Busbud Bus & Train Fare Scraper

Scrape Busbud — the bus and train fare aggregator covering 500+ operators worldwide. Get individual scheduled departures between two cities: operator, vehicle type, on-board amenities, departure/arrival times and locations, trip duration, and price. HTTP-only, no login, no cookies required.

What this actor does

• Route search by city name — free-text origin/destination, resolved automatically to Busbud's internal location codes
• Batch mode — supply an array of origin/destination pairs to scrape many routes in one run
• Rolling ~8-day schedule window — every run returns real scheduled departures for today through the next several days; filter to one exact date if needed
• Filters: travel date, vehicle type, operator name (substring match), max duration, max price
• Sort: recommended (site order), cheapest first, fastest first, earliest departure first
• 30 currencies — every price re-quoted server-side in the currency you choose
• Route-level context on every record: cheapest/highest fare seen, daily departure count, distance
• Empty fields are omitted — a field only appears on a record when real data was found for it

Output per departure

• origin, destination — canonical city names for the route
• date — the calendar date (YYYY-MM-DD) this departure runs
• operator — carrier name (e.g. FlixBus, Greyhound Lines, Inc., OurBus)
• vehicleType — e.g. bus, train
• amenities[] — on-board amenities shown for this departure (e.g. Wifi, Toilet, Power outlets)
• tags[] — Busbud's own badges for this departure, e.g. Cheapest, Fastest
• departureTime, departureDateTime, departureLocation
• arrivalTime, arrivalDateTime, arrivalLocation
• durationMinutes, durationText
• price, currency
• bookingLink — deep link to book this specific departure on Busbud
• routeLowPrice, routeHighPrice, routeDailyOfferCount — route-level fare context
• routeDistanceMiles, routeDistanceKm — route-level distance
• sourceUrl — the Busbud route page this was scraped from
• recordType: "departure", scrapedAt

Input

Field	Type	Default	Description
origin	string	Boston	Starting city name. Ignored if routePairs is set.
destination	string	New York City	Ending city name. Ignored if routePairs is set.
routePairs	array	–	Batch mode: [{"origin": "...", "destination": "..."}, ...]
date	string	–	Keep only departures on this exact date (YYYY-MM-DD); leave blank for the full published window
vehicleType	string	any	any / bus / train / shuttle / minibus / ferry
operatorName	string	–	Keep only departures whose operator name contains this text (case-insensitive)
maxDurationMinutes	int	–	Drop departures longer than this many minutes
maxPrice	number	–	Drop departures priced above this amount (in the selected currency)
currency	string	USD	Re-price every departure in this currency (30 supported, e.g. EUR, CAD, GBP, JPY, INR)
sortBy	string	recommended	recommended / cheapest / fastest / departureTime
maxItems	int	50	Hard cap on emitted departures (1–1000)
proxyConfiguration	object	AUTO	Apify proxy (free AUTO datacenter group); not strictly required

Examples

Example: simple city-to-city search

{
  "origin": "Boston",
  "destination": "New York City",
  "maxItems": 20
}

Example: one exact travel date, cheapest first

{
  "origin": "Toronto",
  "destination": "Montreal",
  "date": "2026-07-10",
  "sortBy": "cheapest"
}

Example: only Greyhound buses under $50

{
  "origin": "Chicago",
  "destination": "Milwaukee",
  "operatorName": "Greyhound",
  "maxPrice": 50
}

Example: fares in euros

{
  "origin": "Paris",
  "destination": "Amsterdam",
  "currency": "EUR"
}

Example: batch multiple routes in one run

{
  "routePairs": [
    { "origin": "Calgary", "destination": "Banff" },
    { "origin": "Montreal", "destination": "Quebec City" }
  ],
  "maxItems": 100
}

Use cases

• Travel booking comparison tools — pull live bus/train fares into a fare-comparison UI
• Price tracking — snapshot fares for a route over time to spot trends
• Travel content/SEO — power "how to get from X to Y by bus" articles with real schedules
• Corporate/group travel planning — compare operators, amenities, and cost for a route
• Market research — see which operators actively service a given city pair

Data Source / Limitations

Data comes from Busbud's public route pages, which publish a rolling schedule window (today through roughly the next 7 days) without requiring login. City names are resolved automatically through Busbud's own public location-suggestion service; ambiguous names (e.g. multiple cities sharing a name) are resolved to Busbud's best relevance match, with automatic fallback to nearby candidates (and a live check that a route page actually exists) if the top match turns out to have no service. Dates outside the published window, or route pairs Busbud has no service for, return 0 records with a clear status message rather than failing. operatorName is a substring filter rather than a fixed dropdown because Busbud aggregates 500+ operators — far more than a stable enum can cover.

For a small number of large cities, Busbud's public location-suggestion service doesn't surface a clean city-level match at all (only specific stations/landmarks) even though the city itself has real service — in that case the actor tries several fallback candidates before giving up, but may occasionally still report 0 results for a genuinely serviced city. Retrying with a nearby well-known landmark or the metro area's main station name in origin/destination works around this when it occurs.

FAQ

Is this affiliated with Busbud? No — this is an independent, third-party actor that reads Busbud's public route pages.

Why do some departures have no tags field? Busbud only badges select departures as "Cheapest" or "Fastest" on a given route; most departures carry no badge, so the field is omitted for those.

How far ahead can I search? Busbud's route pages publish roughly an 8-day rolling window starting today. Requesting a date further out than that returns 0 records for that request.

What currency are prices in? Whatever you set in currency (defaults to USD). Busbud re-prices every fare on the page server-side in the requested currency — 30 currencies are supported.

Why is operatorName a text filter instead of a dropdown? Busbud aggregates 500+ bus and train operators globally — far too many for a stable dropdown — so this field matches any operator name containing your text, case-insensitively.

What happens if a city name doesn't resolve, or the route has no service? The actor returns 0 records and sets a status message explaining why — this is a clean, valid result, not an error.