Going.com: How we flew to the Andes for $138

Tl;dr: Deal alert services like Going can save you hundreds

In January, I received an email with the following subject line:

“👀 *mistake fare* South America — $138 to $208 (Feb-Jun / Aug-Dec).”

For a few years, I’ve been signed up for emails from Going (when I started, it was called Scott’s Cheap Flights). They scour the internet for great deals on flights and send their members alerts when flight prices reach “great deal” territory. Often these are sales, or unusually low prices, but sometimes they find the holy grail: a “mistake fare.” In short, some sort of internal error by the airline that leads to an abnormally, outrageously low fare. This email offered just that: tickets to Santiago, Chile from $138 roundtrip. For comparison, as I write this the cheapest flight anytime in the next 6 months is $578. 

As Going explains here, these tickets can be so cheap that the airlines don’t have to honor them. Once, I got a flight alert from Going for a $26 round trip from DC to Salt Lake City. I booked the ticket and paid online, but mysteriously I never got any confirmation, my ticket was never issued, my credit card was never charged, and American Airlines never acknowledged my purchase. I booked just as AA started removing the fares from their system, and I still wonder what would have happened if I booked it immediately upon receiving the email rather than waiting a few hours. 

With that lesson in mind, we quickly decided to go ahead and book the trip–you only get so many opportunities in life to visit a new far-flung country, and a $138 ticket is a very, very good opportunity. Such a good opportunity, in fact, that we decided to gamble and take that rock-bottom price for a basic economy ticket. That meant if our plans changed we couldn’t change the flight or get a refund or trip credit, and we’d have no control over where we would sit on the plane until we got to the airport. 

Suffice to say, the gamble paid off. We were worried we’d both be stranded in middle seats in distant ends of the plane for the 10-hour flight. We were relieved when we finally got assigned adjoining seats shortly before boarding. We were caught off guard, though, when we were in the first group to be called to board our connecting flight to Chile. Instead of being relegated to the back of the line as basic economy passengers, we were instead promptly seated in a fancy LATAM+ premium economy seat. They were pretty nice:

We then waited for what seemed like an hour for the rest of the passengers to board, waiting for someone to fill the aisle seat next to us. Applying a lesson I learned the hard way on a flight back from Lisbon when someone helped themselves to our vacant aisle seat, I decided to make myself comfortable there until our assigned seatmate arrived. But no one ever did, and we flew to Santiago with the luxury of spreading out in a mini-couch. We also enjoyed two meals and a healthy amount of free Chilean wine to really make those fares a real bargain.

Because the trip was the result of the bargain fare rather than pre-planned, we did not have a lot of time off, and had just four days and three nights in the Chilean capital. But it was a completely worthwhile experience. The cost of living in Santiago is low, so we booked an Airbnb (and got some more Delta points), ending up on the 20th floor of a nice downtown apartment for 3 nights for $148. In our brief stay we took a cable car and funicular to the park overlooking the city, ate to our heart’s content, explored the museum of pre-Columbian art, took the $10 bus to the port city of Valparaíso, and enjoyed the natural hot springs in the Andes just about an hour outside of the city. 

We spent our last day in Santiago walking around in the blazing sun, and I was worried about suffering through the 10-hour flight back slathered in sunscreen. Thankfully, our Capital One Venture X came to the rescue. Thanks to the Priority Pass we received for having the card, we were able to access the Skyteam Lounge at the airport prior to our flight. That allowed us to grab snacks, comfortable chairs, free food, and, crucially, take a shower before our flight.

While it was great to fly refreshed, we couldn’t quite match our seating luck from the first leg. We were seated together in LATAM+ yet again, but this time sharing the row in the middle of the plane–no leaning back on our sky couch this time. LATAM staff also confiscated the bottle of manjar (dulce de leche) I bought in a post-security airport store with my last few pesos, for reasons I still don’t totally understand. 

Is Going worth the price?

Clearly, my Going subscription more than paid for itself by affording me the opportunity to fly to Chile for less than the cost of flying in-state. Is it really worth it, though?

The premium version is $49 per year. That’s a pretty steep price (I’m grandfathered into a lower rate, at least for now), and you’ll want to make sure you’ll get your money’s worth. In a little more than two years, I’ve received three extraordinary deal alerts through Going: this one (which also contained a $161 flight to Lima that I wish I booked), the $26 flight that was canceled by the airline, and a pandemic-era $450 flight to Japan that we had to cancel because Japan had not reopened to tourists by the time of the flight. I’ve also received a bunch of deal alerts that were very good (say, $200 to Central America, Europe for $400 or less), but not drop-everything-and-book good. 

If you don’t have the scheduling flexibility to jump on deal offers quickly (within a few minutes or hours for mistake fares to maybe a few days for sales), your value from the premium version might be limited. The emails are also tougher to take advantage of if you need to coordinate the schedules and travel tastes of multiple people (e.g. you and your partner). I also think some competitors may offer better value (more on them later). But I’ve really enjoyed keeping tabs on the prevailing sale rates for flights to various dream destinations, and even if it’s only once every few years, the odd unbelievably spectacular deal can really make the price worthwhile. 

I certainly think anyone should check it out (referral link). There’s a free version available that will send some deals on a slight delay, to give you a sense of what the offers look like, and maybe afford you the opportunity to snag a cheap flight. At that point, if you want to check out the premium version you can always try it free for 14 days. You never know–that could be when the next sub-$200 flight to the Andes drops.