• by Shankar Gupta , August 24, 2005

Online travel aggregators such as Expedia.com, Orbitz.com, and Travelocity.com offer consumers seeking car rentals more usable Web sites than do major car rental companies, according to a new Keynote report.

For the report, Keynote monitored 2,000 consumers as they interacted with 10 Web sites, including those of major car rental companies like Avis, Alamo, Budget, and Hertz, and travel aggregators. Two hundred consumers tested each site.

In overall customer experience, Orbitz, Travelocity, and Expedia claimed the top three positions, respectively. In terms of sales conversions, those three sites again scored the best, with Expedia coming first, followed by Orbitz and Travelocity. In the area of consumer satisfaction, Budget's Web site--Budget.com--broke into the top three, coming in second ahead of Travelocity, and behind Orbitz.

The only area in which brick-and-mortar car rental agencies beat out their online aggregators was in reputation--Hertz, Avis, and Enterprise took the top three spots in the minds of consumers.

Other Keynote reports also have found that online aggregators show up direct sellers when it comes to airlines and mobile phones.