Six Months After Winning in Court, FlixBus Still Cannot Board a Passenger at Sete Rios, and It Has Gone Back to the Judge

Six months after a Lisbon court ordered that it be given "immediate access" to the Sete Rios coach terminal, FlixBus still cannot sell a ticket for a departure from it. The German operator has now gone back to the courts, filing an enforcement action against Rede Expressos and, separately, a criminal complaint against the managers of the company that runs the terminal. It confirmed both to the Lusa agency on Friday.

Sete Rios is the main long-distance coach terminal in Lisbon. It is managed by Rede Expressos, part of the Barraqueiro group, which is also FlixBus's principal competitor on Portuguese intercity routes. The Tribunal Administrativo de Lisboa ruled on 8 March that FlixBus must be let in. The two sides have been talking since, and FlixBus says the talking is the point.

"Only an appearance of compliance"

"Despite FlixBus having presented, in good faith, a phased plan for entering the terminal, Rede Expressos has been prolonging this situation of uncertainty, postponing the resolution of the problem and creating only an appearance of compliance with the judgment of 8 March," an official source at the operator said.

According to FlixBus, Rede Expressos is making access conditional on something outside the court's ruling: the lifting of a suspension on authorisations for new express services at Sete Rios, imposed in May 2025 by the transport institute IMT and the mobility regulator AMT. FlixBus says both bodies have rejected that linkage and accepted that no new licences should be granted for lines, timetables or services that would increase occupancy at the terminal, which was the premise the court itself worked from.

The complaint is that lifting the suspension would let Rede Expressos renew lapsed authorisations and file new requests that could exhaust the terminal's available capacity, in FlixBus's words "even if artificially".

A start date nobody can sell tickets for

An access date of 20 August had at one point been agreed, and slipped. FlixBus now says it has no guarantee that 24 September, the date pencilled in for the start of operations, will hold either. Its evidence for that is simple: there is still not a single FlixBus journey on sale from the terminal.

The operator lists what it says is still missing before it could run a service there at all: a ticket office and customer support point, its own staff on site, departure and arrival information on the screens and at the platforms, storage for lost luggage, and cleaning and parking conditions for partner operators' coaches.

There is also a clock running on the paperwork. The capacity declarations Rede Expressos issued so that FlixBus can operate at Sete Rios are valid for 60 days and are close to expiring. FlixBus wants them extended before it enters, so that its position does not depend on "unilateral decisions of the managing entity".

Sete Rios is not the only closed door. FlixBus says it still has no access, or conditioned access, at the terminals of Coimbra, Évora, Faro, Albufeira, Fátima, Caldas da Rainha, Peniche, Santarém, Alcobaça, Beja and Torres Novas.

What this means for expats

• Do not plan a Lisbon FlixBus departure yet: the 24 September date has no tickets behind it, and the operator itself will not vouch for it.
• This is the second round of the same fight: in May, Rede Expressos opened slot allocation to FlixBus seventy-three days after the ruling, with an "operação limitada" caveat attached.
• Eleven other terminals are affected: the access dispute reaches Faro, Coimbra and Évora, which shapes fares on the routes expats use most.
• Know how the network is structured: our guide to long-distance coaches explains who runs which terminal and why that matters to a passenger.
• Complaints are already high: the regulator logged 26,933 passenger complaints in 2025, with Rede Expressos among the most-named operators.