Abstract – Travel and ticket booking websites have seen a good revenue generation in the past five years. Whether it be a direct booking or an indirect booking (booking through a travel agent), the numbers have always been substantially high.
However, these websites face numerous challenges that include the inability to access, modify and apply the latest information. These challenges are the reasons that companies are not able to retain their customers. The products offered by the company are unable to provide the required impact because of poor user experience.
The websites which contain all the vital information are prone to get crashed under high traffic. The ability to provide comprehensive search results is the key to acquiring customers and offering valuable services to partners as well as suppliers. Robust booking engines, ERP systems, and automation software for repetitive processes are critical factors in helping agencies for improvement.
Performance testing of websites can improve the quality of the product offered to the users by an organization. Below listed are specific points on how performance testing helps in making a website robust:
- Performance during heavy traffic
During promotional events (festivals and national holidays), the number of bookings on travel websites increase significantly. At times, substantial traffic may disrupt the functionality of a website. If websites are not prone to handle many transactions, they fail the users’ expectations. However, if a website has undergone performance testing, it holds up to heavy traffic which provides adequate workability to users. To determine the capacity of a website, load testing and stress testing should always be conducted during production stages. With the help of load testing and stress testing, bottlenecks in the working of a website can be found and eradicated.
- Optimization for different devices
Travel ticket booking websites should be compatible with a variety of devices. As there are multiple operating systems available in the market (iOS, Android and Windows), an app’s functionality may differ from one system to another. The design of websites must work more efficiently on mobile devices, as users tend to access these websites more from their mobile phones. There are numerous mobile devices present in the market, and each one of them has a different screen size and network configuration. The website should be such that its content can adjust in accordance with the screen size and internet speed of the device. If some content is inaccessible with a slow internet connection, users must be notified about it. This helps users to rely on the working efficiency of the website and increase the user base.
- Enhances response time and speed
With the help of performance testing, errors in functionalities of a website become deductible. The speed of a website is a critical essence to increase the user base. If a website does not provide adequate speed, good response time, reliability and scalability, users tend to disengage from it. If the website is not able to handle concurrent users, performance testing identifies the glitches and reports it to the developers. Performance test inspects the quality of the source code in the software development lifecycle.
For effective testing, an organization must possess adequate resources. Various tools can be helpful for performance testing of a travel booking website. Some of them are:
- Apache JMeter
- LoadUI
- NeoLoad
- LoadImpact
- LoadRunner
- Qtest
- WAPT
- WebLOAD
- io
- OpenSTA
A travel ticket booking site can maximize its revenue objectives during peak seasons. However, if the working of the website is not up to the mark, it loses the empathy of users. With the increase in a number of travelers, organizations can wallop a great deal of business if the performance of their website is efficient. Performance testing can help developers and testers in capturing the defects in the website. Eliminating these defects not only increases the ROI of an enterprise but also retains its user-base.
