A Business Built on a Typo, More or Less
Here is a thing about airfares that airlines would prefer you not dwell on: the price of a flight is not really the price of the flight. It is a number that a revenue-management algorithm produces, thousands of times a day, based on demand and inventory and what a competitor did four minutes ago and, occasionally, on nothing at all. Sometimes the number comes out wrong. Sometimes a New-York-to-Milan round trip that should cost $1,100 comes out at $130, and for a few hours the market is simply mispriced, and if you are fast you can buy the mistake before anyone fixes it.
In December 2013 a journalist named Scott Keyes bought that exact $130 mispriced flight to Milan. Then he did the thing that separates a lucky traveler from a company: he told his friends. The friends wanted more. Keyes started a mailing list, which is a low-tech way of saying he productized his own attention. By August 2015 the list had a paywall and a name - Scott's Cheap Flights - and Keyes had accidentally discovered that a large number of people will pay a small annual fee to be told, reliably, when the airfare gods have made an error in their favor.
What makes Going interesting is not that it finds deals - lots of things find deals - but the direction it points you. Google Flights and Skyscanner and the rest are answer engines: you tell them you want to go to Lisbon in October, and they tell you what that costs. Going runs the query backwards. It watches the whole board, notices that Lisbon in October has quietly dropped to $340 round trip, and asks whether you'd like to go to Lisbon. Deal first, destination second. It is the difference between shopping and being tipped off.
This is a subtle but load-bearing distinction, because it changes who the customer is. A Google Flights user already decided to travel. A Going member is a person who is flexible - who has some vacation days and an open mind and would go a lot of places if the price were right. Going is, in effect, selling the destination. The flight is just the mechanism.
The unglamorous machinery
You might assume that catching mispriced airfare across hundreds of airlines is a pure software problem, and you would be half right. Going runs algorithms that scan for price drops, flash sales, and the rare true "mistake fare." But it also employs human flight experts who decide which of those drops are actually worth interrupting your day for. Pure automation would flood your inbox with $12-off nothingburgers. Pure humans wouldn't scale past a few routes. The product is the refusal to choose between them - a curated feed where the curation is the value, and the restraint is the feature.
The economics follow from this. Going does not, in the main, make money from airlines or commissions; it books you directly with the carrier and keeps its incentives pointed at you. It makes money from memberships. There is a free tier - "Limited" - that sends a thin trickle of economy deals to the continental United States and requires no credit card. This is not charity. It is a demo. The free deal proves the product works, and a working demo is the most efficient salesperson for the $49-a-year Premium tier, which opens up international destinations, and the $199 Elite tier, for people who would like their mistake fares in business class.
Growing up, and changing its name
By 2021 the company had a problem that most companies would envy: it had outgrown its own name. "Scott's Cheap Flights" was charming and specific and, increasingly, wrong. Scott was no longer a guy with a laptop; he was a founder with a 60-plus-person team. "Cheap" undersold a company that was also doing premium-cabin and points deals. And the possessive apostrophe implied a single proprietor of a thing that now served roughly two million people. So the team did what growing companies do and agonized over a rebrand, reportedly running through more than 3,000 candidate names before landing, in January 2023, on a single unfussy word: Going.
The new logo leans forward, and its arrow runs counter-clockwise - a small visual joke about the backwards booking model, deal before destination. It is the kind of detail that only makes sense once someone explains it, which is to say it is exactly the kind of detail a company includes when it wants to signal that it thinks differently about the category. Whether customers notice the arrow is beside the point. The arrow is there for the people who ask.
What you actually get
Since the rebrand, Going has been busy filling in the product around the core alert. In June 2023 it launched Going with Points, extending the same watch-and-notify logic to award redemptions and loyalty programs - useful if your currency is miles rather than dollars. In March 2024 it shipped native iOS and Android apps with an interactive map, so members can see deals as geography rather than as a list. And in March 2025 it added trip-preference alerts, nudging the product from "here is a cheap flight to somewhere" toward "here is a cheap flight to somewhere you actually said you wanted to go." Each step narrows the gap between a generic deal feed and a personal travel concierge.
None of this is exotic technology. Going is not curing a disease or launching rockets. It is doing something more modest and, in its way, more durable: it noticed that a small, real inconvenience - the difficulty of catching a good fare in time - was worth solving for money, and then it kept solving it a little better each year. Two million people now outsource a genuine decision to a company in Boulder. The company's whole promise is that price should stop being the reason you don't go. On the evidence, a couple million travelers agree it's worth $49 to find out where "going" turns out to be.