Kayak Rated Fastest Travel Web Site

MSNBC: Just a few seconds make the difference between browsing for a plane ticket and buying one, according to travel experts. If you’re addicted to quick clicks, a new 15-month study has ranked the speed of travel companies’ websites – down to a millisecond.

The study, conducted by Compuware Gomez for USA Today, was based on the premise that many consumers will click away from a website if it’s too slow to load or complete a transaction. “Too slow” is not exactly poky. Quoting Forrester Research, the paper says online shoppers expect webpages to load in two seconds or less; 40 percent of shoppers will abandon a page that takes three or more seconds to appear.

“Customers simply don’t want to wait,” Forrester analyst Mike Gualtieri told USA Today. “There is a performance arms race among the travel websites because they know how important this is."

So, who’s winning the war? Kayak ranked as the fastest of all travel sites. With a homepage load time of 1.231 seconds, the booking service beat 45 other online travel agents and all airline and hotel sites.
Among the 12 airlines monitored, the top spots for speediest homepage went to AirTran at an average of 2.065 seconds, followed by Delta, Frontier and Hawaiian, all of which clocked in at under 2.8 seconds. Alaska Airlines was the slowest, at 5.12 seconds, although company spokeswoman Marianne Lindsey said the airline was posting faster times since redesigning its website in April.

On the hotel front, the study looked at 47 booking sites and found that 10 beat the two-second mark. They included Marriott, Best Western, Holiday Inn and Hotels.com, with Marriott and Best Western taking first and second, respectively.