Blablacar will not relaunch its bus offer in Europe before spring 2021, its managing director Nicolas Brusson said on Wednesday.
The operator suspended its Blablabus (formerly OuiBus) offer on November 2, with the reconfinement.
"
We want to avoid doing the yo-yo: relaunch for Christmas, close in early January,
" Nicolas Brusson told AFP.
The few trips booked during this complicated period will be reimbursed, Blablabus said.
Read also: SNCF is preparing to run its trains for the Christmas holidays
After a first stop during the March-April containment, traffic had resumed in the summer, to 70% of its 2019 level. With the reconfinement, reservations had fallen from 70 to 75% on All Saints' Day.
The company will focus this winter on its carpooling offer.
Since the reconfinement, the traffic of these shared journeys is about 25% of the usual figures, at 10,000 bookings per day on average.
The carpooling network resisted the crisis better
On the Blablabus side, the SMEs that supply the coaches are "
warned
".
"
It hurts everyone less at a time when it is very unlikely that we will manage to fill the buses,
" said Nicolas Brusson.
"
It also allows our partners not to operate, with some of the drivers covered by partial unemployment
", just like some of the employees of Blablacar.
The bus service could be relaunched between mid-March and the end of March 2021. “
We bet that we will have left the stop & go, confinement / deconfinement.
The announcements of recent days on vaccines seem to go in this direction
”, underlined Nicolas Brusson.
The more flexible carpooling network has withstood the crisis better than other means of transport, such as the train, says Blablacar.
In the spring, “
people will want to travel and it will start again very quickly on carpooling.
It minimizes the number of people with whom we come into contact,
”said the director of Blablacar.
"
We anticipate that it will not stop overnight even if the vaccines start to arrive
."
