Airbnb, Booking.com, VRBO and Hotels.com rank as the fastest apps for time-to-search; Expedia, Priceline, Hotwire and Trip.com among the slowest.
SAN MATEO, CA — April 25, 2017 — PacketZoom (www.packetzoom.com), the company re-defining mobile application performance through in-app mobile networking technology, today published its Travel App Performance Index, ranking leading travel and hospitality platforms based on the speed of their mobile apps. According to the index, Airbnb, Booking.com, HomeAway/VRBO and TripAdvisor were the fastest apps among those analyzed, with Expedia, Priceline, Hotwire and Trip.com the slowest.
Specifically, the study looked at how quickly content loaded on each app’s homepage, and how long it took before the consumer was able to conduct a search. Airbnb had the fastest app, with a time-to-search period of 2.1 seconds. Homeaway/VRBO, Hotels.com and Booking.com, came in at 2.2, 2.3 and 2.6 seconds, respectively. Apps from Expedia (5.4 seconds), Priceline (6.2 seconds) and Hotwire (7.1 seconds) were much slower than average. Studies from Dynatrace and Google have shown that consumers expect mobile apps or web pages to download completely in four seconds or less.
“Performance is of the essence for every type of app, but especially for travel apps,” said Shlomi Gian, PacketZoom CEO. “Consumers have come to expect speedy content downloads, and when it takes too long they don’t necessarily blame the networks or external factors — they blame the apps, and they’ll close out of them or sometimes even uninstall them altogether when things are too slow. It is crucial that app developers do all they can to make sure that their apps don’t experience any undue delays.”
The Travel App Performance Index also analyzed the number of static images and the total static content size of the major travel apps, as those are two important factors in determining an app’s speed. However, a low number of images and small content size didn’t always have a direct correlation to fast app performance, as network conditions also play a large factor. PacketZoom found that even the fastest apps had room for an increase of up to 60 percent or more in their time-to-search by integrating in-app mobile networking technology.
“Using a mobile app on the go means users have to depend on changing and unreliable network conditions, and roaming only enhances network challenges and the expense.” noted Gian. “Per PacketZoom’s Mobile Observatory data, the discrepancies between countries and geographical locations have big impact on the user’s mobile app experience. Our data shows Canada and the US with about 5-6% of session disconnects, versus 7.3% in India, 8% in Mexico, 9.5% in China and as high as 13% on average in Russia”.
A summary of the report can be found below:
The PacketZoom team is announcing their findings today at the EyeforTravel San Francisco Summit and is also competing as a finalist for the Start-Up Award at the digital travel conference.
The full Index can be found on the PacketZoom site at https://www.packetzoom.com/travel-performance-index.html.
About PacketZoom
PacketZoom redefines mobile performance via in-app networking technology that is customized for each user. PacketZoom Mobile ExpresslaneTM improves user experience on mobile apps by eliminating performance roadblocks in the mobile last mile, accelerating download speed by 2x to 3x, rescuing up to 80% of the sessions from TCP connection drop and reducing CDN costs. PacketZoom is designed specifically for native mobile apps, helping mobile publishers boost app performance worldwide by accelerating and improving reliability of content delivery. For more information visit: www.packetzoom.com.
