Based on the keynote by Kai-Markus Mueller, Professor of Consumer Behaviour — Global Revenue Forum 2026

Consumers do not always choose the best deal. They choose what seems right to them at that moment, and small details in how options are presented can change everything: what people prefer, how much they’re willing to pay, and even what they consider a good deal. For an industry that sells experiences, this is a decisive insight. People value experiences more than things, and the higher a person’s income, the more pronounced this preference becomes. Yet it’s often assumed that the decision to choose one hotel over another, or one city or ski resort over another, is rooted in the guest’s personality, culture, or preferences. That’s not the case. Instead, much of that decision is influenced by how the options available to the guest are designed and presented.

This statement is deliberately provocative: the destination a guest chooses depends less on who they are and more on how the available options are presented. The clearest example comes from a field entirely unrelated to tourism. Organ donation rates vary enormously among countries that are otherwise similar. Some face chronic shortages, while their neighbors seem to have solved the problem almost entirely.
The explanation does not necessarily lie in culture or character. Where participation is low, citizens are not donors by default and must actively choose to opt in, a step that very few people take, despite extensive public awareness campaigns. Where participation is high, citizens are donors by default and must actively choose to opt out. The outcome is therefore determined to a large extent by how the decision is framed. The default setting exerts a strong pull. The same principle applies whenever a hotelier wants a guest to say yes. The practical conclusion is that hoteliers should become “choice architects,” deliberately shaping the options that guide guests toward a particular decision.
A shift in perspective does not necessarily have to be explicit. Asking a regular guest if they would like to have breakfast at seven or eight implicitly assumes that they eat breakfast. This approach inevitably yields a different response than simply asking if they would like to have breakfast, even when the guest fully understands the mechanism at play.

Two mechanisms in consumer psychology can help a lodging facility influence guests’ choices without resorting to discounts. The first is the decoy effect. Since customers do not always clearly understand their own preferences, adding a third, deliberately unattractive option, which includes the room the facility wants to sell but at less favorable terms, can make the desired room appear clearly superior. Guests will therefore be more likely to choose it, without any price reduction. In a study of approximately 1,500 travelers, this approach increased the booking rate by more than 10%. The guests in question also reported feeling more satisfied and confident in their choice compared to those who were offered only two options.
The second mechanism is the “less is more” effect. When evaluated in isolation, which is exactly how a guest experiences a single hotel, a breakfast, or a pool, a comprehensive yet modest offering may be rated more positively than one that is objectively more extensive but visibly flawed. Guests experience one offering at a time and judge it as a whole. The lesson is uncomfortable but clear: whatever is offered must be flawless. A spa with a broken pool or a gym with equipment that doesn’t work should be fixed immediately or not offered at all. The guiding principle is simple: less, but flawless.

The most significant finding concerns a divergence between human and artificial decision-making. These framing effects appear to be deeply human. When artificial intelligence is asked to evaluate the same offers in isolation, it does not respond in the same way. Instead, it assigns a higher value to the objectively better product, without relying on the internal comparisons that people typically use. This is particularly relevant in a market where guests are increasingly planning and booking through AI-powered assistants. The long-established principles governing persuasion may not apply in the same way to a non-human decision-maker. The practical implications fall into a number of well-defined categories:

• Human guests remain susceptible to framing, default settings and the composition of the options presented to them.
• AI-based evaluators tend to make economically rational choices, resisting the framing effects that influence people.
• At the same time, AI is capable of identifying behavioural pricing and choice architecture techniques within an offer — including anchoring, decoys, loss aversion and scarcity — and could, in principle, apply them itself.

Underlying these mechanisms lie certain immutable truths. Guests buy experiences. They value these more highly than material things and often remember them and talk about them long afterwards. The decision to choose one venue or feature over another does not, to a large extent, lie in the guest’s mind, but in the structure of the choices they are faced with. People are consistently more satisfied when they are helped to make the right decision rather than manipulated into making the wrong one. And none of this is a substitute for quality: whatever is offered must be the best in its category. The task of the choice architect is not to obscure value, but to make it clear and easy to understand, increasingly for both human and artificial audiences, who no longer judge options by the same rules. Alongside dynamic pricing, we may soon witness the emergence of dynamic choice architectures and software designed to create them.