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Report: Too Many Airline E-Commerce Sites Stuck on the Tarmac
With the airline sites at the bottom of the list, “frequent short outages were common,” the report said. The worst sites were those run by EasyJet, Lufthansa SAS and JetBlue, which had an uptime percentage of 97.37.
“Overall, the websites of U.S. and Japanese airlines were more reliable than those of other countries,” the report said. “Other contenders around 99.90 percent were Japan Airlines, Frontier, Virgin Blue, Open Skies, Skynet Asia, British Airways, ANA Sky, Air France, NWA, Eva Air, Southwest and American Airlines. KLM and United had the least downtime of the 42 monitored airline websites, less than half an hour during the monitored four-month period, while JetBlue had well more than three full days of downtime.”
Pingdom Web Analyst Peter Alguacil said the airline site uptime figures were disappointing. “These are big companies that deliver crucial transactions over the Web to customers spread across time-zones: find your flight, book it, buy it, check in and get delay info in time. Yet many of them have hundreds, sometimes thousands of quarterly outages. It is inconceivable that these problems would not cause frustration and customer loss for companies like for example SAS or JetBlue.”
Alguacil said Pingdom monitors 35,000 Web sites and servers worldwide and knows a 99.8 percent uptime “is achievable by companies with far less resources than airlines, yet 62 percent of the airlines currently fail to reach it.”
The average uptime for the 42 sites was 99.49 percent, said Pingdom, adding that this equates to more than 44 hours of downtime during a year. The average for all Web sites is between 99.6 percent and 99.7 percent, said the company.
The Pingdom monitoring was done by loading the homepage for each site. A site was listed as down if it was unreachable, if the HTML part of the page did not load in 30 seconds or if the page responded with an HTTP error such as HTTP error 404 (page not found) or 500 (internal server error). Downtime had to be confirmed from two different locations for it to count, the Pingdom report said.
-Marc
May 1st, 2009 at 5:35 pm
Hmmm, so it didn’t count CRS problems with actually making a booking, just HTTP error 404 or similar. So those of us who fly United and AA and had MAJOR booking issues this last year don’t get into the mix.
The worst that was counted; Lufthansa and JetBlue, I’ve yet to out of 10 bookings on each find a flaw or problem using their sites. In fact, the Lufthansa site I find to be one of the easiest to deal with for a non-US airline.
I find some of the Asian sites the worst as their e-commerce sites are nothing more than a “part online” “part offline” approach. They take all the info, check availability and check your payment – BUT don’t issue a ticket. That is done my someone manually, and upto 12 hours later. So much for true e-commerce