Examining hotel brand loyalty via a modified brand switching matrix in the context of Macau's rapidly growing industry

![CDATA[This paper examined the use of a modified version of Colombo & Morrison’s (1989) brand switching matrix (BSM) as a framework for analyzing hotel brand loyalty among a random sample of visitors to Macau. The study adopted the modification to the BSM proposed by Obermiller (2002) in which brand loyalty is operationalized as the consistency between respondents' stated preferred (or first choice) hotel and the actual hotel where they stay. Following such an approach, results of the study yielded not only a measure of customer brand loyalty for various hotels but also the dynamics of ‘switching’ of patrons between hotel brands, allowing for a richer understanding of the competitive interplay occurring in the recently liberalized Macau hotel industry. The relative advantage of using the BSM as a[br]framework for assessing brand loyalty is then briefly discussed and weighed against other, more popular though problematic, alternatives of conceptualizing brand loyalty.]]