Blablacar Bus VP: -A Waymo will never give you the long-distance ride you need

This week, we interviewed Aurélien Gandois, VP of Buses at BlaBlaCar, to learn how the company moved from a simple carpooling platform to one of Europe’s leading multimodal long-distance travel platform. What began as a carpooling service has evolved into a system that also includes long-distance buses and trains.

Aurélien explains how EU liberalization opened the door for coach travel, why BlaBlaCar chose buses as its next step, and how the company turned the loss-making SNCF subsidiary into a profitable asset-light network. He also shares insights on distribution, cross-selling effects, and the policy gaps that still limit the potential of long-distance bus travel in Europe.

For anyone working with mobility and multimodal integration, this conversation offers a look at how coaches fills an important gap in the mobility ecosystem.

Read the full interview with Aurélien Gandois here, and feel free to share your thoughts with me by answering this email.

Topics from the interview

• How carpooling led BlaBlaCar toward multimodal travel

• What made coaches the right second mode

• Turning OuiBus around through an asset-light model and dynamic pricing

• Adding trains in Spain and France

• Cross-selling trends across carpooling, buses, and trains

• Why coach travel remains overlooked in European policy

• The need for better digital and physical integration of long-distance modes

Read the full interview here, and let me know what you think!

About Movability

Movability provides transport consulting utilizing top-tier operators, executives and consultants. Experts include Sampo Hietanen (ex. CEO MaaS Global), Maximilian Schreiber (ex. Head of Innovation at GLS and Signal Iduna) and Peter Froede (ex. McKinsey Charging expert) to mention a few. Movability’s Managing Director is Lars Christian Grødem-Olsen, ex Country Manager and MD of TIER Mobility Norway, who helped create the new Oslo escooter regulations and popularized the term Public Mobility through his blog post in World Economic Forum with Transport researcher Nils Fearnley.

Movability has worked with clients such as Bolt, Ruter, dott, Cachet, Kolumbus and many more on projects such as Ruters MaaS app strategy, tender strategy, Go-To-Market Strategies for Europe and more.