A bus operator, not a middleman

A fleet we own

Vehicles in three classes: large touring coaches Setra, Mercedes Tourismo, Neoplan and MAN — for the busy destinations and for groups; minibuses Mercedes Sprinter, VW Crafter and Iveco Daily — for the early departures, where six people turn up for a trip rather than forty. The vehicle model is shown on the departure row before you book: it decides whether there is a toilet on board.

Owning the fleet is not a boast, it is the reason we can shift a departure because of a delayed plane and charge nothing for it. A middleman renting somebody else’s bus pays for it by the hour and therefore cannot afford to wait.

One corridor, learned down to the details

All our Romanian destinations — Siret, Suceava, Iași, Bucharest — run through a single border crossing, Porubne–Siret. It is the bottleneck of the route and at the same time the thing we know best: when the queue clears, at what hour extra lanes open, and how long a bus check really takes compared with the car queue.

There is exactly one exception and it deserves saying out loud: the trip to Chișinău goes to Moldova and crosses the Ukraine–Moldova border at a different crossing. Moldova is in neither the EU nor the Schengen area, so nothing we write about Porubne–Siret applies to it.

The journey time includes the border crossing — which is why the 82 km to Suceava take 2 h 15 min rather than an hour. This is not padding “just in case”, it is the real average at this crossing.

Why departures are tied to flights

From Chernivtsi to the nearest airport with cheap tickets is under two hours, and almost every departure from Suceava and Iași is a morning one. A bus leaving “at 8:00, whenever suits the operator” does not make such a flight at all. So the timetable is built around the flight schedule rather than around the depot, and that is where four-in-the-morning departures come from.

When you give the flight number at booking, dispatch sees it next to your seat. There is no automatic flight status tracking at present: if the plane is late, an operator moves the departure by hand, at no extra charge.

A dispatch desk, not a chat thread

The timetable on this site is not a separate marketing copy. These are the same trip rows the operator sees in the working system: the same bus, the same driver, the same seats remaining. When “3 seats left” appears in the search results or on the booking page, it means exactly three: the coach’s capacity less the seats sold and less the seats somebody is holding in the form right now. On the home board and the date strip only the sold seats are subtracted, so while someone else’s booking is still open those can read a seat or two higher than what you will be sold.

• One bus cannot be put on two overlapping trips — that is a database-level constraint, not an interface check, so not even two operators pressing “save” at the same moment can get around it.
• The system shows driving hours at the moment of assignment, not after the fact in a month-end report: the operator sees the warning before putting the driver on a trip that would take him over the daily limit.
• Every assignment change leaves a trace in the log — who, when and exactly what they changed. The entry is written by a database trigger and cannot be deleted.

What we do not do yet

There is no live border queue on the site yet. We plan to take it from nakordoni.eu and єЧерга, but we are not connected to either source yet, so on the border page there is a dash where the current queue would be, not a number. The «40–60 minutes» and «3–4 hours» ranges quoted there are what our drivers typically see, an example of the order of magnitude, not a reading of today’s queue. Showing a plausible figure instead of a real one is the cheapest thing to do, and it is exactly what destroys trust at the moment the passenger reaches the border.

The company’s registration details, its international carriage licence number and its registered address are still marked as placeholders in the footer — they will be replaced with the real ones before ticket sales open.