
Germany's FlixBus to Take on Greyhound in the United States - dakna
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-flixbus-usa/germanys-flixbus-to-take-on-greyhound-in-the-united-states-idUSKBN1D81CB
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Doctor_Fegg
"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.

~~~
Clubber
Globalization makes me crazy.

Budweiser anyone? It says American on the can.

~~~
ZenoArrow
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](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budweiser_Budvar_Brewery)

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

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-
Busch_InBev](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anheuser-Busch_InBev)

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robert_foss
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.

~~~
Michaels123
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.

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robert_foss
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.

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Frondo
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.

~~~
raisspen
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.

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duckwheat
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/](https://www.flickr.com/photos/95851032@N07/14628233183/)

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

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

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NickHoff
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.

~~~
usrusr
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.

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eru
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.

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wongarsu
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)

~~~
hanikesn
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.

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

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

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bbarn
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.

~~~
stoic
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.

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jccooper
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.

~~~
blahedo
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.

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Noos
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.

~~~
save_ferris
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.

~~~
ghaff
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.

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_nothing
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...](http://www.chicagotribune.com/business/ct-megabus-downsizing-
chicago-1111-biz-20161110-story.html)

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

~~~
gruturo
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.

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

~~~
hobofan
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.

~~~
JulianRaphael
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.

~~~
hobofan
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.

~~~
JulianRaphael
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.

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NTDF9
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.

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lerie82
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.

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baybal2
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.

