Milano, 08.05.2025.

After more than two years of intensive work, today we are publishing the first edition of the report “The long-distance coach market in Europe | Year 2019 – 2024”, in collaboration with the platform Checkmybus.com. The report is an upgrade of the “Italian Long-Distance Coach Transport Market Report” published by TRASPOL between 2017 and 2021.

This report is the only independent observatory on coach prices and now covers the entire European continent, including Turkey. It aims at becoming the reference for the industry and will (hopefully) be published every year.

The study is based on a huge sample of prices collected for 6 years by the platform and describes the profile of bus users, the prices charged, the main routes and the most requested locations. The entire dataset has been cleaned to ensure the maximum reliability of the results, and geolocated to let us map the market. Here some highlights of this first edition:

• We classify the OD pairs in three sub-markets: domestic intercity, cross-border intercity and OD pairs serving an airport. We exclude short routes (<50km for IC, <20km for airport). The main evolution is the relative reduction of intercity traffic (from 81.7% to 69.9% including cross-border) and the corresponding increase of domestic airport connections (from 15.2% to 27.3%). International traffic, heavily influenced by covid pandemics, has very slowly been recovering with respect to domestic segments since 2022, but it is still well below the 20% of the pre-covid era.

• The price index (€/km) has grown quite substantially (+15%) in five years (2024 vs. 2019), but in a different way for the three sub-markets, and with airport segment growing the most. 2024 is on average slightly lower than 2023 (-3%), due to the steep reduction of the first semester.

• We compute indicators for market concentration: share of top-3 carriers by country and average number of carriers per route, by country. The European landscape is very different. While in most of European countries top-3 operators have more than 70% of passengers (!), higher shares are found in The Netherlands, Belgium and especially UK (top-3 above 90%). Only in Eastern countries + Italy and UK passengers can enjoy > 3 average companies per route.

• Let’s end with a map: where are Europeans travelling? Here the answer: everywhere! European coach passengers are extremely more homogeneous than any other similar map representing rail or air flows. Coach system looks more widespread and less polarised on main urban nodes.

You can download the report for free using this link:

Beria P., Sorbona S. (2025). The long-distance coach market in Europe | Year 2019 – 2024. TRASPOL Report 1/25 & Checkmybus. Milano, Italy.