Not all European Tourist Boards are ready for summer rush
Tourists do lots of research on the web before travel and National Tourist Boards websites are the number one web destinations. How well are National Tourism Boards’ websites prepared to handle the thick of vacation season? Mon.itor.US conducted research to check the speed and availability of European country official websites out of several locations in the US and Europe.
National Tourist Boards’ websites have become significant gateways. They make a first impression by sharing information across geographical, linguistic and technological boundaries, creating the electronic market place. A good performing website entices potential tourists to use their services and come to their country.
Effective websites show close to 100 percent availability. MonitorUS has been monitoring European National Tourist Board sites from 1-12 June 2007, demonstrating the following uptime results:
91.5% means Finland www.visitfinland.com scored a 91.5 percent ranking meaning that the site was down more than a day during the monitored period. A score of 98 percent represents downtime of approximately 6 hours during 12 days! How many customers were lost during that time? High uptime is not only possible it is absolutely necessary to be effective. Finland www.visitfinland.com and Denmark www.visitdenmark.com official tourism sites seems had serious issues during the first twelve days in June.
Mon.itor.Us also measures website upload speed which is an important metric in delivering quality web experience. Web customers aren’t going to stand in the “queue” to reach you. Slow loading means longer time waiting in the line. The table below presents official websites’ load speed for 12 days.
Several sites demonstrated poor speed that represents the equavalent of being down. The worst sites were Greece and the UK.
On-going monitoring and measurement of website uptime and load speed is a best practice if businesses want to be competitive. It is not only important to monitor your own sites but also sites that directly or indirectly affect your performance. For example, tour operators or hotels’ website traffic may be significantly affected by the Country Tourist websites low availability.
