Luxury Sleeper Bus Wants to Serve Berlin — But a German Law Requires Passengers to Sit Upright

Twiliner, a Swiss startup founded by Luca Bortolani, launched in December 2025 offering premium night bus routes linking Zürich with Amsterdam and Zürich with Barcelona. Its 21-seat coaches convert seats into flat beds, have carried more than 5,000 passengers, and had an occupancy rate growing from under 30 percent in January to roughly 65 percent by October 2026. A single ticket costs an average of €174, and the service emits 85 percent less CO₂ than the equivalent flight. Twiliner wants to extend its network to Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt and Cologne, with onward connections to Copenhagen, Prague, Venice and Paris. The obstacle: Paragraph 35i of Germany's Straßenverkehrszulassungsordnung (road traffic regulation) prohibits the transport of lying-down passengers. Any Twiliner passenger crossing German territory would have to sit upright, eliminating the service's core advantage. The bus industry association (bdo) supports a regulatory change. Transport activist Heinrich Strößenreuther notes that reclining buses once operated legally in Germany until railway lobbying led to the ban.