Luismi Design
--:-- · MAD
← Work / 01 / 06 Case study / LATAM Airlines · Payment Checkout

Payment checkout — redesigned at scale, live.

Redesigning the most critical step in the airline booking funnel — at scale, across markets, with zero margin for error.

Role
Senior Product Designer
· Multi-market Rollout
Team
Product, Eng, QA, Market Ops
Year
2024
Methods
Phased rollout · Live experimentation
Outcome
+13% regular flow · +3% miles · CSAT 50→60
01 — The problem

Four windows. Zero clarity.

ProblemCheckout · payments

LATAM's payment page spread one decision across four surfaces: a main window just to read which payment method was selected, plus three modals stacked on top of it — one to select, one to add, one to fill out billing information. Every step meant losing the context of the one before it — generating friction, errors, and customer claims on the final gate before a booking became revenue.

02 — Why it mattered

Highest-traffic flow, zero margin for error.

StakesBusiness + user

For the business: this was the final conversion gate for millions of booking journeys across Latin America — one of the highest-traffic checkout flows in the region, and any redesign had to roll out without disrupting it. For the user: travellers already committed to a purchase were losing the thread of their own payment, across two distinct journeys — regular checkout and miles redemption — on both desktop and mobile web.

03 — What I owned

The redesign — and the rollout.

ScopeDesign + cross-market delivery

Senior Product Designer leading the checkout redesign end to end: the single-page flow, a reusable payment-method component adopted company-wide, and the phased rollout strategy — coordinating product, engineering, QA and market operations across countries.

04 — The key decision

One page, not four windows.

DecisionOne component, company-wide

The redesign collapsed all four surfaces into a single page, with what's selected and what's available made unambiguous at a glance instead of inferred window by window. Rather than solve this once for this page, I designed it as a single custom component with variants per payment method — the same building block reused across every online payment touchpoint, web and mobile, replacing whatever each product had improvised on its own.

Four windows, one page. Start to finish, no context lost.

05 — The solution

Selected and available, clear at a glance.

SolutionBefore & after
Old LATAM checkout — payment method reached through a separate 'Agregar tarjeta de crédito' row and a SafetyPay banner, no method visible at a glance
BeforeRead, select, add and bill — one main window, three modals
New LATAM checkout — LATAM Wallet, Mastercard, Agregar tarjeta and SafetyPay all listed as one payment-method component on a single page
AfterOne page, clear payment-method states
  • 01Single page — one main window plus three modals (select, add, bill) collapsed into one flow
  • 02Payment-method clarity — selected vs. available states redesigned to remove ambiguity
  • 03Time on task — down from 6 to 4 minutes
  • 04One component, company-wide — a single payment-method component with variants, reused across web and mobile touchpoints

The company-wide rollout of that component took a year and a half, reached 7 other digital products, and each one saw its own conversion rate improve.

06 — Validation

Ship it like a live experiment.

ValidationMarket by market

A phased rollout strategy treated the release as a live experiment — scaling traffic per market only when conversion data confirmed improvement, and pulling back when issues emerged.

Rollout progress Conversion vs. previous pivot, by % of traffic live
Regular payment flow Miles redemption flow
Rollout progress for both payment flows Regular payment flow started at −10% conversion with 10% of traffic live, dipped to −2% around 35% traffic when a debit offsite issue was found and fixed, then climbed to +13% at 100% traffic across six iterations over three weeks. Miles redemption flow rose steadily across four markets from about +1% to +3% at full rollout, with no setbacks. −10% −5% 0% +5% +10% 0% 25% 50% 75% 100% % OF TRAFFIC LIVE Debit offsite issue found & fixed +3% −10% +13%
Regular flow — 6 iterations over 3 weeks. Miles flow — 4 markets, no setbacks.

The regular flow took six iterations across three weeks. Starting at −10% with 10% of traffic and landing at +13% at full traffic wasn't turbulence — it was the process working exactly as designed. We fixed a debit offsite issue mid-flight and kept moving. The miles redemption flow followed a cleaner path across four markets, closing at +3% at full rollout.

Scale traffic when the data agrees. Pull back when it doesn't.

07 — Outcome

Up at full traffic, on both flows.

OutcomeFull rollout · both flows
Regular payment flow
+13%
Conversion vs. previous pivot
Miles redemption flow
+3%
Conversion vs. previous pivot
CSAT
+10pts
50 → 60 · scale −100 to 100 · by month 3
Claims & errors
Reduced
Customer claims and processing errors

Beyond conversion: faster delivery and fewer inter-team PR review cycles, a byproduct of a rollout process that surfaced issues early instead of at launch.

08 — What I learned

Coordination as design work.

ReflectionCross-market · cross-team

At this scale, redesign is also a coordination problem. Aligning product, engineering, QA, and market operations across multiple countries — while maintaining rollout discipline — demands as much design thinking as the interface itself.

The interface was the easy part. Holding the rollout together wasn't.

© 2026 — Luis Miguel Bello García Senior Product Designer, AI contact@luismi.design
Next — 02 / 06 Concierge access & discoverability