intact with the brand. As discussed earlier, in highly competitive war-field, a brand loyal
customer profile is critical for a hotel brand. Our study recommends a stronger role of service
quality and one of the strategies to create such a loyal customer profile is to develop a unique
ambiance, an exclusive tangibilized atmosphere and a service delivery ensuring empathy and
reliability. The staff’s politeness, responsiveness, timely service and empathy plays a strong
positive role in instigating a sense of belongingness in the customers; which means a strong
brand loyalty because employee’s behavior and attitude shape customers’ overall perceptions
about the brand.
This study also has several limitations. Firstly, this study targeted only four/five-star hotels.
So the results cannot be generalized on the entire hotel industry. Secondly, conducting this
research by using probability sampling method will compensate the limitation of non-
probability sampling method used in this study. In spite of a lot of literature on brand equity,
it has been difficult to offer a full description of the nature of the hotel brand equity construct.
To the best knowledge of the researchers, this research examined the impact of only two
dimensions of brand equity for hotels. Still, there may be some other dimensions that have
not been identified in the conceptual framework of this study. There is a dire need to extend
this study to the categories in chain restaurant, cafe and motel settings.