Real experience:
We had travel guides with 1 page about travel itineraries on each destination covered.
(e.g. Rome Itineraries)
That page was doing good but we decided to create other 3 pages to target longer keywords: 1 day Rome Itineraries, 3 days Rome Itineraries, 5 days Rome Itineraries (not exactly that keywords but somethign like that).
New pages have been linked from the "old" well performing one. We replaced the content of the old page (it was about 1 day, 3 days, 5 days itineraries) to avoid any internal duplicate content issue and created new fresh content for the new pages.
Results:
Traffic increase in 2/3 months.Moreover we observed decreased bounce rates since we were finally serving all the user with an exact intent (e.g. "5 days itinerary in Rome") with good and focused content.
IMHO, having lot of pages targeting a lot of keywords it's good but you have to pay attention on content differentiation. Different keywords, different pages, different GOOD content.
