Purpose This paper aims to explore adolescents’ perceptions of child-parent dominance in family vacation decision-making (FVDM) by investigating child-parent relative influence (CPRI) and responsibility-sharing (RS) within the family in regard to 15 vacation issues. Design/methodology/approach This paper adopts Davis and Rigaux’s (1974) framework for identifying adolescents’ perceptions of child-parent dominance across a set of subjects concerning FVDM, by inspecting the distribution of family decision roles across 25 nations. This study then segments the issues regarding family vacations and nations, judging by CPRI and RS within the family. In addition, this paper introduces Hofstede’s cultural dimensions and diverse indices of development for each surveyed nation and compares their respective correlations with CPRI and RS at the national level. Findings The results, derived from data collected in 25 countries or territories, illustrate a climate of a parent-dominant-to-autonomous style of FVDM for all decision issues and all nations. Overall, both information availability and economizing attribute of issues are related to the democratization of FVDM. The relationship between the child-parent role distribution and national clusters varied across issue clusters. In addition, the paper found the national effectiveness more effective than the cultural dimension in explaining the dispersal of CPRI-RS profiles. Originality/value The data collected from 25 nations provide strong evidence for profiling child-parent dominance in FVDM. The data also serve as a basis for analyzing the role of sociocultural and ideological influences on child-parent dominance in FVDM, which was not established in previous research.