Cities throughout Europe, including Växjö, a college city in the south of Sweden, have been developing and managing their city brands actively to attract young talents and students. Växjö has been a destination for students from Sweden and all over the world to study in Linnaeus University (LNU). However, the city, and according to its managers, has not been able to keep students in it after completing their studies. There are many previous studies that focus on destination and place marketing in general, however, only a few highlight the topic of city brands and branding.   This research has been conducted in order to explore the factors that can contribute to Linnaeus University students’ (customers) satisfaction with the city of Växjö, and examine the relationship between Customer satisfaction and Customer retention and Intention to switch in relative to Växjö. Qualitative and quantitative methods have been used. The primary data for this research has been collected through an online questionnaire survey from 84 LNU students who fitted the target sample criteria, and 6 semi-structured interviews. The findings of this research suggest that majority of the students are satisfied with Växjö as they take their current situation as students into consideration, however, they have shown a low rate of city retention, and a high rate of intention to switch to another place in future. The results are limited to the city of Växjö.

Online travel agencies (OTAs) play an important role in the online travel market. OTAs offer various features, rich information, and numerous hotel choices for customers. All these hotel choices, accompanied by detailed information and supported by various website features, are generally beneficial and advantageous for hotel customers. They allow hotel customers to evaluate numerous hotels based on different characteristics, including price, location, amenities, and ratings. However, the reasons why OTA users postpone their booking decisions and switch to other hotel booking channels remain unclear. Therefore, this dissertation aimed to explore the determinants of OTA users' intention to postpone their hotel booking decisions and their intention to switch to other hotel booking channels by developing and testing a conceptual framework based on the integration of stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) framework and information processing theory (IPT). A sequential exploratory mixed-methods approach, comprising two phases (i.e., qualitative and quantitative) was employed as the research design for this dissertation. In the first phase, themes that hold significance in influencing OTA users' intention to postpone their hotel booking decisions and intention to switch to other hotel booking channels were explored by conducting thematic analysis on qualitative data collected from OTA users through three online focus groups. In the second phase, the themes that emerged from the qualitative data analysis were utilized to formulate a quantitative survey instrument for a more in-depth investigation of the research problem. A total of 700 online surveys were collected, and structural equation modeling (SEM) was conducted to analyze the quantitative data and test the study hypotheses. The study results revealed that information overload, choice overload, and system feature overload, as stressors, positively influenced strain factors including similarity confusion, ambiguity confusion, time risk, psychological risk, performance risk, privacy risk, emotional exhaustion, decision task difficulty, and untrustworthiness toward OTAs. The results also indicated that similarity confusion, performance risk, emotional exhaustion, decision task difficulty, and untrustworthiness toward OTA, as strain factors, had a positive impact on OTA users' intention to postpone their hotel booking decisions. The results further indicated that ambiguity confusion, time risk, performance risk, decision task difficulty, as strain factors, had a positive impact on OTA users' intention to switch to other hotel booking channels. This dissertation provides valuable theoretical contributions to the existing body of knowledge in the realms of travel, tourism and hospitality industries and offers significant practical implications for OTA operators to generate effective and efficient strategies to be more competitive in the travel market and avoid unwanted consequences.