Is the Volaris Annual Pass Worth It?

Are you thinking about buying a Volaris Annual Pass and wondering whether it is worth it? Is the payoff worth all the restrictions? I just completed a year of travel with it and I’ve got some personal experience answers for you. 

In general terms, the Volaris Annual Pass lets you pay one price up front for the year and then fly as much as you are able on the Mexican bare-bones airline. I’m saying you can fly as much as you are able and not as much as you want because those turned out to be two different things for us. While the promise is that you can jump on a flight and take off when you’re feeling spontaneous, the reality is that they only open up a flight to you if it’s nowhere close to full. 

So if you’re looking for a quick “Heck yes!” or “No way!” answer to the headline question, I’m afraid it’s not that simple. Even with the two of us in one house that purchased it last year, the answers for the two of us are “not really worth it” and “worth it, but it took some work.” 

I’m going to lay out how the program actually works in practice, the pros of using it, and the cons of paying for a pass instead of just paying as you go. The bottom line is, if you live in Mexico or in a city that they serve and you can fly a lot without planning ahead, it can be worth the investment. If not, it’s a big gamble and you get reamed badly on the luggage charges. 

The Volaris Annual Pass Program Explained

This annual flight pass debuted in the summer of 2023 and at the time, we had a lot of trips coming up within and from Mexico. Plus as a travel writer and blogger, I can always use an excuse to go somewhere if it’s not going to cost a lot. When Volaris sent us e-mails about an introductory price of 5,999 pesos, about US$350 at the time, we both decided it was worth taking a flyer on and we whipped out our credit cards. 

Keep that intro price in mind when I get to the math though because that intro deal hasn’t been repeated. The pass will now cost you $500 U.S. or the equivalent in pesos (more or less) if you live in Mexico. So you have to take $500 worth of flights before taxes and all the fees to make it worthwhile. After that you’re coming out ahead. 

What you get, in theory, is the promise to fly the whole year on Volaris, as many flights as you can get onto, without paying for any airfares.

There are some major restrictions with this pass though that you need to understand clearly. Your pass only covers the price of the ticket itself, not anything these budget airlines consider extra. Which is everything else. You’ll pay for luggage (at a premium price it turns out, more on that later). You’ll pay for a seat if you don’t want to be stuck in the middle by the bathrooms in the back.

You’ll pay the airport taxes. You’ll pay to board first instead of joining the chaotic queue where most passengers are. 

You are also severely restricted on how far out you can book: just 24 hours ahead for domestic flights and three days out for international ones. Obviously you won’t be using this for group trips or business meetings. 

You can only book one-way flights without connections. This means twice as much work and twice as many fees since a flight with a connection is considered two flights, not one. So if you live in Denver and regularly go to see relatives in Mexico City, great. If you have to change planes to go see them somewhere else in Mexico, not so great. 

On the plus side, you can fly to anywhere the airline serves with this pass, which is currently eight countries. You could go all the way from Chicago to Lima, Peru using this pass if you wanted. I visited Costa Rica and Guatemala with it. 

Last, you must go through a special Annual Pass website when making a booking, then you can’t pay for any of your extras there. You have to go back into the regular site later for that. See more in the Cons section below about how this increases the amount of money Volaris pockets on each transaction. 

Annual Pass Pros

If you live somewhere that is on the Volaris route map and you can travel spontaneously, you’re a good candidate for this annual flight pass program. If you live by an airport they serve in Mexico, even better. I’ve got friends in Puerto Vallarta who have family in Chicago, so it could easily make sense for them if they’re going home more than twice and they’re flexible. Add a vacation or two in there and they would be golden. 

My wife flew to meet me in Huatulco with this pass, which was quite nice when we were kicking back here:

For the most part, the system works as promised. You log in 24 hours or less before a domestic flight and 72 hours or less before a foreign one. (It’s not even that exact on the latter: it’ll show the whole day of options a bit further out than that.) If you see a flight available for your date and route, then it’s all yours to jump on. Just pay the taxes with the card they have on file and you’ve got a ticket. 

You really can fly anywhere they travel. A couple times I started dummy bookings just to see how far I could go and I saw availability from Mexico to Peru and multiple cities in the USA. I just had to search two different flights from my Leon/Guanajuato airport sometimes though because while I can fly direct to some Mexican and U.S. destinations from there, I can’t fly to the rest of the Americas directly. I’d have to change planes. 

It’s not all that hard to make the Volaris Annual Pass pay for itself when you’ve only laid out $500. One or two international routes could easily cost you more than that. But price them out ahead of time so you’ll know for sure. 

Volaris Pass Cons

Unfortunately, the list of cons is a longer one that the list of pros, so you really need to know what you’re in for before you sign up. 

The big one is the short booking window. This one factor alone will rule out most customers. Mexicans aren’t real fond of planning ahead and they do tend to be spontaneous with their trips, but even by their standards it’s tough to only plan one day ahead. For international trips where you’re booking tours, hotels, and transportation, you’ve got to be a confident, seasoned traveler to start the whole process only three days out. 

Then when you are ready to take off, you might be denied a chance to fly. This is not as bad as being on standby, but think of it like a seat on a plane for an airline staffer. If the flight is not sold out, they’re good to go, but if it is anywhere close, they’ll be denied. 

The airline is doing this to fill marginal empty seats, not because they think it’s fun to talk about in their marketing, so understand that because you could take $500 worth of flights next month alone, it doesn’t mean they’ll actually let you book all of those with your pass.

A few times we did a fake booking a week or two ahead and there were plenty of seats available, like half the plane. But then when we finally got to the window where we could use our pass, the flight had disappeared from the options. 

As mentioned earlier, all this pass covers is the Volaris portion of the flight cost. They won’t show you the taxes at first, but then those pop up on the screen like they’re optional (they never are) and you have to check a box and then pay them. Then pay if you want to select a seat. Then pay again if you want to bring luggage—even a carry-on. 

This last point was the deal-breaker for us, the main reason why we’re not signing up again. I understand that the business model of these budget airlines is to ding you to death with fees since that is where all their profits come from, but you shouldn’t be penalized and pay double the cost on luggage fees because your baggage purchase is treated like a last-minute one, not one you bought in advance. 

On one flight of less than two hours I would have had to pay an outrageous $79 to carry on my own bag and put it in the overhead bin. Or $90 to check it. That would have taken my savings from the pass and stuffed them into the pockets of a cigar-smoking executive in Mexico City saying, “Just keep raising the fees!”

Was the Flight Pass Worth It for Us?

The answer to this is a yes for me, a “not really” for my wife. I saved about $500 bucks in the end, though luggage fees on one trip would have erased a big chunk of the savings if I hadn’t been so stubbornly underpacked. 

In the end, my wife only saved about $50 when it was all  said and done. If she had been able to get a flight to Tijuana on the day she was meeting up with her mom and sister at a spa resort in the countryside, it would have been a different outcome, but all the flights were off-limits when she needed to get there.

Over the course of the year, she flew three flights covering four states in Mexico and after the increased luggage fee on a couple of them, the whole thing was probably more hassle than it was worth. 

I made it pay off because I took five flight legs with it and three of those were international, two domestic. I flew to Costa Rica from Cancun, Costa Rica to Guatemala, and Guatemala to Mexico City. Then two domestic flights.

There would have been one more domestic one in there on my way to Costa Rica, but only one of three daily from BJX to CUN was available and it would have gotten me there too late. So I bought a flight on competitor Viva Aerobus instead of using my pass. 

The total flight cost (again, before taxes and fees) was 15,000 pesos and I spent about 6,000. So I saved 9,000 pesos, around US$500. Not too shabby. At today’s price though, I would have only saved $350, which is not so dramatic. 

As mentioned above though, I managed to avoid more than $200 in luggage fees on one 3-leg trip by traveling with just an underseat bag. That’s extremely tough to do, even in a hot climate, especially if you’re bringing a laptop. See my blog post here about flying with an underseat bag to see how I avoided the onerous fees. 

Now we come to the real answer at the end, where actions speak louder than words. We are not renewing our Volaris annual passes at the regular price. We may jump back in another time when we have more domestic travel on the horizon that is flexible, especially if they fix the luggage fee doubling problem for passholders.

Until then, we’ll hop on one of the other budget Mexican airlines when we go somewhere in our adopted country and one of those or a foreign carrier when traveling abroad.

My next three flights are on United, Copa, and United again, to destinations Volaris doesn’t travel to, so having the pass wouldn’t have helped me there anyway. 

Another Opinion on the Flight Pass

Sometimes I pretend to be a real journalist instead of a blogger and I reached out to a friend who also bought the pass when it first opened up. She got a better deal than we did, just 3,999 pesos (about $235 at the time), so for her it was even more of a no brainer. She just got some private offer to renew it at that same rate, which we didn’t so big score!

Here’s how it has worked out for my Canadian bud Lora who runs Explore with Lora and some other travel sites: 

I snagged the Volaris pass when it first launched for a bargain intro price, and within a couple of flights, it had already paid for itself. Over the past year, I’ve used it to travel extensively across Mexico, Colombia, the U.S., and I’m currently in El Salvador! The pass has inspired me to explore more places closer to home here in Mexico, which has been a nice bonus.

As a travel content creator based in Mexico, the Volaris pass really complements my lifestyle. It allows me to fly all over Mexico, the U.S., and Latin America, with only airport taxes to cover. Since I often book trips at the last minute, the 3-day advance booking window for international flights works out well for me. If you’re someone who needs to plan ahead and prefers more certainty, this might not be the best fit—though I’ve always managed to get the flights I wanted.

Another perk is that Volaris accommodates Emotional Support Animals, which means I can travel with my dog out of his carrier. While the low-cost airline experience is far from luxurious, having him with me makes the journey much more comfortable.

Will this flight pass be worth it for you? It depends on where you live, where you’re going, and how often you can wait until the last minute and take a chance. But if you’re interested, head here to see the current price and the long list of restrictions/rule/caveats.

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