A Private Coach Line Takes On DPP's Airport Express, at 125 Crowns Against 200

The bus between Prague's airport and its main railway station has a private competitor. From Monday 26 October the carrier Dinarica runs coaches between Václav Havel Airport, Hradčanská and Praha hlavní nádraží under the name BusAir, going head to head with the Airport Express that Prague's public transport company, DPP, operates on the same corridor. Zdopravy.cz, which reported the launch, describes the route as one of the most expensive bus lines going when priced per kilometre travelled, and this is the first time private competition has entered it.

The difference is the fare. A single Airport Express ticket costs 200 crowns. BusAir will charge 125 crowns, or 5 euros, with luggage carried in a separate hold included in the price and the statutory discounts for children, seniors and other protected groups applying. Airport Express itself cost 100 crowns until the end of last year; from January DPP doubled it.

Eight a day, for now

BusAir starts with eight pairs of departures a day. The buses are Setra and MAN coaches. On paper the service is a line from Český Krumlov to the airport, but the full length of the route is run only twice a week; the Prague leg is what runs daily.

In the city the coaches leave from Opletalova street by the main station, and will do so until the reconstruction of the magistrála, the arterial road in front of the station, is finished. At the airport they start and finish at the stops beneath the elevated roadway, 70 metres from the entrance to Terminal 1 and 200 metres from Terminal 2.

Getting this far took months. Zdopravy reports that Dinarica had been trying to enter the route for several months but ran into trouble getting permission to drive into the airport, on grounds of what was said to be insufficient capacity for more buses.

What the operator says

Dinarica presents the line as a way to get more people to the airport by public transport rather than by car, and is competing on comfort as well as price.

Every passenger will travel in a comfortable seat with their luggage in a separate hold. The journey between the airport and the centre takes tens of minutes, and the comfortable options have so far been either limited or overpriced. We have come to change that.

— Josef Petrák, managing director of Dinarica

That is the company describing its own product, and it should be read as such. Dinarica currently runs a regular České Budějovice–Brno line; besides Prague and the airport it is preparing an international Prague–Bratislava–Budapest–Sarajevo service and is in talks about extending BusAir to popular airports abroad.

Why it matters

Read alongside the fare history, the launch puts a number on the room DPP's January increase left. Airport Express went from 100 crowns to 200; a private operator now offers the same journey for 125, luggage included. Undercutting the city's own company by 75 crowns on a route it priced up at the start of the year is the clearest signal yet of what that increase looked like from outside.

How much difference it makes depends on things the launch does not answer: whether eight departures a day are enough to change how people actually get to the airport, and whether the capacity argument that kept Dinarica out of the airport for months returns if the service grows.