More than 82 percent of consumers in study make travel arrangements online.

More travelers are turning to the Internet to make online travel arrangements, a study has found.

Feedback Research, a division of Claria Corp., analyzed more than 43 millions users and found that 82 percent prefer to make their travel arrangements online. Fifty-nine percent of respondents say they bought travel online, such as hotel, airline or car rentals, in the past 90 days, and 67 percent made their purchases on a travel service site such as Expedia, Orbitz or Travelocity.

The study found that airline sites and travel aggregator sites are in steep competition. Seventy-eight percent of respondents who bought from a travel aggregator site typically preferred to scope it out when first researching travel arrangements. However, 50 percent who ultimately bought from an airline site preferred to go to an airline site when researching travel, compared with 41 percent who preferred to go to a travel aggregator site first. The study found that airline tickets were the most popular online travel purchase with 87 percent of survey respondents who bought from a travel aggregator site in the past 90 days saying that they purchase airline tickets. This was followed by hotels at 54 percent and car rentals at 42 percent.

Consumers are looking for better deals on the Internet. The study found that 82 percent of respondents who repeatedly purchase from travel service sites say they buy because of the "good price" and 30 percent say it's because of "good packages." This indicates that these "good price: consumers came back to the category 8.4 percent more and viewed 5 percent more site than the average consumer, while "good packages" respondents returned to the category 16 percent more and viewed 9 percent more sites than the average viewer.

Many consumers are shopping around for travel, as the study found that low-cost airline site shoppers viewed an average of 17.8 percent more sites than the average airline shopper. During the research period, the average shopper within the travel aggregator category came back 12 percent more times than the average shopper within the airline category.