Some of the best businesses start not with a business plan, but with a feeling. For Andrea Giordano, that feeling struck for the first time in 2007 while seated in front of a computer screen, staring at a $25 flight from Columbus, Ohio, to Nashville.
"I can think as far back as 2007," she says. "And I remember the feeling in my body of pure excitement and also I couldn't stop talking about it."
Twenty years later, that same instinct for a great deal has turned into BNA Cheap Flights — a fast-growing Instagram account and paid email subscription service that is quietly changing the way Middle Tennesseeans travel. Giordano has built something that feels less like a business and more like a public service.
For years, hunting cheap flights was purely personal. Giordano spent two decades in corporate life, including a stint as an ESL department head at a university and four years working for USAID, all while quietly searching Google flights in her spare time and posting deals to a small Instagram account she maintained just for the love of it.
"It was just a pure hobby," she says. "In between when I would take my lunch breaks or putting my kids down to sleep at night or whatever it was, I was just searching for cheap flights, posting it up there and just seeing what would happen."
The pivot came suddenly and unexpectedly. When USAID was shuttered in early 2025, Giordano lost her job on Valentine's Day. She had just hit 10,000 Instagram followers. With the help of her brother, a Franklin-based email marketing expert, she launched a paid subscription list that same week, appearing on Talk of the Town to announce it before she had even fully processed what she was building.
"I lost my job on that Friday, and then that Monday I'm on Talk of the Town," she says. "And instantly maybe 50 people or so signed up in the first couple weeks and it was like, 'Oh, this might work.'"
Giordano's track record speaks for itself. A round trip to Savannah for $16. Wilmington, North Carolina for $38. Hawaii for $283. Copenhagen for $639 in the summer. Iceland (her favorite country of the 39 she has visited) for $199.
Her process is less algorithm and more intuition built over decades of daily searching. "Some of it is just tons of experience and just knowing what a good deal is to 100-200 different cities," she says. "It's like a deep knowledge within me. So when I see a flight, I know whether it's a good deal or not."
Her day involves opening Google flights multiple times, monitoring airline sales, and doing the tedious work that most travelers don't have time for. When Southwest announces a sale, for example, she goes deal by deal through the fine print. "Maybe of like 20 cities they're talking about, only one of them is actually a great deal," she says. "So I'll send an email for that one city."
Subscribers receive three to five flight deal emails per week, with occasional compilation emails — like her current roundup of the sixty cheapest summer flight deals — at $7 a month or $49 a year. The model is entirely subscription-driven and there are no affiliate links and no airline partnerships influencing what she recommends.
"I really do want to stay neutral," she says. "I'm here to share the cheapest flights for you. I'm not here to just promote one airline."
What makes Giordano happy are the messages she gets from subscribers. Subscribers meeting each other in Hawaii because they all booked the same deal she shared. A single mom writing to say that a $38 flight made a Niagara Falls trip possible for her family for the first time.
"I always say I just can't take all these flights that I find so I need you all to do it for me," she says. "Because I live vicariously through them."
Giordano hopes to see BNA Cheap Flights grow deeper into the local community. "I think of my email list as a personal friend," she says, "I'm the friend who just hops in your inbox and says, 'Hey, we should go to Berlin.'" BNACheapFlights.com
"It was just a pure hobby. In between when I would take my lunch breaks or putting my kids down to sleep at night, I was just searching for cheap flights."
"It's like a deep knowledge within me. So when I see a flight, I know whether it's a good deal or not."