MeTravel: Travel Selfies, Narcissism, and Destination Marketing

Abstract

While posting travel selfies on social media, many tourists strategically attempt to adjust them to better portray their images by excluding destination attributes, thus manifesting narcissism. Following the inductive research approach, based on in-depth interviews conducted with 27 tourists, this paper explores how travel selfies and tourists’desire for narcissism create challenges to destination marketing. The findings indicate a growing tendency among tourists to capture themselves in travel selfies while excluding unique and attractive destination attributes or shifting them to the side of the photograph, thus diluting the attention toward tourist destinations. This paper suggests several managerial implications for tourism practitioners on strategically marketing tourist destinations using tourists’ selfie posting behaviour.