Does celebrity endorsement actually help sustainable destinations?

Sustainability is increasingly central to destination image, yet little is known about whether food-celebrity endorsement can support sustainable tourism promotion. Drawing on Meaning-Transfer Theory, this study compares three Instagram posts promoting Spain as a sustainable destination: one featuring a Spanish chef, one featuring an English chef, and one with no celebrity. An experiment with 432 English potential tourists shows that, after accounting for celebrity familiarity, evidence of a host-celebrity advantage is limited to specific ad-related outcomes and audience segments. Celebrity endorsement does not consistently outperform a no-celebrity message (control condition) and may be ineffective or counterproductive for some targets. Older men strongly favored the control condition, whereas younger women slightly preferred the host over the origin celebrity. The findings are consistent with a familiarity–persuasion paradox and suggest that destination management organizations should consider tourists’ culture, age, gender, and celebrity familiarity when designing sustainable destination campaigns.