Most travelers never think about the payment step until it fails. By then, the airline risks losing more than a sale. For Rodrigo Maldonado, Head of Payments at Volaris, a declined payment can break the customer relationship before the journey even begins: “It's a passenger who may never come back.”
That conviction led Volaris to rethink its payment operation in stages: first by connecting its providers through one orchestration layer, then by gaining a clear view of performance and opportunities, and finally by putting that intelligence in control of payment decisions. The result: its highest acceptance rate ever.
Watch Rodrigo Maldonado, Head of Payments at Volaris, and Matías Rodríguez, VP Sales LatAm at DEUNA, tell the story in their own words.
Volaris started with a small fleet and a handful of routes. Today it operates 157 aircraft across eight countries and is Mexico’s leading airline by annual passengers carried. That growth brought travelers from around the world, each expecting to pay with their preferred card or local payment method, and Volaris committed to making every checkout feel effortless.
Delivering that experience meant running an increasingly complex operation behind the scenes. Every new market added acquirers, local payment methods and requirements of its own, and building and maintaining each connection in-house was consuming engineering resources the team needed to keep moving fast.
To keep growing at that pace, Volaris adopted DEUNA’s payment orchestrator, bringing all its providers into a single integration layer that simplified new connections and reduced technical effort. Once connectivity was solved, the team could focus on the next question: how were all those providers actually performing?
The answer wasn’t easy to get, because every provider reported performance differently. Each week, the payments team gathered data from multiple sources, reconciled formats and manually cleaned and consolidated reports before any analysis could begin.
All that preparation ended up delaying the very decisions it was meant to inform. Opportunities surfaced late, and investigating a performance drop took longer than it should have.
When approvals fell in a country, the answer could be scattered across several providers’ files, and while the team worked to find the cause, passengers kept running into the same obstacle. Volaris needed a faster way to understand what was happening and decide what to do about it.
Volaris adopted Athia, DEUNA’s agentic command center for payments, to bring every provider’s data into one consistent view, aligned with its own definitions and goals.
The team could now ask questions in everyday language and receive answers in real time. Complex reports that once took days could be built in minutes. Proactive alerts flagged performance changes and their likely causes, helping the team focus its attention where it mattered most.
Each team member gained back two to three days of manual work, creating more time to investigate opportunities and improve performance. Everyone could work from the same numbers, without rebuilding the analysis whenever a new question arose.
As Rodrigo describes it: “Now the numbers finally agree, and everyone in the room is looking at the same one.”
Volaris’ biggest leap came when that intelligence began driving payment decisions. With DEUNA’s Acceptance Optimization Agent, the airline moved from periodically reviewing static rules to continuously adapting how each transaction is processed.
The agent uses live performance signals to select routes, fine-tune message settings, and adjust retries, giving each payment its best chance of approval. Rules that once remained untouched for months gave way to decisions made at the moment of each transaction, around the clock.
Volaris defines the boundaries; the agent optimizes within them. The agent accounts for commercial agreements with processors, technical constraints, and operational restrictions, keeping every decision within the conditions the airline sets.
Authorization rates climbed by more than four percentage points, reaching the highest acceptance rate in Volaris’ history. More booking attempts became successful payments, helping more passengers complete the trips they intended to take.
For Rodrigo, the clearest sign of success is how deeply the change is embedded in daily operations: “Today this is just how we run payments. Not a project, not a test.”
Give your payment operation the intelligence to spot opportunities and the agents to act on them. Athia and DEUNA’s specialized agents help you increase approvals, reduce manual work and keep optimizing performance, always within your business guardrails.
