LOOK AT ME—I AM FLYING: THE INFLUENCE OF SOCIAL VISIBILITY OF CONSUMPTION ON TOURISM DECISIONS Alexander Josiassen Copenhagen Business School, Denmark A. George Assaf University of Massachusetts, United States Abstract: This article focuses on the impact of social visibility of consumption on tourists’ purchase decision making. We focus on two important purchase decisions leading up to the time of departure: the choice of destination and the choice of an airline to get to the desti- nation. The results show that when individuals are concerned with how they are evaluated by others, they are more inclined to letting their image of the destination inform their willing- ness to visit a particular holiday destination. Further, the airline’s country-of-origin turns out to be a far more salient and useful information cue the more the holiday is perceived as being socially visible. Finally, the results regarding social visibility are more pronounced among trav- elers who are susceptible to normative influence than for travelers who are not susceptible. Keywords: social visibility of consumption, destination image, product-country image, air- lines, purchase behavior. Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. INTRODUCTION Tourism researchers and practitioners are continually interested in understanding the cues that tourists use in their decision making. When traveling, individuals are faced with several important decisions leading up to the time of departure. Two of the most fundamental decisions relate to the choice of destination and the choice of transportation to get to the destination. Developing a deeper under- standing of tourist decision making in respect of these two decisions is important. Alexander Josiassen is Associate Professor in Marketing at Copenhagen Business School, Denmark. His research interests include international marketing, marketing strategy, tourism research, and quantitative modeling. He has published about these topics in leading journals such as Tourism Management, Journal of Travel Research, Journal of Retailing, and Journal of Marketing. A. George Assaf is an assistant professor at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts–Amherst. He has a strong research interest in the areas of performance modelling, transportation/tourism economics, structural equation modelling, and Bayesian statistics. He has publications about these topics in leading economics, statistics, and management-related journals. Annals of Tourism Research, Vol. 40, pp. 155–175, 2013 0160-7383/$ - see front matter Ó 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. Printed in Great Britain http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.annals.2012.08.007 www.elsevier.com/locate/atoures 155