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Comment by wongarsu | Hacker News Reader

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)

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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.

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.

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