Sell or Change Your Flight

The problem

Plans change after a flight is booked, and until recently the passenger absorbed that on their own.

Volaris offers a way out, run together with Travel X, a partner platform. Passengers on eligible flights receive an email with two options: sell the ticket back in exchange for an electronic voucher, or move to a different date and keep a voucher for the difference. Everything happens on Travel X's side, from the email to the change flow. For someone whose trip got cancelled or moved, it's a real alternative to losing the flight altogether, and the released seat goes to a passenger who needs it.

The catch is how the offer arrives. It comes unannounced, by email, offering money back on a flight already paid for and handing you off to a site that isn't Volaris's, which is also a fair description of a scam. And because the whole experience lives on the partner's platform, any improvement had to be negotiated through the partnership rather than built inside our own product.

• Why do some passengers accept the offer while others ignore it?
• Is the flow clear enough for people to understand what they gain and what they give up?
• Where does the experience break down, and what keeps people from trusting it?

Research approach

I split the study into two groups, because each could answer a different half of the question.

Passengers who didn't convert → moderated usability tests

Five participants, aged 24 to 49, went through a realistic scenario: a week before a trip, they receive the offer email and explore the flow in a Figma prototype. This showed where the experience lost them.

Passengers who converted → in-depth interviews

Five participants, aged 28 to 68, walked me through their real experience with the help of screenshots. This showed what motivated them and what almost stopped them.

Synthesis

I built archetypes for both groups, compared needs and reactions across profiles, measured satisfaction with NPS, and organized recommendations by screen and by effort.

The ten profiles, side by side

Comparing them is where the pattern showed up. Both groups asked for the same thing from different distances: the people who didn't convert needed to understand enough to feel safe acting at all, and the people who did needed to understand what they had just received. Previous experience with vouchers predicted neither reaction.

Recruiting was a project of its own. I wrote the invitation emails, requested the list of eligible passengers from Travel X, and coordinated with Marketing to send about 2,700 invitations in three waves. Then came days of waiting for responses, plus no-shows that I had to follow up one by one to reschedule.

The Travel X designer joined every session as note-taker. We discussed findings together as they emerged, and he could jump in during sessions to explore something a participant said. Some of what surfaced were issues with the platform and emails that his team didn't know about.

Key insights

The turning point

The usability issues were real, but they weren't the main barrier.

That changed the conversation with both teams. Fixing the email alone wouldn't be enough. We had to look at every touchpoint where passengers could meet the offer, and use all the channels Volaris already had to make it feel official and easy to act on. I presented the findings to Volaris's stakeholder in charge of the Travel X partnership, and the Travel X designer shared them with his team.

Outcome

Several changes have already shipped:

• Verification moved to WhatsApp. The broken code step became a single, familiar interaction, and it also signals an official channel.
• A new in-app entry point. Eligible passengers now see the offer directly on their flight in the Volaris app. Because it appears inside Volaris's own app, it's clearly legitimate.
• Clearer copy. The flow now explains what passengers receive, and how and where they receive it.
• A lighter visual design, toning down the intense purple participants found overwhelming.
• A multi-step email journey, where each email has a single job: explain the service, present the offer, follow up, and explain how it could help next time.

Verification, before and after

The offer inside the Volaris app

The entry point passengers trust most turned out to be the one they already had open. On an eligible flight, the offer now appears on the trip itself, explains what it involves before anyone commits, and confirms afterwards that the change is already reflected in the booking.

In progress: a virtual assistant to answer questions in real time, like what happens to a seat or add-ons after a change. Changes for part of a booking remain under review, since splitting one booking involves the reservation system, extra steps and business rules.

Beyond this study: I'm now working on bringing features passengers already know from Volaris's own site to the partner platform, like changing to other airports in cities with more than one, and sorting results by schedule, so moving between both platforms doesn't feel like an abrupt change.

What I'd measure next

Offer conversion by channel (email, WhatsApp, app), completion and drop-off at each step, voucher redemption, NPS over time, and support contacts about the service.

Reflection