Compuware Launches New Web Performance Benchmarks For Travel Industry
Detroit-based Compuware Corp. (Nasdaq: CPWR), the technology performance company, Thursday announced the launch of new Web site and mobile performance benchmarks for the travel industry.
The new U.S. travel benchmarks allow travel organizations to compare and track Web site performance against competitors and market leaders so they can compete more effectively and meet consumers' expectations for fast and reliable web and mobile site experiences.
EMarketer estimates that the number of U.S. consumers researching and booking travel online is still growing - more than 114 million people will research travel online this year, and 93.9 million will book it. Due to increasing pressure and competition for travel businesses to convert Internet shoppers to bookings, travel organizations are focusing on improving web and mobile site performance.
Today's travel consumers demand high levels of website interactivity, rich destination previews, and dynamic applications and content, so travel companies must make their Web sites as engaging and dynamic as possible. With consumers showing less and less patience for slow-performing sites, travel organizations are pressured to deliver all of this functionality today.
With an estimated 25 million U.S. mobile users researching travel information on their mobile devices before making a trip this year, mobile devices are expected to transform every phase in the travel process. However, according to Compuware's benchmark research, only two out of the top 19 travel sites are currently meeting consumer expectations of providing mobile page load times of five seconds or less.
The new U.S. Travel benchmarks include:
* Airlines Last Mile
* Hotels and Resorts Last Mile
* Online Travel Agent Last Mile, Flight Search, Hotel Search
* U.S. Travel Mobile Site Index
"Web and mobile travel sites are dramatically enhancing their self service travel planning experience," said Jonathan Ranger, Gomez benchmark practice director at Compuware. "Benchmarking your Web and mobile site performance against both your competitors' and the industry's performance offers strategic intelligence to compete effectively online while also enhancing the customer experience, supporting cost control and maximizing bookings in a rapidly evolving environment."
In addition to the newly launched U.S. Travel benchmarks, several existing travel benchmarks have been re-aligned with the latest top traffic data benchmark from comScore and renamed to better reflect key travel categories.
The realigned U.S. Travel benchmarks include:
* Airlines: Home Page, Search
* Hotels and Resorts: Home Page, Search
* Online Travel Agent: Home Page
Compuware Gomez Benchmarks are an impartial, quantitative measurement of comparative Web and mobile site performance and rank the Home Page, Transactions and Mobile performance results across many industries across three key metrics:
* Response Time -- measures the time elapsed while downloading a page or an entire multistep transaction process
* Availability -- measures the percentage of successfully completed tests out of total test attempts for the measurement period
* Consistency -- measures the standard deviation of the response time of successful tests completed
Gomez Mobile Performance Indices offer a "rank of ranks" of the mobile performance of leading sites in the U.S across four carrier and device combinations - AT&T/ iPhone, Sprint/ HTC Hero, T-Mobile/ HTC Dream and Verizon/ Droid.
Benchmarks are used by organizations to compare and track performance against competitors and market leaders; baseline and track performance over time; and as key indicators of success for business and IT site owners. Gomez publishes hundreds of global Web and mobile performance benchmarks based on more than 20 million monthly tests across 3,000 companies in 13 countries and include:
* Home Page Backbone Benchmarks: measure the performance of the Web site's home page from the Internet Backbone.
* Home Page Last Mile Benchmarks: measure the performance of the home page from the end user's desktop taking into account the real user's connection speed.
* Transaction (Search) Benchmarks: measure the performance of a key business process such as ordering a product or making a stock trade.
* Mobile Benchmarks: measure the performance of mobile site's home page on the largest carriers and top devices.
