Umbrella Mobility brings 300 foreign bus drivers to Czechia

For big carriers in Czechia, the bus driver shortage is a thing of the past. “The time when there was a shortage of drivers is over,” Pavel Steiner, head of Umbrella Mobility, told Seznam Zprávy in an interview. The company runs long-distance and suburban bus lines across Europe and operates for FlixBus. It now has more than 400 buses and is not short of drivers in any country.

Enough drivers, but fuel is getting more expensive

“We brought roughly 300 drivers from third countries to Czechia, and they do very good work. In Germany, many companies were laying people off, and among those let go are plenty who hold a bus licence and want to drive. So our vacancies are naturally being filled,” Steiner says. After years of practically begging for drivers, the company is now turning candidates away: its staff is full this autumn, at about 900 drivers. According to him, if he needed to hire a hundred people, he could find them right away.

A city and suburban transport driver now earns around 50,000 crowns, and in international transport up to 80,000. That sum includes weekend work and long shifts behind the wheel.

What worries carriers most at the moment, however, is high fuel prices. “Since February 2026 it has been bad. We are in some strange period. Whatever America says shows up in the price of diesel the next day. It jumps up by tens of percent,” Steiner says.

The company has minimal room to react to such swings. Regions adjust for price increases quarterly, so for three months the company has to absorb the rise itself and keep a reserve. With FlixBus the difference is made up with a two-month delay.

Every month the company burns through about 1.2 million litres of diesel. On FlixBus services the price rise costs it roughly 10 million crowns a month, which is 20 million after two months. Some municipalities index prices only once a year. This year the company has to balance around 80 to 100 million crowns of diesel costs in its cash flow.

The price cap makes Czechia a country to fill up in

Fuel prices in Czechia have been capped since the beginning of October. According to Steiner, that makes them among the lowest in Europe, and his company tries to refuel in Czechia.

At the same time, the current situation threatens weaker players, and consolidation is under way across Europe. “In Germany carriers have been going under quite often lately, and many insolvencies have been reported. Not everyone can balance the price of fuel, and on top of that, everything is getting more expensive today. Two percent on financing used to seem like a lot, now we are glad to get five,” he adds.

More and more small Czech carriers, he says, are drifting into the “grey zone”. Steiner says it is common that a payslip does not show all the money a driver receives: “There are loads of people who get cash in hand. And of course there are other things that do not go through an invoice. That saves a lot of money.” Large firms, he stresses, certainly cannot afford this. But even they have to consider which tenders are worth applying to today and where they have no chance.

“Look at tenders today. Arriva wins, with huge and strong backing, somewhere it is Transdev and ICOM. The rest are basically just hanging around. We recently applied for a tender in Moravia and lost, but that was expected. We did manage to win in Frankfurt am Main in Germany, where we provide transport, and we also succeeded with Flibco, for which we run airport transfers, and we are trying to agree on cooperation in Belgium,” Steiner says.

Four billion in turnover and a heavy Covid hit

Steiner built the company from scratch 22 years ago. It is now aiming for revenue of four billion crowns, and its EBITDA is more than 420 million. Although Umbrella Mobility is mostly associated with the green FlixBus coaches, they account for only a quarter of turnover. “We have more than 400 buses, and about 107 of them are on FlixBus now.”

The worst period was the pandemic. “Covid cost us 52 million euros, a quarter of a billion crowns. If someone had told me that at the start of Covid, we would have packed it in. Today I count it a great success that we came out of it.” As for EBITDA, whether it is 400 or 450 million, he says that is a figure for partners, banks and financial institutions, but for him it is just a number: “I can’t eat any more soup anyway.”

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Around Prague, based on reporting by seznamzpravy.cz