Out of the spotlight: Four years of Italian coach market prices

Analogous to Germany and France, Italian coach market radically changed after liberalisation (2014). Liberalisation led to new routes, increased frequencies, mergers, and withdrawals. The paper analyses market trends from four years of real ticket prices collected through collaboration with www.checkmybus.it. The dataset, consisting of monthly average prices and the number of clicks by company and by city-pair, is enriched with spatial information, including the separation of airport routes. Results show that sub-national markets had different trends, with the growth of offer on routes linked to network expansion of the early liberalisation slowing down. Contrarily, the historical routes to the Centre and South remain stable. Interestingly, larger (Top-5) companies' prices are below market average up to 5–10% less. Smaller companies operate often on niche routes, with fewer economies of scale and thus maintain higher prices. This trend switched during the COVID pandemic. A further comparison with rail prices showed that coaches were able to reduce the price gap at least with conventional trains, from −50% (average for 2017–2020) to −20% for the second semester of 2020. This is a sign of the ability of the coach sector to adapt to the shock, by reducing capacity and concentrating on more competitive routes.