GetGoing: Cheap Flights for People Who are Willing to Take a Gamble

Every empty seat on a flight is money an airline left on the table. The problem is that airlines can't just slash fares openly — they'd end up giving everyone, including price-insensitive business travelers, the discount.

A 2013 travel startup called GetGoing thought it had a clever answer: mystery destinations. The pitch worked like this. You picked two destinations at least fifty miles apart, paid up front, and the company chose one of them for you — essentially a coin flip — selling you the ticket at up to 40 percent off. Like Priceline and Hotwire before it, GetGoing masked the airline. Unlike them, it masked the destination too.

The forced choice was the whole business model. Airlines are happy to discount deeply for vacationers who might not fly at all at full price, but they don't want corporate travelers — spending someone else's money — getting the same deals. Requiring customers to accept destination roulette filtered the business crowd out automatically.

Whether it filtered out too many vacationers was the open question. Plenty of travelers won't pay for a trip without knowing where they're going. GetGoing's CEO, Alek Vernitsky, argued there was a real audience of cost-conscious travelers for whom the surprise was part of the fun — especially groups, where the gamble could settle a "where should we go?" argument by itself.

Asked whether some clever matching algorithm paired travelers with seats, Vernitsky was disarmingly honest: no, it was basically random. And the discounts weren't just for last-minute desperation fares — he said airlines know their loads well enough in advance to offer the deals months out.

The concept was genuinely inventive, even if the target audience was narrow. Most travelers, this writer included, aren't quite willing to let a coin flip plan their honeymoon. But for the price-sensitive and the spontaneous, it was one of the more creative attempts to solve the oldest problem in airfare: the empty seat.