Kayak.com wins online booking race

I'm always on the lookout for stories relating to Internet use and how it can help my fellow travelers .

So I think you'll be interested in this story I came across on MSNB dealing with the subject of browsing the Internet for travel deals.

According to the MSNB story, a 15-month survey conducted by Compuware Gomez for USA Today on the speed of travel companies online booking sites - specifically how fast they load - concluded that Kayak.com ranked  the fastest of all travel sites with a homepage load time of 1.231 seconds. Kayak.com beat 45 other online travel agents and all airline and hotel sites in the speed test.

According to the study, 40 per cent of consumers will click away from a website if it’s too slow to load or complete a transaction - average consumer time spent waiting for a site to load is about 3 seconds, according to the study.

Among the 12 airlines monitored, U.S.-based AirTran's homepage was the fastest to load at an average of 2.065 seconds Then came Delta, Frontier and Hawaiian, all of which clocked in at under 2.8 seconds. Alaska Airlines was the slowest at 5.12.

Among the 47 hotel booking sites monitored in the study, 10 beat the two-second mark - Marriott, Best Western, Holiday Inn and Hotels.com, Marriott and Best Western recorded the best times.

Canadian booking sites were not part of the study.