ALSA and Iberia team up for “Bus&Fly”

Spanish bus company ALSA and Iberia (Madrid) today are launching “Bus&Fly”, a service allowing travellers in several Spanish provinces to combine flights and coach travel to/from the airport on a single ticket.

Bus&Fly is Europe’s most advanced intermodal service of its kind, since it can be booked through the global reservations systems used by travel agencies around the world.

The first cities to be served by Bus&Fly are Albacete, Burgos, Lorca, Soria and Valladolid, from which some 66,000 passengers each year use Madrid airport for international flights. As of today the bus terminals on all five cites will have IATA codes, allowing travel agencies around the world to issue the new intermodal tickets, and giving greater international visibility and access to global markets to the cities themselves.

Each day ALSA will offer more than 40 coaches to/from the five cities and Iberia’s Terminal 4 hub in Madrid, where they can reach nearly 100 international Iberia destinations in Europe, the Americas, Africa and the Middle East. Iberia and Alsa have devised timetables to ensure relaxed connections, with ample time for passengers to check their luggage, complete security control procedures and board their flights. To streamline the process further, passengers may obtain their boarding cards on line fromwww.iberia.com and their luggage tags from airport check-in kiosks, and then drop their luggage at Iberia’s express counters number 810 and 811.

The launch of Bus&Fly is a new step contributing to intermodality –the use of different means of transport– at Madrid-Barajas airport, which translates into the more efficient use of the airport and of other passenger transport infra- structures, as well as easier access to the airport from the provinces.

About one-third of all passengers who use the airport are making connections to/from other Spanish cities and other cities elsewhere in Europe. Bus&Fly will strengthen the T4 as a hub for Iberia flights and passengers. There are plans to extend Bus&Fly service to other cities in Spain and in other countries in which both Iberia and Alsa operate.

ALSA is a part of the UK’s National Express group since 2005, is Spain’s leading long-distance coach line operator. The parent group supplies coach and rail travel to passengers in the UK, the US, Canada, Spain, and Morocco. In Spain it is the sole road transportation company to cover the entire county with scheduled coach services. It also operates regional, commuter, and municipal bus services. It has a fleet of 2,459 vehicles and staff of 6,870 people. In 2011 it posted sales of 635.4 million euros, and carried 224.1 million passengers.

Iberia: