Poor travellers around Europe do not have much of a choice for the means of transportation.
With national railways being expensive, and ‘lowcosters’ still lacking comfort and flexibility, almost the only option left is FlixBus. For a long time, this company has dominated the European market making a bus ride more and more associated with them. However, one should be careful as when ticking the ‘Terms and Conditions’ box for your next journey on a green couch, you most likely do not know what you agree with.
Imagine the situation: you take a bus ride from Paris to Brussels which should take 4 hours. Suddenly, already one hour away from Brussels, your bus gets a flat tyre. You stop on the highway near the gas station and curiously look at the driver and the neighbouring villages.
What would normally happen in these circumstances? Like most vehicles, the bus should have a spare tyre that the bus driver can fix with the help of the people at the gas station. That was the moment passengers discovered that none of the Flixbuses had a spare tyre with them.
Well, since the bus is luckily stuck in one of the most densely populated places in Europe and near mainstream transportation routes, there has to be a fixing team that can come with a spare tyre and get us going. Here, we realized that Flixbus probably does not have any such operative stations in this part of Europe.
But hang on, there is so much traffic on this highway, we could be picked up by the next bus to Brussels that comes almost every 40 minutes. In theory, yes. In practice, you will probably have to wait 7 hours until this happens. Seven hours of being left among the countless trucks in the Belgian countryside without any information about whether someone is coming for you at all, and when you can expect to be at home.
The passengers started joking that it was enough time to make it to Brussels on foot. At least the operators of Flixbus ‘help’ line sounded very concerned, though it did not accelerate the process in any way.
You might get from the tone that it is a real story and quite a fortunate one. However, most people on the bus for whom Brussels was not the final destination had to spend the night in the city of waffles as we arrived long after midnight.
It is not the fact of the accident that is discouraging, but the total negligence and disrespect towards the customers. Not a single effective manager can convince me that it is impossible to get the people from a more than half-empty bus to Brussels in less than 3 hours.
What most likely happened is that the dispatchers decided, based on the response from the call centre, that we could wait for a bit more and forget about our existence for some time. Simply because they can do it, there is no alternative to Flixbus travels anyway. And this is what happens when even a seemingly effective company monopolises the market.
Even a simple journey which normally does not require much attention turns into a nightmare without any guarantees or protections. It is worrying to think about more serious trips that Flixbus offers which take over 10 hours to complete – maybe then they should add plus minus a week on their website.
The well-known policy of Flixbus is that in case of a delay of more than 2 hours, the ticket is refunded. However, as the incredibly kind manager explained to me, the ‘delay’ counts only if the bus is late for the departure. Once a passenger enters the green chariot, the length of the trip is fully left to the mercy of the company.
It can be over 2 hours or over 20, and neither the refund nor any kind of complaint would have a valid ground. The key, as the manager reminded in every message, is in the ‘Terms and Conditions’ that a passenger agrees to when they buy a ticket. This document liberates the company from any responsibility for the trips to be organised adequately once the check-in is done.
So, next time you plan a short trip to the neighbouring town via Flixbus, better leave the next day free, just in case you will need to have a 7-hour-long picnic on the highway.
