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.

As the competition heats up between travel sites, everyone's coming out with new booking, reviews, and rewards tools to win your trust — and transaction. But which ones make your life easier? We name a few that solve common travel problems in a way other, better-marketed websites don't.

Flash-sale clubs
The problem: Sure, the discounts on sites like Jetsetter and LivingSocial are solid (50 percent off is common), but how good are the actual properties?

The fix: Incorporate real-world ratings. A year ago, TripAdvisor launched an invitation-only sale site, SniqueAway, that only promotes hotels with a minimum four-out-of-five-star TripAdvisor user rating. Each week, three new hotels are typically offered at discounts of up to 65 percent. A recent example: The Restoration on King, a luxury hotel in Charleston, S.C., had rooms at $189 a night, up to 43 percent off regular rates.

Customized search
The problem: You trust your friends' opinions on restaurants, hotels, shops, and more. So what are their favorites and how can you find them easily?

The fix: Enable like-minded linking. One-year-old Hotpot, by Google, is a mapping tool that combines the best of Yelp, Facebook, and Foursquare. Rate the places you've recently visited on a scale of one to five, and then invite your friends to do the same. When you next trawl Google, the site uses your network as a filter, retrieving related results from the Web and putting the most relevant recommendations first.

Getting trustworthy travel advice
The problem: Reviews are only as useful as the users who generate them. And who knows who they are?

The fix: Amp up reviewer transparency. The dozen-year-old travel community IgoUgo isn't new — and its 1 million user reviews don't come close to TripAdvisor's 35 million — but a new interface emphasizes trustworthiness. Reviews are written only by IgoUgo members (with clickable profiles) or come from larger online travel agents such as sister site Travelocity, which allows posts only by hotel guests, not anonymous commenters.

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Remember when traveling included travel agents, paper maps that were impossible to fold into their original shape and clipped magazine articles or dog-eared notepads full of suggestions for a full, active itinerary?

That is so 1990s.

Thanks to websites, smartphones and apps,  tech-savvy travelers can easily research and book trips and store flight information, boarding tickets, maps and more on a mobile device that fits in a shirt pocket.

Some websites rise to the top when it comes to usefulness. On Friday's TODAY show, Nina Willdorf, editor-in-chief of Budget Travel, detailed six useful websites with Kathie Lee Gifford and Hoda Kotb.

Willdorf endorsed Bing.com as a great site for researching airfares. "It's really hard to know whether the flight prices are going to go up, go down," she said. "Bing puts together historical data so it can predict whether or not that fare that you love is going to go down tomorrow."

(Msnbc.com is a joint venture between Microsoft and NBC Universal.)

Willdorf also touted Autoslash.com: "If you book through them, they will guarantee that any price drop that happens on a rental car, you will get refunded," she said. Over the holidays last year, she said four out of five people who booked with the website received a discount. "The average discount was $65. It's just money in your pocket that you weren't expecting."

Willdorf also mentioned Plnnr.com, a website that allows travelers to detail what type of vacation they're looking for (such as active or mellow) and puts together free, customized itineraries, and Tripit.com, a service that pulls together flight information, confirmation numbers, driving directions and more and presents it in an organized, easy-to-use itinerary that travelers can send to their phone.

Click here for Budget Travel's 10 most useful travel websites.

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Joe Myxter has been running msnbc.com's Travel section since 2006. Follow him on Twitter.