Germany's FlixBus to Take on Greyhound in the United States | Hacker News Reader

Germany's FlixBus to Take on Greyhound in the United States

reuters.com

158 pointsdakna94 comments

"Germany's" FlixBus is largely owned by American private equity firms.

Good ol' all-American Greyhound is owned by one of the biggest UK public transport companies, FirstGroup. (Megabus is owned by another, Stagecoach.)

Meanwhile, over in the UK, Stagecoach and First duke it out for rail franchises with the nationalised rail companies of Europe.

Globalization makes me crazy.

Budweiser anyone? It says American on the can.

Budweiser is an interesting example of an American beer, as the original Budweiser beer was from the Czech Republic:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_Budvar_Brewery

Budweiser isn't even an American company anymore. Globalization: who made this piss water? :)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-Busch_InBev

They also bought Molson Coors, "Canadian" beer... With the I am Canada slogan lol

It’s not publicly known who owns how much of FlixBus. It has been reported that General Atlantic holds 35%, but Daimler, Holtzbrinck and the founders most likely hold a significant amount as well.

Haha yea I just learned that in the article.

Seems like it's really hard to get American citizens or companies to care about public transit. We only have outliers like Musk, and I'm not even sure that tunnel thing he's building can be considered "public" transit.

Having a less pleasant experience than with Greyhound is basically impossible, so I wish them good luck!

More competition can only be a good thing.

Well I have no experience with greyhound since I'm European but I do absolutely hate flixbus. Awful experience every time I've used them. Never again.

Your impression is possibly why the bar gets nudged pretty high for mass transit providers in Germany.

To put Greyhound into context for you, the driver sits in a box made out of bullet proof glass.

So no matter how unpleasant Flixbus may be, I doubt that it's a life or death situation.

Hey, just out of curiosity, where in the country is that? I've ridden Greyhound in the Pacific Northwest and New England, and never saw that.

It is most likely in the "I need to make up something outrageous" part of the country. I have used Greyhound to go out of downtown LA and SF which are both situated in some of the worst places of their respective cities which are still accessible and saw nothing of the sort. The LA one was definitely very sketchy, but the Greyhound experience for me wasn't much different than the experience using long haul bus travel here in Europe. Yea the facilities are more run down, but the bus rides are much more fun since people actually talk to each other.

Not very nice to accuse the guy of just making things up. I've seen them in the southeast. Was able to find this picture: https://www.flickr.com/photos/95851032@N07/14628233183/

That doesn't look like bulletproof glass, that looks like plexiglass.

Agreed, it looks like the dividers that a lot of public buses will use.

> To put Greyhound into context for you, the driver sits in a box made out of bullet proof glass.

I've used Greyhound many times over years, and I don't recall ever seeing that.

I travelled with Flixbus multiple times when the sector was still booming about two years ago. I don't understand the complains. Flixbus has comfortable seats, you can charge your phone and they have very fair prices for snacks and drinks. Of course, you do not have infinite space if you have long legs (but more than in a common bus) and the Wifi could be laggy sometimes. But hey, they had free wifi before the Deutsche Bahn was even thinking about it! And a online media center with quite a variety of films free to watch. They really made an effort to provide good service and offer a comfortable ride, so my experience.

I switched to ride sharing (not like Uber - but a in a way where someone who is taking a certain route anyway fills up their empty seats) since Flixbus got more expensive when their competition died out.

I travelled with Flixbus lots of times over the last couple of years and their WiFi is either broken or completely overloaded. Toilets commonly didn't have toilet paper or were downright unusable. Even more fun was that the Bundespolizei used to conduct random checks in Munich and pull out one or two passengers who then had their luggage searched for no good reason.

Your complaints are likely valid and still irrelevant to how much of an improvement almost anything would be over Greyhound.

Really? I split my time between Canada and Germany and Flixbus was always reasonable (a bit late once though). Way cheaper than DB.

As a German, Flixbus is quite ok. Comfortable buses, and most trips have electric outlets, wifi and a working toilet.

Compared to the train, their toilets are unreliable, they experience way worse delays (30m-1h delay is not unusual from my experience, very understandable since traffic varies), provide fewer routes and have a pretty bad experience at the bus station (small stations are ok, big stations are always chaotic, nobody knows anything, personnel has no announcement system or even megaphones and is trying to herd people around by shouting information). But Flixbus is usually significantly cheaper than taking the train, making them a popular choice among students and other price-conscious travelers with flexible schedules.

I think as a German that has been using different forms of transit in the US, I think you - unknowingly - are comparing apples with oranges: Flixbus is bad, yes - but only for German standards.

Inner-american travel comes with much less "classiness". I don't know why; I'd like it to be because of more price competitiveness, since more access for poor people is a good thing. But i dunno. Just that inner-US flights have the flair of an european subway-commute.

Anyways: Riding the bus in Germany was always only chosen by those who couldn't afford train or plane. This is why I loathe Flixbus! City-to-city bus rides were prohibited* in Germany until Flixbus basically "uber"-ed the prohibition away. But their network of busses, drivers and subcontractors are basically the same of what the market offered before.

Personally I'd never expected ICE-train quality standards for for a fraction of the price.

[*] = to be exact, the Deutsche Bundesbahn (state owned railway) had the only license to operate inter-town bus-rides, which - being a town-connecting railway company - they "just happened" to under develop.

Interesting. Public transport in America seems to be considered primarily just for poor people outside of a couple of east coast cities, where in most of Western Europe it’s a way of life.

I was also going to point to a much bigger hangover from class divide in Anglo-Saxon countries, but actually that doesn’t hold true in the UK — coach services in the UK tend to be pretty good for shorter journeys, perhaps because of strong competition? The Oxford London coach route is exceptional, with free food being given out in the mornings at one point, free WiFi, comfortable buses, and generally just a nice way to travel.

> Public transport in America seems to be considered primarily just for poor people outsid

Except the one mode of public transport that is most environmentally unsustainable and has a ~2.7x multiplier effect (vs just the fuel's CO2 emissions) to global warming [1].

[1] TLDR: http://co2offsetresearch.org/aviation/RFI.html - source: http://www.ipcc.ch/ipccreports/sres/aviation/index.php?idp=6...

It wasn't Flixbus that "ubered" the laws, it was DeinBus.de, that had a lawsuit with Deutsche Bahn. They sadly didn't grow to the size that was needed later, but they were the pioneers of the space.

As an American in Germany, I say good for them. My FlixBus rides have been downright amazing compared to Greyhound back home.

I was just in Jena and decided to take a bus to Leipzig. The bus was like riding in a plush pillow, the driver even made coffee for everyone with a machine that was built into the actual bus.

Going back to Germany in a few hours to relive the experience.

Cheers from the 1950s, cheers from Sofia.

Is it really any worse than the cattle-car experience of air travel in the US? I take the bus semi-regularly and while far from luxury, I don't find it any less appalling than what Alaska / United / et al. dish out.

At least with flying, I don't have to worry that some hobo will steal my bags between "layovers" using the bus.

Nah, when flying it's the TSA that pilfers your stuff. At Newark they had a theft ring going for years, the victims were elderly Indians going home: http://abcnews.go.com/Blotter/convicted-tsa-officer-reveals-...

I literally settled yesterday for a far too small amount with Turkish Airlines, because my bag got "lost" four weeks ago (Frankfurt-Istanbul-Singapore).

So .. yeah. I'm convinced it was stolen. And the airlines treat you like crap when that happens, basically shrug and do nothing for a month.

I used to ride Greyhound when I couldn't afford to fly, years ago.

There is no comparison. The bus is worse.

> cattle-car experience of air travel

Being herded in and out of a Greyhound at 3 AM by a pissed off driver is literally a cattle-car experience, and happens often.

I've only encountered smiling faces and helpful attitudes from flight attendants and pilots.

It's night and day.

I was also a frequent Greyhound rider, mostly during and right after college (2000 - 2007 maybe). It was overall an awful experience, and in general took about 3x the time of driving a car. You do end up with about one crazy story per 8 hours travelled though.

Smoke breaks. I think a near majority of Greyhound riders smoke. And dang, Germans and French smoke way more than Americans - it's almost like they don't know or care that it'll kill you, and make you cough badly enough it sounds like you're dying. Somehow I kinda doubt it'll be any faster on a FlixBus.

Flixbus coaches do not do smoke breaks.

Well then it has the potential to be a buttton faster than Greyhound.

If you aren't choosing your bus line based on "what's the cheapest one that is at least as clean as any other form of public transportation" you are an out-lier compared to the typical customer.

I ride with FlixBus several times a year within Germany to visit family. It gets you where you're going, on time, clean buses. There seems to be a lot of competition for buses in Germany, at least in Berlin, so maybe that pushes quality up. I wish them luck.

Scheduled inter-city buses were not allowed in Germany until 2013, it's hardly surprising that only four years later, everything is still somewhat new and shiny. I'd be careful to draw long term conclusions.

To be more precise, they were not outright forbidden: a Nazi era law just gave Deutsche Bahn a veto on all bus routes. (If memory serves right.)

Berlin was a special case before that, because of cold war stuff.

> There seems to be a lot of competition for buses in Germany

Flixbus market share was 90% in January, read just the other day that it raised to 93% recently.

https://www.statista.com/topics/3361/long-distance-bus-marke...

Flixbus bought MeinFernBus a couple of years ago, followed by the Postbus passenger service, which was a major consolidation of the market.

I'm not sure if the prices have gone up much in the last year despite the drop in bus competition. I always had the impression that the inter-city buses were competing pretty hard against non-consumption, and Mitfahrgelegenheit services like BlaBlaCar. There were a lot of highspeed 1:40 trips between Berlin and Hamburg that simply weren't happening on Deutsche Bahn for 60-110€ but made sense as 3 hour trips for 9-20€. Bus liberalization also seemed to result in DB introducing more slow trains that could compete on price on popular routes. Market liberalization has been a big mobility win for the young and less wealthy.

> Flixbus bought MeinFernBus a couple of years ago

It's a common misconception. More precisely, FlixBus merged with MeinFernBus. At the time MFB had the bigger share of the market. FlixBus was chosen as a name mainly because it sounds better to foreigners.

Although it was publicly branded as a merger of equals it was pretty clear that Flixbus is the one who took over the other. Just after the merger, management was almost completely from Flixbus (the MFB founders even left completely soon after) and operation moved to their Munich Office immediately.

Yup, Berlin-Hamburg was the route I took most often.

So America's "Uber for long-distance buses" will come from Germany instead of Silicon Valley? I must say I'm a bit surprised.

(Granted, the "Uber for..." comparison is not spot on here. FlixBus provides the infrastructure in form of bus terminals and information booths. But tickets are bought online or in their smartphone app, with surge pricing etc, and FlixBus contracts local bus companies for actually driving the buses)

It sounds like their model of operation is not that different from existing players in the U.S. market, such as Bolt Bus.

What makes this the "uber for long buses"? It isn't even that they they are filling unused inventory on existing routes, from what I can tell they are simply using contractors. Is all it takes to be the uber of something to not have staff and have an app? The article didn't mention uber at all (or did I miss it?) and this really seems more like a regular long haul bus company that thinks they can do it better than a real disruptor.

Flixbus owns 1 bus I believe, just so they can apply for routes as a bus company. They then "wet lease" the services (staff+bus).

Disclosure: I work for Flixbus

It's a bit more complicated. We have a revenue share model with our partners, payout depends on a few factors and is about a 70/30 split. Though we also guarantee most of them a minimum payout per ride. So it's in both parties interests to have satisfied customers.

The bus terminals are owned by the cities themselves and only at the busiest stops we have those booths. Also a lot of our manpower goes into planning new lines, marketing and customer service. And not having to buy buses at 275k € each allowed us to scale up business really quickly.

Also we really see ourselves as a technology company and are always looking for more engineers. So if you want to work in Berlin or Munich in an international team drop an email to jobs (at) flixbus.com.

Disclaimer: I work for Flixbus as an SRE in our cloud platform team.

I wanna know more about the onboard wifi services. what team deals with that and are they in Berlin? I'll buy them beers! :)

(Un)fortunately that's done by a third-party provider. Fun-fact: Bad wifi and delays have the highest impact on customer happiness.

I don't know how Greyhound is still relevant. Most of the time you can get comparable if not cheaper tickets on Amtrak, and it's an order of magnitude better experience than a greyhound bus. I just did a sample from Chicago to SF, and it's 20 dollars cheaper on amtrak, and 1 hour faster. That's leaving on Monday.

I suppose there may be some rural routes where it's a good option, but I don't see it.

That's a hell of a train ride. Last I checked rides that long are about price equivalent to flying. Why do you take the train?

It's about half the cost of the cheapest flight I could find to SFO from ORD. Personally, I wouldn't do it - I'm just saying greyhound seems like an even worse choice than a train.

FWIW that's only true if you don't mind sitting in a coach seat for 2 days. If you want a bed, it's more expensive. And for a 2+ day train ride, you probably want a bed :-)

I would seriously consider doing it for the experience / as a vacation (I like trains), but not as a serious mode of transportation.

Am I missing something, or are you able to sleep in the coach seats?

I haven't had any issues sleeping in Amtrak coach seats the handful of times I've taken overnight train trips. I sleep much better than on airline coach. Amtrak seats recline pretty far and have much larger pitch than airline coach seats. It's quite comfortable for a single night, really.

Interesting; thanks for your reply. I guess I'm doomed to airplanes for work travel; I can't justify the added expense and time of the sleeper cars, and can't sleep in the coach seats :(

The Amtrak multi-day sleeper car trip is not the romantic experience you are imagining. It is one of mechanical breakdowns, unexplained delays, and reaching your destination hours if not days late.

The actual beds aren't bad though, and the dining car food is decent.

It's on my list of things to do someday when the stars line up correctly, but I do fear that it's the sort of thing that seems more exciting and romantic on paper than in reality.

What was the price?

At half the cost, I get it. It's not pleasant, but there are plenty of people for whom the money is a lot more important than the time. Particularly if you're not currently employed, for example.

I'm curious, how much did you pay? I do ORD-->SFO around monthly, and I've never paid more than $150 roundtrip. Amtrak is super expensive by comparison

That's very dependent on geography. A counter example: a train up or down the east coast (DC, Philadelphia, NYC, Boston) is often equal to if not greater than the cost of a flight. At least $100, usually a lot more. By comparison, buses are about $30, often less.

And that's to say nothing of extended networks - Amtrak is great if you live near an Amtrak station. A lot of people do not, and buses serve them well. Ish. For many places in the country, Amtrak is comparable to a slow plane, not a fast bus.

For many routes, it is dirt cheap, but like anything, you get what you pay for. I take it semi-regularly from Walla Walla to Seattle (approx 5 hours by vehicle) and it is about $50. If you plan ahead, there are flights (45 minutes) for $60, but they can run as high as $200. By and large the Greyhound consumer is of an income bracket where that $50 is a significant expense, and an airline ticket would be a serious stretch. Also, Greyhound appears to have a deal with the prison system, as released convicts from the state prison are regular passengers. Frankly it isn't any worse than an airplane and you get regular stops to stretch your legs and get a cup of coffee. All the busses have wi-fi and some also have power outlets.

To your point -- for really long distances, air travel is likely the way to go, but for regional transportation it is a reasonable alternative. A tank of gas in my Ford F-150 is as much as $90, making a bus ticket or a flight cost effective within the region.

I don't know about the us, but here in Canada they go everywhere. In most towns and smaller cities, your options for travel are either greyhound or personal vehicle.

They're still relevant because there is literally no alternative.

That's true in much of the US as well.

Interestingly I looked into bus travel to Oxford, Mississippi (home of the University of Mississippi) a while back. I live in New Orleans without a car, and I figured it could be an interesting weekend trip and assumed it would be something like $30 round trip by bus.

There is no bus or rail service to Oxford. Greyhound and Megabus no longer stop there. The nearest airport is in Memphis, Tennessee. Taking a cab from the airport or from the nearest train or bus station is impractically expensive.

The only way to get there is by private car. I'll go there someday if I buy a car, or if a friend of mine with a car feels like going.

I have traveled a lot from Chicago to Iowa City, which has no rail service, via both Megabus and a Greyhound subsidiary. Don't know that I would call it a rural route. Or rather, I don't think it's so rural as to be invisible.

People under various hardships have different needs. Greyhound you can pay cash, if you don't have a credit/debit card, though you do need a photo ID. Amtrak is the same, but doesn't go everywhere. Megabus you can ride without a photo ID, but you need a credit/debit card and access to the internet.

When I was traveling that way there were a lot of families moving out of Chicago by bus, with all their possessions in black garbage bags.

Also, prisoners in Illinois tend to get a bus ticket when they're released: http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-prison-releases-bus-me...

On the Illini routes, Amtrak is slower, less reliable, and runs less often.

> cheaper on amtrak, and 1 hour faster.

Amtrack's schedules are fiction.

Further anecdata: Amtrak is a joke in Texas.

Amtrak from Dallas to Austin is a 6h22 trip for $29 (value fare), departing only once per day (11:50am) and taking about 2 hours to reach Fort Worth, a 30-minute drive.

By contrast, there are 11 Greyhound buses from Dallas to Austin per day, from $13-19, and the ride is never longer than 3h40 (mostly 3h to 3h10). There are usually 3-4 Megabuses in each direction per day as well, for around $12 for an unreserved seat.

Heck, they won't even quote you for Houston-Dallas. This is an improvement: they used to show a ridiculous two-day route connecting through San Antonio.

Amtrak in Texas (and most of the rest of the country outside the NW corridor) is set up as a cross-country sightseeing/nostalgia tour service. Sunset Limited (New Orleans to LA) runs three times a week. It's not meant for actual, you know, transportation. Really, they ought to fully embrace that and operate more like a cruise ship with day stops for sightseeing. An American version of a Rhine cruise.

Probably this is because they can't compete on either price or time with busses, planes, or cars. I think there's many city pairs in the country where center-to-center rail service at a price and speed between bus and air would work well, but I doubt that can be achieved on the freight rail network.

>(and most of the rest of the country outside the NW corridor)

I assume you meant NE corridor although I understand that Seattle to Portland by train works reasonably well. Even on the NE corridor it's really segments. Boston-NYC and NYC-Washington DC work well. Boston to DC really takes too long although I've done it.

There are some other segments here and there but even when they seem like a good way to get from A to B (like Raleigh to Charlotte), in my experience it's not heavily utilized.

I've done a lot of cross-country train trips, and in addition to NE corridor, travel radiating to/from Chicago and within about 500 miles is generally pretty transport-oriented (not just vacationing). And even in a lot of the other places, there are many of the more rural parts of the country where Amtrak is much more accessible than the nearest airport, and people there use it accordingly.

>I suppose there may be some rural routes where it's a good option, but I don't see it.

Some rural routes? Google for maps of Greyhound and Amtrak routes to see how many places the train doesn't serve.

I'm sure they'll have fun realizing the target market of bus travel in America isn't what it is in Germany, and that they are trying to be a department store in a dollar store world.

You may be right, but I so dream of a serious competitor to air travel in the US. Flying is so expensive, inconsistent, uncomfortable, and stressful.

I've experienced missed connections/cancellations on roughly 1/3 of my flights over the last 5 years, only a handful of which were due to weather. Maintenance/software problems and operation bottlenecks accounted for the rest.

I hope some will look at this as an alternative to air travel because we desperately need it.

Distance makes that mostly a non-starter except for the relative handful of routes where Amtrak or "luxury" bus services already exist such as Boston to New York City. Long distance [bus] in the US almost exclusively serves the low-end of the market and it's hard to see why that would change.

The potential market for bus travel in the US is high. There are many places with no/limited/unaffordable commercial air service and one of the limiting aspects of bus travel is user experience. Changes to local last mile transport can probably improve that experience. Providing a better travel experience than a Greyhound bus terminal is a pretty low bar.

All travel in the US defaults to dollar store for anyone who doesn't fly business class or just drive. Air travel has been going down market for decades. Roads have been getting better. Trains have remained an eccentricity.

Last time I took the Megabus, the bus drivers were complaining that the company had sold the Midwest division (or something like that) to Coach USA. Indeed, the last few times I took it from Chicago to Ohio, they were Coach USA buses instead of the usual blue double-decker Megabuses. Apparently they downsized majorly in the region [1].

It didn't strike me as a particularly profitable venture in this country.

[1] http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-megabus-downsizing...

Having ridden with them in Germany I wish them the best. A fantastic service.

I used one of the companies they acquired (MeinFerbus) and had a very positive experience - but now that they basically acquired a monopoly by buying out everyone else they are turning out not to be so nice. Many popular routes had the frequency cut down to ensure every bus is full to the brim, travel times became longer because they combined 2 routes in one, etc.

Honestly, FlixBus aren't well known in Germany for being good. They are cheap, but you constantly see people complaining about them.

You also see people constantly complaining about other modes of transportation.

I've ridden both Flixbus and ICE extensively, had good and bad experiences with both and would say that they are very comparable in most aspects, except travel time. If I would find myself in a position with less money again, I would switch back to Flixbus (though the gap when you have a Bahncard 50 isn't even that big on popular routes).

I wouldn't be surprised if they would lose significant business in Germany when the new Munich-Berlin ICE track is opened at the end of the year. 6hrs (ICE) vs. 8hrs (bus) will suddenly become 4hrs vs. 8hrs.

I wouldn't be surprised if they wouldn't lose much business at all. With Flixbus, people pay 22€ for a 7:15h bus ride from Munich to Berlin. With DB, people will have to pay 150€ for a 4h train ride from Munich to Berlin (without a Bahncard). This is not affordable for the typical customer of Flixbus.

That's why I said, "on popular routes" (I probably should have said "on busy days" instead). When the number of available seats runs low, the price quickly surges from 22€ to 48€ (or even higher). 48€ vs 75€ with Bahncard 50 is not a huge gap anymore. 150€ also is for "Flexpreis" which isn't really a 1:1 comparison.

Comparing both pricing models isn't really that straightforward, which is why I left it out of my initial comment.

You are right, the pricing models are hard to compare 1:1. However, most Flixbus' customers can't afford (or don't want to afford) a Bahncard 50 and are very price sensitive. I've been travelling with Flixbus throughout Europe and the crowd is typically either very young or comes from the low-income strata of society. Anecdote ain't data, but that's what I also hear from the folks working there. Also, it has cost DB €10 billion to build the new connection, so they'll have to recoup that investment. Imho and as mschuster91 indicated, they will mainly steal customers from airlines.

Who is gonna lose big is flight, on that route. 4h one-way is comparable to flight... 1h10m flight time, plus 1h getting from Munich city center to the airport, plus 1h of pre-boarding time plus another ~45min to get from Schönefeld or Tegel into Berlin plus the inevitable delays on public transport, and suddenly the train is a viable alternative.

Also, in a train you usually won't end up with damaged legs or other flight related issues and you don't need photo ID or be treated like you're a terrorist (patdowns/searching, in addition that your PIR records WILL end up at NSA HQ, no matter what), which is the reason why I do not fly.

> though the gap when you have a Bahncard 50 isn't even that big on popular routes

Also, as a Bahncard holder, you get limited-time offers all the time. Just this weekend, I made a 500 km trip with InterCity trains that only cost me 25€ in first class (down from 160€) because of a voucher DB sent me via snail-mail. Once every few months, I will similarly receive vouchers like "10€ off a ticket purchase within the next 6 weeks" or "2 people ride, 1 pays for your next ticket purchase".

Yea, but you don't just see an entire review page just filled with bad reviews.

I have noticed the uptick in quality of services owned by foreign companies over services owned by US companies.

Maybe foreign companies are not under pressure to achieve constant growth at all costs and that allows them to focus on quality metrics instead of quantity metrics.

I love greyhound, I have taken it coast to coast dozens of times since the late 90's, I will be doing it again soon, I would love to see some competition.

Buses in US suck. I can buy a first class train ticket in China for the price of a SF-LA bus ride, and it will pass the equivalent distance in less time than you need to reach downtown SF from the airport.

Thus, Chinese trains are superior to American buses.

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