Bus and coach passenger rights: what the 250 km test decides

Regulation (EU) No 181/2011 attaches to the service, not to the vehicle. The same coach with the same driver can run one journey under the full regime, the next under a short closed list, and a third under a regime with no delay rights and no national enforcement body. Article 2 decides which, and none of it asks anything about the bus. The Regulation is in force and has applied since 1 March 2013 under Article 34.

The scope test asks nothing about the vehicle

Article 2(1) brings a service inside the full regime on two conditions taken together: it must be a regular service “for non-specified categories of passengers” where “the boarding or the alighting point of the passengers is situated in the territory of a Member State”, and “the scheduled distance of the service is 250 km or more”. Either end of the journey satisfies the geography; the distance condition then has to be met as well.

Article 3(a) defines regular services as carriage “at specified intervals along specified routes, passengers being picked up and set down at predetermined stopping points”. What it never defines is the qualifier. Regulation (EC) No 1073/2009, on market access rather than passenger rights, defines “special regular services” at Article 2(3) as regular services “which provide for the carriage of specified categories of passengers to the exclusion of other passengers”. Setting the one phrase beside the other is our reading: neither instrument cites the other.

Article 2(7) closes off the vehicle question outright: nothing in the Regulation “shall be understood as conflicting with or introducing additional requirements to those in current legislation on technical requirements for buses or coaches or infrastructure or equipment at bus stops and terminals”. General construction belongs to UN Regulation No. 107, under bus accessibility and coach specifications; the paperwork proving one vehicle’s history belongs to buying a used coach.

What survives below 250 kilometres

Article 2(2) does not switch the Regulation off on shorter regular services. It keeps a closed list alive, in the Article’s own order.

The omissions are the substance of it. The Article 4(1) duty to issue a ticket is not there; neither is the Article 7 accident floor, nor the assistance duties of Articles 12 to 15, nor Chapter IV, the whole delay and cancellation regime. An urban route and a 200 km regional link are governed by the same seven entries, and one of the seven is spent: Article 16(2) allowed the driver-training exemption “for a maximum period of 5 years from 1 March 2013”, closing that window on 1 March 2018 by our arithmetic.

The Commission’s list of designated terminals shows Malta relying on this cut: it “did not designate any bus terminals because there are no long-distance (more than 250 km) regular services in Malta”. The Regulation’s own threshold is 250 km or more, not more than 250 km.

Occasional services are a third regime

Article 2(3) reaches occasional services — Article 3(b) defines them as services outside the regular definition whose main characteristic is “the carriage by bus or coach of groups of passengers constituted on the initiative of the customer or the carrier himself” — “with the exception of Articles 9 to 16, Article 17(3), and Chapters IV, V and VI”. Its geographic test is worded differently from Article 2(1): the initial boarding point or the final alighting point of the passenger must be in a Member State.

Reading that exception list against the Regulation’s own headings, which is our arithmetic and not a list it prints, a private hire keeps Article 4 on tickets and non-discrimination, Article 5 on other performing parties, Article 6 on the exclusion of waiver, Articles 7 and 8 on accidents, and Article 17(1) and (2) on mobility equipment. It loses Articles 9 to 16 and Article 17(3) of the disability chapter, the delay and cancellation chapter, the information and complaints chapter, and the enforcement chapter — there is no national enforcement body route on an occasional service at all. One vehicle, one driver, three answers, decided by the kind of service and its scheduled distance.

Two thresholds for the same disruption

Article 19(1) triggers on a departure from a terminal that the carrier reasonably expects to be cancelled or delayed “for more than 120 minutes”, or on overbooking. The passenger must then immediately be offered a choice between continuation or re-routing to the final destination, “at no additional cost and under comparable conditions, as set out in the transport contract, at the earliest opportunity”, and reimbursement of the ticket price plus, where relevant, a free return to the first point of departure. The Article is headed “Continuation, re-routing and reimbursement”, and Article 19(4) names all three again in extending them to a regular service cancelled or delayed in departure from a bus stop for more than 120 minutes. Article 19(2) makes failure to offer the choice cost 50 % of the ticket price on top of the reimbursement, paid within one month after the request for compensation is submitted; Article 19(5) has the reimbursement itself paid within 14 days after the offer has been made or the request received.

Care runs on a different clock. Article 21 has the carrier “offer the passenger free of charge” snacks, meals or refreshments in reasonable relation to the waiting time or delay, “provided they are available on the bus or in the terminal, or can reasonably be supplied”, and, where a stay of one or more nights becomes necessary, a hotel room or other accommodation “as well as assistance to arrange transport between the terminal and the place of accommodation” — but only on “a journey of a scheduled duration of more than 3 hours”, and only on a cancellation or a delay in departure from a terminal of more than 90 minutes. Care’s delay threshold is therefore 30 minutes lower than the one in Article 19, and applies only on the longer journeys — that comparison is ours. Article 21 names a terminal and not a bus stop, and the carrier “may limit” the total cost of accommodation “for each passenger”, transport to and from it not included, to EUR 80 per night “and for a maximum of 2 nights”.

Both clocks stop for one class of ticket. Article 23 is headed “Exemptions” and carries two paragraphs, and the first is the one that decides whether either threshold is reached at all: Articles 19 and 21 “shall not apply to passengers with open tickets as long as the time of departure is not specified, except for passengers holding a travel pass or a season ticket”. An open ticket whose time of departure is not specified therefore carries neither Article 19 nor Article 21, however long the wait; a travel pass or season ticket keeps both. Article 23(2), the second exemption, is narrower: where the carrier proves that the cancellation or delay is caused by severe weather conditions or major natural disasters “endangering the safe operation of bus or coach services”, it excuses only point (b) of Article 21, the accommodation. Article 23 gives refreshments under point (a) and the whole of Article 19 no such defence.

The accident figures are floors under national law, not a tariff

Article 7(1) entitles passengers to compensation for death or personal injury and for lost or damaged luggage “in accordance with applicable national law”. Article 7(2) calculates the amount by national law too, and constrains only the ceiling: any maximum limit it provides “shall on each distinct occasion not be less than” EUR 220 000 per passenger and EUR 1 200 per item of luggage. The Regulation sets no payable sum. For damage to wheelchairs, other mobility equipment or assistive devices — three limbs, not two — the same paragraph makes compensation “always be equal to the cost of replacement or repair of the equipment lost or damaged”, with no ceiling at all.

Assistance has two limbs, and only the terminal one turns on a designation

The terminal half of the assistance duty turns on a designation the operator does not make: Article 12 has Member States name the terminals where assistance is provided and tell the Commission, which publishes the list. Article 3(m) restricts a terminal to a staffed one “equipped with facilities such as a check-in counter, waiting room or ticket office”, and Article 3(n) makes every other stopping point a bus stop. The other half does not, because Article 13 has two paragraphs and they are conditioned differently. Both are “subject to the access conditions provided for in Article 11(1)”. Article 13(1) requires carriers and terminal managing bodies to provide free assistance “at terminals designated by Member States”, “at least to the extent specified in part (a) of Annex I”; Article 13(2) requires carriers to provide it “on board buses and coaches”, “at least to the extent specified in part (b) of Annex I”, and names no designation at all. Outside a designated terminal the first duty does not attach and the second still does, so a passenger boarding at Munich or Rotterdam, neither of which is on the Commission’s list, loses the terminal limb and keeps the on-board one, on the same Article 11(1) access conditions, on a regular service of 250 km or more; on a domestic service that holds unless the Member State has lifted it under the Article 18(1) power described below.

Article 14 is headed “Conditions under which assistance is provided”, and its second condition limits the carrier. Article 14(1) has carriers and terminal managing bodies cooperate to provide assistance on condition that the need is notified “at the latest 36 hours before the assistance is needed”, and that the persons concerned present themselves at the designated point at the time the carrier stipulated in advance — a time that “shall be no more than 60 minutes before the published departure time, unless a shorter period is agreed between the carrier and the passenger”. The 60 minutes caps how early the carrier may demand attendance; it is not a window the passenger has to hit. Only where the carrier stipulates nothing does the Regulation set the passenger a deadline of its own, and point (b)(ii) puts it as one: “no later than 30 minutes before the published departure time”. Where no notification is made, Article 14(4) still requires “every reasonable effort” to see that the passenger can board, change or alight.

How the designation power has been used varies more than the chapter’s uniform drafting suggests. In the Commission’s version of 16 October 2025 Romania names 87 terminals and Greece 26, while Germany names three — Hamburg, Mannheim and the Stuttgart Airport Busterminal — Austria one, Vienna Erdberg, qualified “only during the opening hours of the terminal”, and the Netherlands one, Amsterdam-Sloterdijk. The operator duties that run on the driver and the vehicle rather than on the service are under bus fleet operating costs.

Two cross-references that no longer point where they say

Article 3(i) defines a tour operator as an organiser or retailer “within the meaning of Article 2(2) and (3) of Directive 90/314/EEC”, and Article 2(8) does two things with the same instrument: it preserves passengers’ rights under that Directive, and it disapplies this Regulation altogether “in case where a package tour referred to in that Directive is cancelled for reasons other than cancellation of a regular service”. The second limb is a scope rule and not a saving clause: where it bites, the Regulation does not reach the case at all, whatever the distance and whoever the carrier. EUR-Lex records Council Directive 90/314/EEC as “No longer in force, Date of end of validity: 30/06/2018; Repealed and replaced by 32015L2302”. Its successor, Directive (EU) 2015/2302, is in force, and its Article 29 disposes of the pointer: references to the repealed Directive “shall be construed as references to this Directive” and read against the Annex III correlation table, which maps Article 2(2) to point 8 of Article 3, “organiser”, and Article 2(3) to point 9, “retailer”. The definition still works, through a different instrument from the one it names.

Article 33, which added the Regulation to the Annex of Regulation (EC) No 2006/2004, has been overtaken outright: EUR-Lex records it as implicitly repealed by Regulation (EU) 2017/2394 and dates that partial end of validity to 16 January 2020. The successor is in force: its Article 41 repealed 2006/2004 “with effect from 17 January 2020”, its Article 42 applies it from the same day, and it carries 181/2011 at point 19 of its own Annex. One of the Regulation’s 34 articles is therefore gone while the Regulation itself is not.

The time-limited exemptions have run out; one power has no end date

Article 2(4) let Member States exempt domestic regular services from everything except the Article 2(2) list, and Article 2(5) let them exempt particular regular services a significant part of which, including at least one scheduled stop, is operated outside the Union — both capped at four years from the date of application, renewable once. The Commission’s report of 27 September 2016 records twelve Member States then applying the first and thirteen the second, and dates the first period as ending on 28 February 2017 at the latest. Its road passenger rights page now states that “since 1 March 2021, there are no exemptions from the Regulation”.

Article 18(1) is a separate power and reads differently. It lets a Member State exempt domestic regular services from all or some of the disability chapter, without prejudice to Article 2(2), provided national rules give a level of protection “at least the same as under this Regulation”. No period is attached to it, and set against the express four-year cap in Article 2(4) that silence is the point — the observation is ours.

What is changing

COM(2023) 753 of 29 November 2023 would amend five passenger rights Regulations together, 181/2011 among them, as regards enforcement. As proposed, it would insert into 181/2011 a common form for reimbursement and compensation requests under Article 19 (a new Article 19a), service quality standards for carriers (Article 26a) and a risk-based compliance monitoring programme for the national enforcement bodies (Article 28a). The text agreed in interinstitutional negotiations and dated 15 July 2026 (PE791.098) keeps neither Article 26a nor Article 28a. For 181/2011 it would insert “service quality standards for assistance” to disabled persons and persons with reduced mobility, to be set by carriers that do not qualify as small or medium-sized enterprises and, where relevant, by the managing bodies of the terminals referred to in Article 12 (a new Article 13a), and the Article 19a common form for reimbursement and compensation requests under Article 19. It would replace Article 26, delete Article 27, and replace the Article 2(2) list: Article 13a, Article 25a “insofar as it refers to information referred to in Articles 24 and 25”, Article 29 and Article 29a would join the entries that apply below 250 km, and Article 27 would leave them. Neither text is law. The responsible committee approved the text agreed in first-reading negotiations on 2 September 2026, and on 20 October 2026 Parliament adopted that provisional agreement as its position at first reading (T10-0347/2026), by 652 votes to 2 with 8 abstentions; the Legislative Observatory now records the stage reached as “Awaiting Council’s 1st reading position”. The amending Regulation is not law until the Council has adopted it and it has been signed and published in the Official Journal of the European Union.