Europe’s largest bus operator, FlixBus, announced in Kyiv on Tuesday, August 13, that it was beginning cooperation with the Gunsel Group in Ukraine. In particular, FlixBus announced the launch of joint bus services on routes from Kyiv to Warsaw, Wroclaw, and Prague from August 19.
Every Gunsel bus on these routes will have 15 marked seats reserved for FlixBus passengers, the CFTS correspondent reports from a joint press conference by executives of the two companies.
Buses will be operated daily on the Kiev-Warsaw route (via Lublin); three times a week on the Kyiv-Wroclaw route (via Zhytomyr, Rivne, Lviv, Krakow, and Katowice); three times a week on the Kyiv-Prague route (via Zhytomyr, Rivne, Lviv, and Hradec Kralove).
"We want to connect three capitals – Kyiv, Prague, and Warsaw. We are also trying to connect Lviv and Zhytomyr to our international hubs. Then, a passenger traveling from Ukraine will be able to reach a huge number of European cities with only one transfer," FlixBus’ Managing Director for Poland and Ukraine Michal Leman said.
According to him, this is the first announcement of the company’s new routes in Ukraine since the opening of its Kyiv office in June this year. The company now has two bus partners in Ukraine – the EuroClub carrier and the Gunsel Group.
The Gunsel Group’s CEO Zeki Kochak said that each bus will have 15 marked seats reserved for FlixBus passengers.
To mark the launch of the new routes, FlixBus announced that prices of tickets for its joint bus services with Gunsel would start from EUR 5 until August 12.
“We would like to add Odesa, Dnipro, and Kharkiv to our network and increase the frequency of services on all routes. We are working on our route map for next year. I cannot say for sure yet, but we want to increase the density of our presence. In two years of operation in Poland, we expanded our network to more than 100 cities. We want to achieve the same result in Ukraine, maybe not at that pace and in slightly more than two years," Leman said.
