BlaBlaCar’s intercity coach service to shut in France

BlaBlaCar, the popular ride-sharing platform, is shutting the intercity coach service it bought in 2019 citing economic and structural challenges. The last service will run in January 2027. 

“The business of running coaches is far from the core of our technological expertise,” the company said.

“It has generated large, persistent and recurrent losses, and despite numerous efforts to improve results there is no prospect of improvement due to an imbalance between ever-growing costs and the realities of a competitive market.” 

Many of the 400 lines served by BlaBlaCar Bus are operated by subcontractors, some of them owner-drivers, who are likely to be hard-hit by the decision.

As well as offering intercity services in France, BlaBlaCar Bus also runs coaches to 15 EU countries. Links to Amsterdam, Brussels and Barcelona are among the most popular.

Analysts have expressed little surprise at the decision – the coach operation was never profitable, and the sharp rise in fuel prices as a result of the conflict in the Middle East is likely to have compounded problems.

At press conferences in 2025, the company was still confident, telling reporters that it intended to double the size of its network by 2030, and that sales were in the region of €115million a year, double what they were when it started.

The closure of BlaBlaCar Bus means that German firm FlixBus is the only remaining intercity coach service in France.

Coach travel in France

Coaches were strictly regulated before 2015 to protect the state railway company SNCF. Until then, the only services allowed were between cities not served by trains.

The law that opened up the market was pushed through by Emmanuel Macron, the then finance minister. It was one of the high-profile moves which helped raise his profile ahead of victory in the presidential election in 2017.

Ironically, the coach service bought by BlaBlaCar in 2019 was originally founded in 2012 by SNCF and called Ouibus.

France’s transport regulator, the Autorité de régulation des transports (ART), had long called for coach services to be opened up. However, it recently expressed concern about the effective duopoly of FlixBus and BlaBlaCar Bus, which between them had 94% of coach passengers in 2024, the last year it has published figures for.

ART said 18 million coach passengers were carried that year, but the companies only made an average of €6 per passenger.

BlaBlaCar’s core car-sharing business is not affected by the closure. It experienced its busiest Easter holiday period for three years with 140,000 shared journeys, as people increasingly look for ways to reduce travel costs.