By the end of 2026, BlaBlaCar will cease its operations as a bus carrier in France. This will result in the loss of 40 jobs of the company’s total workforce of 800 employees.
BlaBlaCar, which also serves various destinations in Belgium, will, however, continue to sell bus tickets for independent bus companies.
Highly competitive market
According to BlaBlaCar, the bus routes are unprofitable, and there is no prospect of improvement due to a persistent imbalance between rising operating costs and a highly competitive market, with German FlixBus as the main competitor. BlaBlaCar Bus and Flixbus account for nearly 94% of French traffic. But there is also fierce competition from the TGV and the SNCF’s low-cost OUIGO trains.
BlaBlaCar works with about 60 subcontractors but bears the financial risk. The subcontractors are paid regardless of the buses’ occupancy rates. However, BlaBlaCar’s decision is causing significant concern among these subcontractors, and there are fears that some of them – often smaller regional family businesses – will also suffer as a result.
Higher fares soon?
The point is that long-distance bus transport was deregulated in France in 2015, precisely to foster competition and drive down prices. Until then, long-distance travel had been a state monopoly reserved for the train.
Ten years later, the result is paradoxical: competition has driven prices down so sharply that operators can no longer sustain their operations. BlaBlaCar Bus is the latest to go under, following several smaller players that already went out of business in the early years.
BlaBlaCar Bus serves all major French cities: Paris, Lyon, Marseille, Bordeaux, Lille, Rennes, Nantes, Strasbourg, and Clermont-Ferrand. Major airports are also connected. The busiest routes are Lille-Paris, Paris-Rouen, and Le Havre-Paris, as well as cross-country routes such as Clermont-Ferrand-Lyon and Bordeaux-Grenoble.
But without a rival, European market leader FlixBus, which now effectively holds a monopoly, no longer faces any pressure to keep its fares low. France does have public regional bus networks, but no public operator for long-distance routes, which were left to the free market.
Travelers who benefited from the price war between the two platforms for a Paris-Lyon trip at €5 may soon face higher fares, especially given higher fuel prices driven by the war in the Middle East. And especially young people will feel the impact of the suspension of bus services, as two-thirds of BlaBlaCar Bus customers are under 35.
Continue to sell bus tickets
BlaBlaCar does intend to continue selling bus tickets on behalf of bus companies, as it already does for international routes. The company, which also sells train tickets, “wants to strengthen its role as a marketplace in France by supporting independent coach partners who wish to operate routes.”
Management will discuss the plans with employee representatives. For now, nothing will change, and bus service remains guaranteed.
At least 12 routes in Belgium
The French company originally started as a carpooling platform, but after acquiring the loss-making Ouibus from the French railway company SNCF, BlaBlaCar also became a long-distance bus company in 2019, serving more than 400 destinations across Europe.
But since the acquisition of Ouibus for €101 million, the company has never made any money from this business, although revenue from the bus division reached €115 million last year, double the 2019 figure.
In Belgium, BlaBlaCar made negative headlines in 2022 when one of the company’s buses was involved in a serious traffic accident on the E19 in Schoten while traveling from Paris to Amsterdam. Two people were killed, and several others were seriously injured. The driver had used cannabis and had previously been convicted multiple times for driving under the influence.
The Belgian routes – at least 12 in total – include Brussels-Nantes, Brussels-Marseille, Lyon-Brussels, Utrecht-Brussels, and Paris-Bruges, as well as Cologne-Liège and various routes from Antwerp to Poland.
