Yahoo Has Best Uptime for Travel Sites

Travel.yahoo.com hasn't had any downtime thus far in 2008, while other major travel sites have been offline for up to 10 hours this year, according to a new survey of 16 popular travel web sites by the uptime monitoring service Pingdom. The results show a substantial difference in availability between major sites. Quikbook.com has had the most downtime in 2008, being unavailable for a total of more than 10 hours, which is twice as much as Expedia.com, which had the second-worst availability on the list. The table below shows the downtime for the period January 1 to May 15:

Significantly, 10 out of the top 16 web sites have uptime of 99.9 percent or better in 2008.

US online travel sales are expected to reach $110 billion in 2008 according to the research firm PhoCusWright, making downtime more expensive for travel web sites than for many other types of online services. There are also plenty of online travel options for customers if one website fails to respond, amplifying the importance of uptime.

The websites were tested using Pingdom's monitoring network, which has servers both in the US and Europe. Any performance issues were s confirmed from two different geographic locations before a web site was considered unavailable. Tests were performed every 5 minutes, around the clock.