While most travelers are equal to the task of booking flights and reserving hotels and packing and remembering their documentation and navigating foreign cities and customs and toilets, many of us are stymied by the tremendous complexity of deciding where to go. Countless vacations are ruined before they start by this vexing issue.
As with so many other problems, this has now been solved by the clever application of technology. Startup website getgoing.com proposes a complex algorythm which randomly selects between two destinations, for that niche market of travelers equal to all the other challenges of travel but find flipping a coin a bridge too far.
The website, which is very nice looking and easy to use and hence has two positive things that can be said about it, proposes a selection of starting points and destinations or experiences. The starting point can be any international airport in the world, provided it’s in the United States, and the destinations are a broad selection of eccentric, off-the-beaten track adventures like Paris, London and exotic Rome. The user selects between two offers and then commits to purchasing one of them, including providing credit card information, before Getgoing randomly chooses on the client’s behalf. The tickets are non-refundable, non-transferable and non-changeable.
To be fair, the prices that Getgoing claims to have negotiated with the leading airlines appear to be quite competitive, and an entirely unscientific comparison shows them to be only slightly worse that what you can get from Expedia.
If you’re really having a hard time deciding where to spend your precious vacation time, Getgoing may well be able to help. If you don’t want to commit to a non-refundable, non-guaranteed price which isn’t as good as that which you can get from Expedia, here are some alternatives to Getgoing:
— Travel with someone more decisive than you are. In fact, you should probably do that anyway. Two people so precious they can’t decide where to go on vacation run the risk of starving to death while deciding where to eat. If you’re experiencing life’s great journey alone maybe it’s because you’re so indecisive and you’re going to have to change that sooner or later, you might just as well decide to start now.
— Stick a pin in a map or flip your own coin. Load Wikitravel and click on “random page” (I just got Transylvania). Go to the airport with a wad of cash and say to the lady at the ticket desk “get me on the next flight out of the country” while looking furtively about for an assassin in the crowd.
— Don’t go. Stay at work and postpone your vacation until there’s somewhere you want to go. Ask your friends — many of them will have traveled and found the experience rewarding. Over time one such experience will strike you as something you’d like to do and if that never happens then you’re not a traveler, spend the money on something you do like, if you can decide what that is.
So on balance out of five stars I’m going to have to give Getgoing a WTF. I have no idea who the audience is nor why anyone would use this site when there are cheaper, more reliable and appreciably more random options available.