Your Ticket Lives on Your Phone: PDFs, QR Codes and What to Show the Driver

The moment after you pay is the moment most people feel a small flutter of doubt. Did it work? Where is the ticket? What do I actually show on the day? Let us walk through it, because the answers are reassuring and the whole thing is simpler than it feels the first time.

Where the ticket goes

As soon as your payment is confirmed we email you the ticket as a PDF. It carries the operator's name, the departure and arrival stops with their dates and times, the passenger names, and a short booking code. It is written in the language of the route and in English, side by side, so a Greek border officer and an Albanian driver can both read the same piece of paper. If you made a round trip booking you will see the same code with a small suffix on the return, so the two legs are obviously a pair.

The same ticket is always available in your account, and if you booked as a guest, the link in the confirmation email takes you straight to it. Lost the email? The lookup page on our site finds your booking from the code and your email address.

The booking code

That short code is the thing to remember. It is what you quote if you phone the operator, what appears on the driver's list, and what you type into the lookup page. It is not your ticket number in the old sense of a serial on a stub, it is your booking's name, and one code covers every passenger you booked together.

What the driver checks

On the day, the driver has a list of everyone booked on that coach, drawn from the same system you booked through, so your seat is there before you arrive. Most operators are happy to see the ticket on your phone screen, and the driver will match your name and the code to the list. Some operators still ask for a printed copy, and where that is the case we tell you on the route before you pay, so you are never surprised at the kerb. When in doubt, a printout costs nothing and lives in your bag.

Bring the identity document you booked with as well. On international routes the driver may check it against the passenger name, and at the border you will need it anyway.

If something looks wrong

Check the ticket the moment it arrives, not the night before. A misspelt name, a wrong date, a wrong direction, all of these are far easier to sort out with days to spare than at the bus station. Our Help Center explains what can be changed and how, and the contact form reaches a real person. If you bought Flexible Ticket, moving the date is something you can do yourself from the booking page within the window the operator allows.

And then, on the day, the routine is wonderfully dull. Arrive a little early, find the coach with the operator's name on it, show the screen or the paper, say your name, sit down. The system has already done the rest.