Study finds online booking giants aren’t satisfying travelers like they used to

Facing increasing competition from startups and search engines and mired in a relatively stagnant user experience, online travel agencies Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity and Priceline got dinged in a recent major customer satisfaction report.

Released Tuesday, the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI) rated overall satisfaction with the online travel agencies, also known as OTAs, at 76 on a 100-point scale for 2012. That's a drop of 2.6 percent from the year prior.

In fact, travel was the only focus area in ACSI’s latest e-commerce report to post a decline; satisfaction with the other two sectors — online retail and online brokerage — were up 1.2 percent and 2.6 percent, respectively.