A new study finds almost two thirds of airline websites to be unreliable based on the number of hours they are unavailable to their customers. Although all websites need downtime to perform routine maintenance, many airline websites fail to meet the absolute minimum requirements for availability, according to a new report from Pingdom, a European firm that monitors website uptime.

Pingdom says it’s important for businesses with websites and other online services to be available around the clock, every day of the year. Although all websites have occasional problems, companies with poor online availability can lose customers, sales and goodwill. The websites are an important source of information for airline customers and sales and revenue for the airlines, especially as airlines emphasize the importance of booking rates on their own sites versus on-line travel agents as they have in their recent Q1 conference calls.

Pingdom noted that customers who turn to airline websites to book and buy tickets, select seats, check-in, receive boarding passes, and check flight status and delays, are pressed for time and need immediate flight information. Web pages that are unavailable, slow to load, or return error messages can cost airlines customers and revenue, neither of which they can afford.

“I think there is a widespread misconception that things ‘just work’ once you've set up a website, but the truth is that it requires constant monitoring,” says Peter Alguacil, Pingdom web analyst. “There are just so many factors involved, so many things that can break or become bottlenecks, and conditions usually change over time.

”As for the reasons for downtime, they will usually differ from site to site,” he continued. “Some common reasons are temporary slowdowns that essentially makes the website unable to load properly (it times out), or some link in the chain may become overloaded (for example the number of concurrent connections a website can handle),” says Alguacil. Too many visitors at one time can overwhelm the site, and hardware issues, like server crashes or network problems, can make a website unavailable.

Pingdom says there is no longer is a “middle of the night” on the Web. “Downtime at 4 a.m. on the U.S. East Coast may not bother most American site visitors, but that is 10 a.m. in central Europe, and 8 p.m. in Sydney, Australia,” said Pingdom, adding downtime also creates unhappy customers and affects an airline’s reputation.

Nine out of ten website visitors would switch to a competitor’s webpage if a website fails to load, according to a survey cited by Pingdom. Downtime also causes lost ticket sales, which, said the company, noting between a quarter and a third of online shoppers will not wait longer than four seconds for a webpage to load before leaving. A down website turns away 100 percent of its visitors, the equivalent of locking the door to the store.

“These [airlines] are big companies that deliver crucial transactions over the web to customers spread across time-zones: find your flight, book it, buy it, check in and get delay info – in time,” says Alguacil. “Yet many of them have hundreds, sometimes thousands of quarterly outages. It is inconceivable that these problems would not cause frustration and customer loss for companies like for example SAS or JetBlue.”

Pingdom monitors 35,000 websites and servers worldwide, and considers a “99.8% uptime to be an absolute minimum for such important sites,” says Alguacil. “This is achievable by companies with far fewer resources than airlines…”

The company monitored the websites of 42 international airlines during a four-month period (121 days), from November 19, 2008 to March 19, 2009, a large enough sample to be representative. They included: Aeroflot, Air India, Air New Zealand, Air Pacific, Air France, American Airlines, ANA Sky, Asiana Airlines, Atlasjet, Bahamas Air, British Airways, Cayman Airways, China Eastern, China Southern, ChinaAirlines, Corsairfly, easyJet, Egyptair, Eva Air, Finnair, Frontier, German Wings, Japan Airlines, JetBlue, KLM, Korean Air, Lufthansa, NWA, Open Skies, RyanAir, SAS, Sky Europe, Skynet Asia, Skywest, South African Airways, Southwest, Spanair, SwissAir, Thai Air, United, US Airways, and Virgin Blue.

Pingdom found the average uptime for the entire group of 42 websites was 99.49 percent, which breaks down to 14 hours and 50 minutes of accumulated downtime per website for the period, or a 99.49 percent uptime – more than 44 hours of downtime – over the course of a year. That’s worse than the average for all websites on the Internet, which is about 99.6-99.7 percent uptime, or 35 hours.

Only 13 websites or 31 percent had a 99.9 percent uptime or better. KLM topped the list with 99.99 percent, followed by United -- 99.98 percent, Japan Airlines -- 99.98 percent, Frontier -- 99.98 percent, Virgin Blue -- 99.96 percent, Open Skies -- 99.95 percent, Skynet Asia -- 99.95 percent, British Airways -- 99.94 percent, ANA Sky -- 99.94 percent, Air France -- 99.93 percent, NWA -- 99.92 percent, Eva Air -- 99.92 percent, and Southwest -- 99.91 percent. American Airlines came close with 99.89 percent, but did not make the list. Twenty six of the 42 (62 percent) had poorer than 99.8 percent uptime, what Pingdom considers the minimum acceptable limit. Five sites (12 percent) had more than 24 hours of accumulated downtime during the four-month period, and 14 (33 percent) had continuous website outages lasting more than one hour. Two of these websites experienced continuous outages lasting more than 13 hours.

Frequent short outages were the most common problem for most of the websites with less than 99.8 percent uptime. A 99.8 percent uptime means a website can be unavailable for a total of one hour and 26 minutes per month (30 days), or 17 hours and 31 minutes in a year. Pingdom says this is ample time to perform regular maintenance. Also a quick reaction time when a problem occurs can minimize downtime

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