Here are the UK Travel Websites to Avoid Based on Recent Statistics

UK travel association ABTA reported that 81% of people booked their holidays over the internet in 2018. This makes perfect sense, as planning your holiday online is significantly more efficient and convenient than heading to a travel office.

That said, ensuring that your travel website of choice is worth spending your money on is important. A recent study found that 64% of shoppers won’t return to a website if their experience was unsatisfactory. Issues such as poor design, downtime and long loading times can make navigating a website a headache.

That’s why we’ve put together a list of websites to avoid based on a recent research project done by StatusCake, where the top travel websites in the UK and around the world were compared based on their analysis methodology. Before we get into the list, let’s take a look at the websites that performed the best.

Best Performing UK Travel Websites

According to research done by StatusCake, the average uptime of travel websites runs at 99.91%, which is fairly impressive. Also noteworthy is the average loading time of travel websites, which was reported to be 0.46 seconds or just under half a second. Most users will only leave a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load.

As for UK-based websites, airtours.co.uk came out on top, with a 100% uptime and an impressive load time of only 0.14 seconds. Elegant Resorts (elegantresorts.co.uk) came in second, while flightcenter.co.uk took third place, followed by jamesvillas.co.uk, and finally keithprowse.co.uk with a much slower but still respectable load time of 0.47 seconds.

All of the websites mentioned above managed to maintain an uptime of 100%, meaning that they were never down due to maintenance or issues.

Worst Performing UK Travel Websites

As we learned earlier, even the “worst” performing websites are far from unusable, especially those situated in the UK market. However, their performance is fairly poor compared to the websites mentioned above, so it’s worth knowing who the main culprits are.

PGL (pgl.co.uk) was one of the worst performers when it came to loading time, taking an average of 0.78 seconds to load. NST Group (nstgroup.co.uk) may have had a quicker load time, but experienced a much lower uptime of 98.74% compared to the average of high 99% scores. Other poor performers include cunard.co.uk and aceculturaltours.co.uk.

The Bottom Line

While one shouldn’t really determine whether a website is worth using solely based on how fast they are, it pays to know where to start as a website’s reliability says a lot about the way they do business. So, if you’re looking to plan your next holiday, first take a look at the websites that guarantee they’ll be around when you need them.

Conclusion

What we can learn from these statistics is that even the poorest performing websites are still fairly reliable. This proves that the internet has come far since it’s early days, raising uptime and load time standards to near-perfection.