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In 2000, researchers set up a jam display in a grocery store: sometimes with 24 varieties, other times just 6.
The smaller display sold 10 times more jam.
The finding became one of the most cited studies in behavioral science: when a shelf fills up with similar options, people don't compare; they walk away.
If sameness kills jam sales, what could it do for tour and activity bookings? That’s the question we set out to answer in the first study of its kind for travel experiences: 1,800 travelers, comparing how people react to a sets of similar versus ones with a clear point of difference.
The results are in our Fall 2026 Travel Experience Trend Tracker: “The Data Behind Standing Out", and they have real implications for how you write and position your listings. The short answer: distinctive listings get booked more often and faster. Here's the breakdown and what to do with it.
What we tested and why
The jam study showed that too much choice backfires. It didn't tell us whether the problem was choice itself or sameness. So for this report, we split listings into two groups. In similar sets, either the experiences were alike, or the listing didn't show what made them different. In distinctive sets, each experience gave travelers a clear reason to pick it over the others.
Then we watched what travelers actually did.
Distinctive listings get booked more and faster
Travelers were 12% more likely to book when the experiences in front of them were distinctive, consistently across 8, 20, and 200 options.
Similar listings didn't just get booked less often; more travelers put off booking altogether. 22.2% of travelers shown similar listings clicked "book later," compared to 13.1% for distinctive sets. Nearly 1 in 4 travelers facing similar sets clicked "book later" instead of booking.
When options looked the same, travelers also took 55% longer to decide. A listing that makes its difference obvious gets booked in the moment. One that blends in gets shelved, and shelved bookings are bookings you don't get.
More options didn't scare travelers off. Sameness did
Scaling from 8 to 200 options barely moved how much travelers intended to book. Volume alone wasn't the problem.
What changed was hesitation. As choice scaled up, more travelers reported feeling overwhelmed, and more felt the options were redundant. In other words, experiences aren't jam. Quantity didn't stop people from booking. More of the same did.
That held up across different traveler groups, even when their starting comfort with choice varied.
Why this matters more with AI booking tools
More travelers are using AI to shortlist experiences before they ever land on a listing page. When experiences look the same, AI defaults to price. Without clean, structured data to work from, it has nothing else to sort by.
If you want to be chosen for something other than being cheapest, your listing needs two things: specific, well-written content and clean data AI tools can actually read. Generic AI-written copy makes this worse, not better. It makes listings sound more alike, not less.
What to do with this
None of this means doing more. It means doing one thing differently from the operators around you: shaping an experience that's genuinely different and showing that difference clearly enough that travelers, and increasingly, AI tools, can actually see it.
Get the full report
This covers the headline findings. The full Fall 2026 Travel Experience Trend Tracker includes the complete study results, breakdowns by traveler segment, and more detail on building and showcasing distinctiveness in your own listings.
Download the full report
Distinctiveness isn't the only lever for more bookings. See how reviews can boost visibility and sales for the data on another one.
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