FlixBus began as a disruptive start-up in its native Germany 14 years ago. It claims that on Britain's 17 major city-to-city routes it has reached parity in passenger numbers with National Express.
The success of FlixBus in the UK is as much about the decline of National Express, a Thatcher public transport sell-off that mushroomed into a multinational company and Britain's largest train operator.
Yet in 2025 it is much denuded, its decline having coincided with its listed parent's decision to switch the plc name from National Express to Mobico in June 2023. It quit the UK railways a decade ago; it is all but out of the US; it is in crisis in Germany; its West Midlands bus business is about to be dismantled, and the National Express coaches operation is loss-making, losing market share, downsizing and selling off some of its parts.
The Mobico share price tells all: at less than 30p, the stock is half where it was in the spring and has fallen more than 90 per cent since before the Covid-19 pandemic. Once a constituent of the FTSE 100, it is valued at only £175 million. The business is to lose its autonomy and become a subsidiary of Mobico's successful Alsa coach operations in Spain.
The formal response to the woes of National Express has been lame. It blames its losses on the "headwind" of the end of post-pandemic railway strikes which falsely buoyed its income from rail replacement services.
In calls with investors it has accused FlixBus of "cherry-picking" the best routes, although this accusation causes Andreas Schörling, the managing director of FlixBus UK, to smile.
Speaking from his office in Victoria, where National Express and FlixBus vehicles stream in and out of London's main coach station, his response is: what else was FlixBus going to do?
Unlike in the air, where Ryanair and EasyJet have spent 30 years largely trying to avoid confrontation, Flixbus had to go head-to-head against National Express.
"National Express has been part of the fabric of the UK for decades. The FlixBus strategy has been to establish a strong brand and establish a new market here," Schörling says.
Its UK assault had been due to begin in spring 2020 but Covid stopped that. Instead it launched a year later with public transport still in disarray because of the lockdowns, a dislocation that affected National Express but also saw off Megabus, the only other big player, which withdrew to the Scottish heartlands of its founders at Stagecoach.
On the face of it National Express and FlixBus business models are not too different, both running asset-light operations. National Express owns 30 per cent of its 438 vehicles. The rest, and in the case of FlixBus all its vehicles, are run by regional operators whose vehicles are branded in National Express or FlixBus liveries.
FlixBus has about 20 partners around the country compared with 27 for National Express. This includes, for instance, FirstGroup, the listed passenger transport group. From zero in 2020, through its contractors FlixBus has 200 vehicles.
FlixBus sees itself first as a technology company. "We do not own the vehicles or employ the drivers or operate the depots and garages," said Schörling. "Our expertise is using technology and increasingly the next generation of artificial intelligence in efficient network planning, sales and marketing and customer service.
"Instead of having hundreds of people in depots we have hundreds of techies developing the app and the software around the pricing engines and network planning."
Now serving 80 UK destinations, FlixBus doubled in size last year and expects to grow by another 50 per cent next year, with most of that coming from increasing frequencies on established routes.
Schörling claims the demographic of FlixBus is far younger than that of National Express and the pandemic and its dislocations have helped.
During the railway strikes many young people were forced on to coaches and found that there was an app-savvy, price-flexible alternative to National Express. During the current cost of living crisis, consumers have stayed on coaches as a cheaper alternative to trains.
Quite what the response will be from National Express is yet to be seen but FlixBus refutes claims that it has not played fair.
"We have had the benefit that the UK is a free market and we have competed on fair terms," said Schörling.
"They [National Express] have been quite unhappy and did what they could to hinder and stop us. They have connections and [market] strength and influence and leverage. They have tried to discourage people from working with us.
"But they might have underestimated our strength. We have had to fight and now we have strong momentum."