Do Celebrities Influence Our Vacation Destinations?

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During the winter doldrums, it’s easy to find yourself daydreaming about where you’d like to escape for vacation. But as you start collecting brochures and flyers from your travel agent, ask yourself: do the celebrities endorsing your paradise have anything to do with your decision? Robert van der Veen and Haiyan Song explore this concept in their article “Impact of the Perceived Image of Celebrity Endorsers on Tourists’ Intentions to Visit,” published in the March edition of the Journal of Travel Research.

The abstract:

The purpose of this study is to empirically assess the mediating effects of the impact of the perceived image of celebrity endorsers on tourists’ intentions to visit, using celebrity-endorsed print advertisements for travel destinations. The results indicate that celebrity endorsers have a significant impact on people’s attitudes and visit intentions, thus verifying the mediating effects of this variable. The study also provides clues to what extent celebrity-endorsed advertisements differ from nonendorsed advertisements and explores such differences in terms of destination match-up between native and nonnative celebrity-endorsed advertisements.