I will be doing a good amount of international travel in a month and have been looking for some headphones in the $300ish range with solid ANC. I have a pair of AirPods Pro, and they are just alright on flights as far as ANC goes, and I don't want to deal with charging them every few hours.

I went around to multiple local Best Buys to try out the Bose QC45, Sony XM4, and Sony XM5, and was honestly very disappointed. All three of them only had a tiny change between ambient mode and ANC mode. I also had the same experience with a pair of Bose 700s in all ANC modes. I could still clearly hear customer and employee conversations going on around the store, and I could hear my partner talking next to me, all with none of the demo music playing. I tried out my AirPods Pro immediately after each one and was able to cut out significantly more noise. This experience was the same at each of the Best Buys I went to, and I went to multiple hoping that the first Best Buy just had broken demo units maybe.

One of the Best Buys had a pair of Airpods Max to try, those also cut out significantly more noise.

I have seen nothing but praise for how good the ANC is on all of these Bose and Sony headphones, I would expect them to at least be as good as AirPods, I have tried a family member's XM3s a few years ago and was absolutely blown away by how good the ANC was. Do these demo units just suck? I don't really want to spend $300 just to find out, but I cannot think of another reason.