show the fastest and most consistent performance, indicating that consumers can always expect fast response from these hoteliers.
Hoteliers in the middle of the pack are more transparent, exposing surges to their customers during the work week, but smooth out over the weekend. It seems that these Hoteliers with the slowest response time exhibited more variation in their results, indicating that their infrastructure requirements may need boosting to achieve the response time nirvana: the flat trend line.