Hi there,
The truth is that I didn’t really know what title to put on this post because the general experience is neither entirely good nor entirely bad.
We went to Amarante with Flixbus, and we bought the round-trip tickets online and paid 12 euros in total.
At noon we had already toured the city and decided to return at 1:00 p.m.
We could not use the same ticket that we had bought for 3:30 p.m., so we had to buy new ones.
When we bought them online, each trip cost us 3 euros per person but returning at 1:00 p.m. cost us 10 euros per person.
The bus driver told us that we could only pay in cash and did not give us a ticket or receipt. When we arrived in Porto, I told him to give me the invoice and he told me that “he did not have a printer and that we did not need an invoice”.
As the response was outrageous to me and I imagined that the man was going to steal that money, I took photos of the bus and then filed the claim.
When we verified the invoice that we had received for the tickets we bought online, we also realized that the invoices issued by Flixbus do not comply with Portuguese regulations.
Invoices in Portugal must have the NIF of the company and also a code. Flixbus invoices do not have the code, so it is impossible to register them on the Finanças website.
In Portugal, unlike Spain, you can register all the invoices for all the expenses you have during the year and when you file your income tax return, you get money back from the IRS.
I filed claims in Livro de reclamações, Portal Queixa and in Finanças.
Almost automatically the company responded with templates that did not solve the problem.
To the claim that referred to incorrect billing, they responded by explaining how to enter the customer’s NIF when buying online.
To the claim regarding the driver who charged me in cash and did not want to give me an invoice, they responded that my feedback was very important.
So, I replied again saying that they had not solved the problem.
Diego received a refund for the tickets he bought online, and they told me that since they couldn’t issue an invoice for the money paid in cash, they would give me a coupon for 20 euros that I could use until May 2024.
I was pleasantly surprised with the solution.
If at first they had wasted my time because, as always, they had sent a template, then they gave a quick solution to the problem.
For the experiences we had had so far in Porto, Flixbus was not bad at all, and we decided to give it another chance in the future. Despite irregular billing and a corrupt driver, customer service works well.