Mon.itor.US analytical group published information about website availability and performance for well known travel and trade publications. Travel and Leisure showed lowest uptime; more sites were slow ExecuteTravel being the worst.

Travel and trade magazines and journals, newspapers that provide quality content to readers, sophisticated travelers and to retailers, are integrated vastly in all marketing and PR campaigns of Governments, Tour Operators, Hotels and other major suppliers of tour product. They promote companies, destinations, governments and its relevant developments geared to tourism. Due to vast possibilities of World Wide Web the potential audience is almost unlimited and they experience web traffic load increase during summer high season. Are they ready to handle the load?

Mon.itor.US benchmarked performance of 19 online travel publications.
Merian www.merian.de
TNT Travel Down Under www.tntdownunder.com
Concierge.com www.concierge.com
TNT Magazine www.tntmagazine.com
TTG Live www.ttglive.com
GoTravel www.gotravel.com
travelgirl www.travelgirlinc.com
BTN Online www.btnonline.com/businesstravelnews
Mice http://www.miceonline.net/
Travel News Europe http://www.travelnewseurope.com/
Blue http://www.bluemagazine.com/
Road&Travel www.roadandtravel.com
Info Hub Special Travel Guide www.infohub.com
TheExpeditioner www.theexpeditioner.com
Bestfares.com www.bestfares.com
Weg www.weg.co.za
Travel Trade www.traveltrade.com
Travel&Leisure www.travelandleisure.com
ExecutiveTravel www.executivetravelmagazine.com

Availability and response time metrics were measured during 9 days and then websites were sorted from best to worst in each category.

Most of the websites demonstrate 100% uptime in 9 days period. The worst in the category was "Travel & Leisure" (www.travelandleisure.com) magazine, one of the most popular general travel and trade publication, which was available only 93.4 % of the time during the 9 days which meant almost 15 hours being unavailable for the readers. Moreover, it showed 100% availability only one day out of 9.

Info Hub Special Travel Guide also failed to deliver full service. Info Hub Travel was off for about 4.5 hours.

In response time category the best sites were Merian, TNT Travel Down Under and Concierge.com. Again Travel and Leisure was among the slowest loading websites after Executive Travel which was up 100% but was very slow to load for readers, which also factually means low availability; web visitors switch to other websites when the page loads too slowly.

Improving on-line availability and performance is continues efforts and hard work. Low uptime and speed indicate the need for additional investment into infrastructure - for example finding better hosting provider, upgrading servers or improving software architecture. Otherwise the odds are high the website is losing customers and affecting the company reputation.

More information is available at Mon.itor.US blog http://blog.mon.itor.us/?p=329.

Contact: Gayane Dallakyan
Sales and Marketing
Email: gdallakyan@monitis.com
Web: http://mon.itor.us
Web: http://monitis.com