99% of your travel experiences catalogue is never  sold

For years, the experiences industry has pursued the same objective: expanding supply. Every new supplier meant more products, more destinations and, ultimately, more choice for travellers. The underlying assumption has always been straightforward: the larger the catalogue, the greater the commercial opportunity. But what if we tell you that 99% of your travel experiences catalogue is never sold?

Rather than focusing on how many products are available, perhaps we should start asking how many products or categories actually generate business for our customers.

Looking at catalogue performance differently

To explore that question, we analysed the commercial activity of 20 resellers connected to Globick’s network of supplier APIs between 1 January and 1 July 2026. Together, they made almost half a million experiences available for sale. During the same period, however, only 6,410 different products registered at least one booking.

In other words, just 1.35% of the available catalogue generated a booking. That is, 99% of the travel experiences catalogue is never sold.

That figure should not be interpreted as meaning that the remaining products have no value. In most cases, they never get to search results is prominent positions and therefore, never get in front of their potential customers. In other cases,  some may simply respond to very specific customer needs that OTAs are not realizing

Having inventory isn’t the same as selling inventory

But the aggregated figures become even more interesting when looking at distributors individually.

For the purpose of this analysis, we focus on distributors managing broad and diverse catalogues. Within this group, even the strongest performer generated bookings for just 7% of the products available through Globick, while the median distributor generated bookings for less than 1% of its catalogue.

The implication goes beyond comparing one distributor with another. Even among companies managing broad and diverse catalogues, only a tiny fraction of the products available ever generate a booking. For the typical reseller in our analysis, more than 99% of the catalogue remained commercially inactive throughout the period studied.

Why does this happen?

The data itself doesn’t provide the answer, and it is unlikely that there is a single explanation.

Catalogue performance may depend on many different factors. User experience, brand recognition, commercial model, market positioning, product specialisation, recommendation logic, customer behaviour, catalogue quality, personalisation and, increasingly, artificial intelligence may all play a role.

The important point is not identifying one definitive cause. It is recognising that having products available and having products that generate business are not necessarily the same thing.

That raises a question the industry rarely asks: How do we unlock the value of the catalogue that already exists, ensuring the right experiences can reach the right traveller?

Have we confused catalogue size with commercial value?

For years, the industry has naturally associated larger catalogues with greater commercial opportunity.

More products meant more choice >> More choice was expected to create more bookings.

But perhaps those assumptions deserve to be revisited.

Having 20,000, 50,000 or 100,000 products available does not automatically mean those products have a realistic opportunity to be discovered and booked.

Perhaps the next competitive advantage won’t come simply from adding another thousand experiences. Perhaps it will come from increasing the commercial relevance of the catalogue that already exists, placing the right products to the right niche of customers. And perhaps AI won’t simply improve discovery, but enable the industry to unlock value from inventory that, until now, has remained commercially invisible.

AI may change the question entirely

Today, much of the industry’s attention is focused on AI Discovery.

How will travellers search? How will agentic commerce evolve? How will AI recommend experiences?

These are undoubtedly important questions. But perhaps the real transformation goes one step further.

Not simply better discovery. But better catalogue utilisation.

The evolution of the industry could perhaps be described in three stages:

• Phase 1: More products.
• Phase 2: Better discovery.
• Phase 3: Better catalogue utilisation, potentially enabled by AI

The objective is no longer only to make more products available. Increasingly, it is about ensuring that more of those products have a genuine opportunity to reach the right traveller.

Discovery isn’t the only challenge

Today, a large proportion of experience products never even have the opportunity to compete for a booking.

We don’t yet know whether that’s because travellers never search for them, because they receive little visibility, because demand simply isn’t there, or because recommendation systems repeatedly surface the same products.

Artificial intelligence could fundamentally change this.

Not because it indexes products better, but because it understands travellers better.

• Context.
• Intent.
• Preferences.
• Previous behaviour.

Instead of recommending the most visible products, AI may increasingly recommend the most relevant ones.

If that happens, today’s long tail could become tomorrow’s hidden gems, not as a marketing slogan, but as a natural consequence of better personalisation.

Connectivity will also evolve

If the next competitive advantage lies in making more of today’s catalogue commercially discoverable, connectivity also needs to evolve.

Simply connecting products will no longer be enough.

Connectivity is increasingly about preparing supply so AI can discover it, understand it and recommend it.

That requires much more than moving data between systems. It requires structured data, reliable availability, rich product descriptions, consistent taxonomies, meaningful attributes and high-quality content.

In other words, the value of connectivity will increasingly depend not only on how much inventory it connects, but on how well that inventory can be interpreted by intelligent systems.

The next question for the travel experiences industry

For years, the industry’s challenge was relatively clear.

How do we make more experiences available?

The next decade may be defined by a different challenge.

How do we unlock the commercial value of the catalogue we already have? How do we ensure that more products have a genuine opportunity to reach the right traveller?

Perhaps AI will become the first technology capable of fundamentally changing that equation.

Not simply by improving discovery, but by making it commercially viable to recommend products that, until now, have remained virtually invisible.