JetBlue Airlines today posted a quarterly profit for the first time in four years, and while lower fuel prices are being cited as the primary reason, one has to wonder if skimping on IT spending might be just as important.
That last part is in jest, I think, yet there’s little amusement to be found for JetBlue customers in a report also out today (.pdf) from Web uptime monitoring company Pingdom. According to that survey, JetBlue ranked dead last among 42 airline sites with a cumulative 76 hours worth of downtime over a four-month period. Lufthansa at No. 37 and SAS at No. 40 didn’t fare a whole lot better.
Topping the scorecard with an uptime of 99.99 percent was KLM, followed by United at 99.98.
More than half of the airline sites — 26 total — failed to meet what Pingdom considers minimal uptime standards.
“These 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. Yet many of them have hundreds, sometimes thousands of quarterly outages. It is inconceivable that these problems would not cause frustration and customer loss,” says Peter Alguacil, Web Analyst at Pingdom. “We monitor 35,000 websites and servers worldwide and consider a 99.8% uptime to be an absolute minimum for such important sites. This is achievable by companies with far less resources than airlines, yet 62% of the airlines currently fail to reach it.”
I’ve asked JetBlue’s public relations department if the company will have any comment about its dubious distinction.
