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  • After losing her job, Andrea Giordano turned her hobby Instagram account, “BNA Cheap Flights,” into a full-time career.
  • The “BNA Cheap Flights” Instagram account has grown to over 37,000 followers by sharing flight deals from Nashville.

Before billionaire Elon Musk created jobs in Nashville with The Boring Company, he took them away.

Nashville resident Andrea Giordano was one of the first few dozen people in Tennessee to be laid off by the Department of Government Efficiency under Musk, an initiative by President Donald Trump to reduce federal spending.

Giordano worked as a contractor for the U.S. Agency for International Development, or USAID, a foreign aid-focused arm of the government Musk called “beyond repair” and “hopeless.” Every USAID supervisor had to have two weeks of training, and until February 2025, Giordano led that program.

“It’s an embarrassing thing to say you’ve been laid off, even though it’s no fault of your own,” Giordano said. “I was caught up in the personal grief of it all. I didn’t have time to think about the political implications. I was so worried about providing for my own family, paying my mortgage.”

She wasn’t shocked by the cuts, but she was surprised by how quickly and unceremoniously jobs were eliminated. Musk and Trump officially created DOGE on Jan. 20. On Feb. 14, an email informed Giordano that she was out of a job.

Unsure of what would come next for her career, Giordano turned to the community she had been building online for the last five years through her “BNA Cheap Flights” Instagram account.

That community became her lifeline, and within two months, she had grown into a full-time influencer.

‘BNA Cheap Flights’ Instagram account takes off

Giordano’s “BNA Cheap Flights” Instagram page has drawn over 37,200 followers to date, and it’s still climbing.

On the page, Giordano shares details about her own exciting trips, travel tips and daily deals on flights out of Nashville International Airport. Some highlights have included roundtrips to Reykjavik, Iceland for $298; Tokyo, Japan for $635; Denver for $38 and Orlando for $27.

Giordano started the travel account in 2020 as a hobby, but in the wake of USAID layoffs, she felt hope that it could be something more. Giordano turned to her brother Josh Michael, a marketing consultant, for help. Michael had coincidentally also lost his job recently. Together, they found a way to monetize the account and allow her to work on the site full-time.

The duo launched a paid subscriber-only newsletter three days after Giordano lost her job and two months after Michael lost his.

“It was a now-or-never moment,” Giordano said. “The idea of going back to another 9-to-5 just wasn’t hitting me right, and I thought, ‘If I’m ever going to bet on myself, it’s now.’ The amazing thing was how Nashville responded.”

Since the launch of the newsletter, Giordano gained over 20,000 new followers on Instagram, and over 1,000 people pay for her content. The newsletter costs $7 per month.

“Throughout our lives, Andrea and I have had a lot of side hustles together to try to make money online. Some weren’t so successful, but this one has had wild success,” Michael said. “She built such an amazing base of followers on Instagram with BNA Cheap Flights, and I came along and said, ‘Hey, let me help you make some money off of this. Let’s make a living off of this.'”

Over the years, their side hustles have included an English-teaching subscription service and a variety of language courses. Since their first launch in 2008, the siblings have spent the past two decades starting new online ventures, driven by the belief that one would eventually succeed.

BNA Cheap flights did.

Giordano is the face of the account, scanning flight deals from 10 different sources daily, writing the newsletter and making social media videos. Michael runs the backend of things, setting up business partnerships, email templates and running customer service.

“Seeing this community grow and thrive, seeing the feedback and the comments from Nashville, especially when people go on trips Andrea showed them, it’s amazing,” Michael said. “Andrea is showing people that travel can be affordable. It’s literally changing people’s lives.”

How BNA Cheap Flights began: ‘Travel is transformational’

Giordano was a child when she realized how expansive the world is outside of her daily bubble. Her parents made a point of taking her and her three brothers on road trips across the U.S.

The first time she saw the Colorado Mountains, she was hooked.

“I just had a passion for travel,” Giordano said. “This taps directly into people’s hopes and dreams. Travel is joy. Travel is transformational. It’s beauty. It’s living in the present. It’s all of the things that people want their whole lives to be.”

Now, Giordano said she feels immense gratitude for the role she plays in making that attainable for anyone, regardless of income level.

She recently found a $50 roundtrip flight to Rochester, New York, allowing one follower and her family to visit Niagara Falls. The woman told her she never imagined being able to afford airfare for her daughters, but BNA Cheap Flights made it possible.

“When I tell people, ‘You have permission to do this. Look how cheap it is. You have that in your budget,’ it intersects with this place of deep desire,” Giordano said. “I had one life, and because of this community, because of Nashville and BNA, now I have a totally different life.”

Hadley Hitson covers business news for The Tennessean. She can be reached at hhitson@gannett.com. To support her work, subscribe to The Tennessean.

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