Squeezed between travel providers on one side and meta-search sites on the other, it seems online travel agencies (OTAs) have one ace in the hole: Consumers still like using them.

That’s the upshot of a new American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) report released on Tuesday. Focusing on Expedia, Orbitz, Priceline and Travelocity, the report rated overall satisfaction with the sites at 78 on a 100-point scale last year, matching the record high set the year before.

“A score of 78 is good,” said Larry Freed, CEO and president at ForeSee, which helps produce the Index. “We consider 80 the threshold for a great performing site and they’re bumping up right against it.”

While the aggregate score was unchanged, individual results showed more fluctuation. After nine years in the top spot, Expedia slipped 3 percent, from 79 points to 77, losing its crown to Travelocity, which climbed from 77 to 79.

Orbitz and Priceline also posted better numbers, rising from 75 to 76 and 73 to 76, respectively.

Speaking anecdotally, Freed says Travelocity may have gotten a boost after it redesigned its homepage last summer.

“It’s a bit more of a guided navigation — Step 1, Step 2, Step 3 — as opposed to just filling out a form,” he told msnbc.com. “We don’t know explicitly if that’s the reason it improved, but it’s definitely a fresher, cleaner look.”

Changes at Priceline may also explain that site’s improved rating. In recent years, the company has gradually moved away from its opaque, “Name Your Own Price” focus toward a more traditional OTA model. (In January, the company even went so far as to kill off the Priceline Negotiator, the celebrity spokesman played by William Shatner.)

“They’re now more in sync with everybody else,” said Freed. “Knowing what you’re getting is probably a little more palatable for a larger base of consumers.”

Still, as a group, the OTAs face fundamental challenges because they all serve a similar role as middlemen to the travel providers whose inventory they sell.

“Loyalty is an issue,” said Diane Clarkson, e-business analyst with Forrester Research Inc. “In a sense, the OTAs have replaced search engines. So many travelers will start with an OTA for their research but then book on a supplier site.”

To counter that, Clarkson expects the OTAs to get increasingly proactive toward customer service through the use of newer technologies. More and better use of virtual agents and live chat, for example, may help keep users from clicking over to Budget, Marriott or United when it’s time to buy.

Another option would be to provide more benchmark data to alleviate price anxiety, says Carroll Rheem, director of research at PhoCusWright. “A lot of travelers still feel the need to shop around to make sure they’re really getting a good deal,” she told msnbc.com.

To alleviate some of that anxiety, Rheem points to the way financial companies display info: “They show historical prices, averages against the competition, things that give people a sense of the lay of the land.”

Generally speaking, though, she agrees that the OTAs are doing a good job of satisfying their customers.

 “We’re not seeing very high percentages for frustration factors,” she said. “It’s more about the tweaking and fine-tuning at this point.”

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Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.

Must… find… new… ad campaign.

Alas, for fans of the vocal stylings of William Shatner, that’s the news from Priceline.com, which has decided to kill off Shatner’s Priceline Negotiator character. On Monday, the company will begin airing ads showing the erstwhile Captain Kirk shooing passengers off a bus moments before it tumbles off a bridge and explodes in flames.

Mr. Negotiator was five years old and is survived by a company adapting to a changing market and seeking to highlight its other, non-bidding-based business.

This is not the first time a Shatner character has died in the line of duty, of course, as Captain Kirk met his own demise in the 1994 movie “Star Trek: Generations.”

“Our ad agency said that if we really wanted a spot that would grab people’s attention, we needed to do something over-the-top,” said spokesman Brian Ek. “They recommended killing off The Negotiator, which is a character William Shatner has played in our commercials since 2007.”

Shatner, Ek added, has been Priceline’s celebrity spokesman for 14 years and is still under contract with the company.

The Negotiator, however, has apparently struck his final deal as the company seeks to emphasize other lines of business than the Name Your Own Price bidding-oriented booking option that Shatner promoted.

Although less well-known to consumers, the company also operates a non-bidding, published-price service for 200,000 hotels in 140 countries, a business, said Ek, that has tripled in size over the last three years. “We decided to focus our 2012 campaign on that part of the business,” he told msnbc.com.

The move also reflects the shifting nature of the online hotel business, said Norm Rose, president of Travel Tech Consulting Inc., as hotels and third-party sellers of their inventory jockey for the hearts, minds and wallets of consumers.

“There are always these battle lines being drawn between suppliers and the OTAs (online travel agencies),” he said. “It’s a real love/hate relationship.”

For Priceline, he noted, killing off The Negotiator is essentially an effort to better align its messaging with its business model: “They want to get into the minds of consumers that they’re an OTA rather than an opaque, distressed-inventory site like Hotwire.”

And Shatner-as-The-Negotiator got thrown under the bus, so to speak, although not before handing off his cell phone to a woman and intoning in that inimitable style: “Save yourself … some money.”

Meanwhile, said Ek, the company expects to run some follow-on ads interviewing the people saved before the crash, as well as spots during the Super Bowl pre-game show.

The Negotiator, however, appears to be destined for his own final frontier.

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Rob Lovitt is a longtime travel writer who still believes the journey is as important as the destination. Follow him at Twitter.