Yep, and the 10 second "deal" compilations for travel packages really happen in a fraction of a second. They just purposefully delay the results to make it seem like they are doing a lot of processing in finding all the possible deals and showing you the best ones.
It can be a more friendly way of rate-limiting expensive DB queries. An interstitial that says "too many queries, try again in 10 seconds" is far more annoying than a loading bar.
Yup. We have a similar thing at my company. Every time we try to test out of the loading animation, conversion and retention goes down. It’s an amazing thing to see.
