A new life for buses and coaches in France.
Nadia Benaïssa from BusStore Centre Paris attaches great importance to sustainability.
"Our customers are very different and all have their own interesting story to tell. Sometimes it’s a company story, sometimes it’s a personal story and sometimes it’s all together," says Nadia Benaïssa, Manager at the BusStore Centre Paris. Their day-to-day business is the used bus and coach trade in France, an important market for used vehicles in a country that is as large as it is diverse.
Used stock from Paris.
Due to France’s size, BusStore has two locations there. One in Albi in southern France and one in Sarcelles, just north of Paris. With the two locations, you are as close to the customer as possible and can offer the best possible service, emphasises Nadia Benaïssa. She has been managing the BusStore Centre Paris in Sarcelles since 2022. The team on site consists of a two-person sales team, two back office employees and a trainee who want to give buses and coaches a new life. The nearby OMNIplus location in Sarcelles supports them in this - the perfect package for brokering used vehicles. “Customers trust us and associate high standards with BusStore,” says Nadia Benaïssa. The Mercedes-Benz and Setra brands have a high radiance in France and this is not only about the quality of the vehicles, but also about first-class service.
“Customers trust us to associate high standards with BusStore.”
Nadia Benaïssa, Manager at the BusStore Centre Paris
Quality and trust.
With BusStore as a brand of Daimler Buses, the high expectations are also transferred to Nadia Benaïssa and her team, who serves an incredibly diverse market in France with very different enterprises. For example, we delivered a vehicle once and then found out that the address to which the used vehicle went was the customer’s home address. The residence was also the company’s headquarters, says Nadia Benaïssa. Another time she worked for an enterprise in the midst of a generational change or spontaneously organised an inter-city bus for a customer who needed additional capacity in the short term to win an order.
In order to provide all these customers with the right vehicle, the BusStore team at Sarcelles works closely with the international BusStore locations. Often with Spain and Italy, above all with Germany, but also with BusStores in Eastern Europe. Especially when it comes to cross-border used sales, customers can rely on the all-round service of the BusStore Centre Paris, as Nadia Benaïssa and her team take care of everything: from transportation of the vehicle to completing all formalities and handing over the keys.
“Setra coaches are particularly popular with young entrepreneurs.”
Nadia Benaïssa, Manager at the BusStore Centre Paris
A used eCitaro for overseas.
The Mercedes-Benz Citaro models in all variants and touring coaches from Setra are currently in particular demand from customers, reports Nadia Benaïssa, who emphasises that Setra is particularly popular among young operators. Their customers come from very different units: from small companies with a vehicle, to start-ups that are new to the business, to large transport companies that operate nationwide. BusStore France has also concluded an extraordinary deal with such an enterprise: the sale of a used eCitaro, as Nadia Benaïssa joyfully explains. It was a demo vehicle that was sold on the island of Réunion, a French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, after its deployment in November 2023. The eCitaro is now in operation there at Transdev Outre-Mer.
Sustainability fits BusStore.
“We organised everything, the formalities, the transportation, the shipping of the eCitaro to Réunion, that was already very exciting,” says Nadia Benaïssa. She is convinced that the future belongs to sustainable electric mobility. And sustainability is something that is particularly close to Nadia Benaïssa’s heart. She doesn't go out on the street to demonstrate, she says with a laugh, but what she can do on a small scale, she does. She points to a coffee cup that she uses instead of a paper cup when visiting the coffee machine. "Sustainability also fits my job at BusStore. It’s a great feeling to give buses and coaches a second or even third party life."