Most of us have our favourite apps to shop for travel and, depending on how fast and/or how user friendly the interface is, we either keep them as our favourites or discard them.
Slow performing apps could put some of us off as we want to be able to quickly book air tickets and accommodation, search attractions or find experiences on the go.
The Travel App Performance Index released by California-based PacketZoom ranked the leading travel and hospitality platforms based on the speed of their mobile apps.
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.
It also analysed the number of static images and the total static content size of the travel apps – two important factors in determining an app’s speed.
The results are interesting as some of the brands differ greatly in speed. For example, Airbnb had the fastest app with the search time of 2.1 seconds, while Hotwire at 7.1 seconds was much slower than average. (see charts below).
Findings 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.”
• Featured image credit: Wachiwit/iStock
