A CEO, a digital expert, and a networker, Tobias Stüber holds a Master’s Degree in Economics & Sustainable Management and studied Business English at University of California, San Diego. He began his career at Max Planck Institute Foundation Luxembourg (MPI) as a Project Manager and later became the Head of Operations, Services, Events, and IT. He left MPI after five years to join Flibtravel International S.A. Luxembourg as the CEO.
He transformed the company with his passion for mobility, change management, and digitalization. He also managed two prominent German politicians, Dr. Thomas Sattelberger and Helmut Marktwort, with their digital campaigns for the federal and state elections. He is an expert in change management, new work, and digitalization.
The Company
The consumers identify with the brand “flibco.com” as their way of locomotion to reach the airport. However, Flibtravel International are not to be considered as a transportation company. They are much more the organization and brand behind what travelers see. The company connects main airports with important cities within the catchment area of an airport. Thanks to direct connections between these cities and the airport, frequent departures – generally every 2 hours, and highly reliable and on-time service, they manage to be more practical and more economical than public transport or private transport – all based on data driven decisions. Obliging consumers to change transportation modes or change trains is considered very unpleasant among travelers. Regardless if it’s the one-time traveler or the weekly frequent flyer.
A team of experts at Flibco in software engineering, digital marketing, network planning, dynamic pricing as well as multilingual and fast customer care departments design airport mobility solutions regularly while keeping customers at the center. Flibco’s customer-centric approach allowed it to continuously enlarge its catchment area as well as its geographical coverage. The company’s main markets today are Belgium, Germany, France and Italy. They are actively expanding their presence in other European countries where they partner up with local operating partners, bus companies, and airports.
“Of course, our customer is king, but we realize that we can only excel in what we do if we have close collaborations with our transportation partners on one hand, and the airports and airlines on the other hand. We are using our platform www.flibco.com as well re-selling tickets for 3rd parties acting in the field of airport transportation, so far we offering connections to over 30 airports in 16 different countries,” shares Tobias.
Heralding Change at Flibco
As the CEO of Flibco, Tobias’ management style is driven by team spirit and new work principles like digitalization, work-life integration, flexibility, agility, and flat hierarchy – all this goes along with an open feedback culture and leadership style. He communicates straight to the point, openly, and very clearly – with his behavioral patterns towards his employees, he sees a huge advantage in working in the given direction, which has been recognized as highly efficient at the company level. His inspirations and role models regarding the management style are often taken from the world of sports, as they are showing in general that it always seems impossible until it is done and that team spirit plays one of the biggest roles.
As the pioneer in new work principles, as the first CEO, he implemented a real 4-day week in Luxembourg based on 100 % salary, and 80 % working time with at least 100 % of the same efficiency level. This decision and the successful realization attracted a lot of attention in the Luxembourg Business World – the minister of labor visited him in 2023 to understand and learn more about this concept and was very impressed after this visit.
At the same time, Tobias and his team brought a completely new level of digitalization in the niche of airport transportation. With innovative and data driven concepts, flibco.com is changing the market step by step, which means airports and airlines are recognising this business in a totally different way. One good example is the launch of cooperation in 2023 with Brussels Airlines (part of Lufthansa Group) in which flibco.com operates the “on-ground flights” within the Airline’s software landscape – so far unique cooperation in this niche market!
Cruising through Challenges
As he started his career when he was 26 years old, Tobias had to shoulder high responsibility in leadership positions. As such, the biggest challenge was to push his ideas and his management principles against the established management and to get accepted and respected in the leading position. The change management in terms of modern ways of working and leveraging up the digitalisation status was very challenging in the past years.
During the COVID crisis of 2020-2022, it was very hard to manage because the business was heavily impacted, and keeping the staff motivated was a big challenge. But Tobias called all his team regularly via video calls and motivated them. He gave them a clear vision and instructions which worked amazingly for the team and they created a new company spirit which really made him proud – he will never forget the great support from his Associates Marc and Jos Sales which was much appreciated and without this support it would not be possible to surrive in this crisis time.
“So in less than 10 years in a leadership position, crisis management played a big role in my career and I learned a lot in the past years! I overcame these situations by believing in my key principles and values. I always focused on facts and I am known for my data-driven thinking – the strategy works perfectly well until now. As well a mentor like Thomas Sattelberger helped me a lot during the past years with his experience, it is great to have such people as “sparrings partner”,” says Tobias.
Embracing Technology
At Flibco.com Tobias and his team have started with adopting a sophisticated microservice architecture and integrated a BI-ready database to empower data-driven decisions and enhance agility. This further enabled advanced 24×7 system monitoring to ensure real-time service health with minimal human intervention. Adoption of AI-generated code accelerated development, reduced manual work, and improved business feature delivery, boosting customer responsiveness.
Decoupling technical and business units improved response times, enabling faster iteration and deployment, leading to increased speed to market at Flibco. Using Agile methodology, the company boosted stakeholder-developer communication, fostering adaptability, responsiveness, and customer-centricity, elevating overall organizational maturity.
An Eye on the Trends
An important trend for Flibco is to improve its implementation with airlines. In doing so, they aim to support airlines by cutting very short-haul flights and replacing them with coaches. Another example of such an integration has already been launched earlier this year with the Lufthansa Group where they launched a Ground Operated Flight (GOF) under a Brussels Airlines flight number. This allows the airline to obtain better visibility on the different booking platforms and Global Distribution Systems (GDS). By doing so, they mainly increased the catchment area.
Another trend, per Tobias, is the seamless and all-in-one booking experience travelers are looking for. Flibco can see that many new mobility start-ups manage to launch products. This is also because consumers are more open to trying new things. This openness is essential to stimulate innovation. For Flibco, it is essential to evolve continuously in a customer-centric way.
Another big trend in Flibco’s niche of airport transportation is for sure sustainable transportation in reducing CO2 emission, autonomous driving, and solving the problem of the so-called “last mile transportation”. Regarding customer service, the trend is going in the direction of purchasing the service as digitally as possible via smart solutions like App-inclusive functionalities like tracking the vehicle in live time, different payment methods, and intelligent service hours based on demand.
In terms of solving the “last mile” of transportation, flibco.com developed its product called Door2Gate. It is a service that offers seamless and convenient door-to-gate airport transportation. With Door2Gate, passengers experience a hassle-free journey from their home or office to the airport and vice versa, enjoying comfort and reliability at every step. This matchless shared service with Intuitive booking inside the app, backed up by immediate ride confirmation, together with real-time vehicle tracking and unbeatable price, makes Door2Gate a one-of-a-kind on the market indeed.
Achieving Sustainability
Tobias agrees that there is an ecological questioning from all generations who are concerned about the ecological footprint each of us is leaving by his/her way of living. Traveling and transportation are playing a certain role in this regard. However, he points out that after COVID-19 – there has been a tremendous eagerness to travel. Many airlines and airports have had their best months in terms of volumes right after COVID-19, specifically for the leisure market. So did Flibco. The business travel market, says Tobias, will probably never come back to its previous levels.
“Several easy-to-use technologies allow everybody to communicate via video conference and even the less “digital”-coworkers have no problem using this technology. We can see that business travelers even if they travel less, they now travel longer and better. Yet, traveling is a fundamental right of every human being. It is ridiculous to try to reduce or limit the freedom of mobility. However, we must take our social responsibility as a company in developing sustainable ways of transportation,” he says.
Airlines are actively using Sustainable Aviation Fuel (SAF) intending to reduce their CO2 emissions. As a market leader in airport transportation, Toabisa believes that they must also actively support and implement innovative solutions that allow them and their customers to reduce carbon emissions.
“Our flexible management style towards employees enables home office and this helps to reduce stressful hours on the road,” says Tobias.
In terms of sustainable and autonomous transportation Flibco is a part of SLG S.A. and their experts of Sales Lentz are pioneers in this field – they are part of some international projects and testing regularly to reduce the CO2 emission in ground transportation. flibco.com has already tested electronic busses on its line CRL Airport – Brussels city center and as soon as it makes economic sense they’ll be ready to implement these types of busses.
Aiming for Growth Despite Industry Challenges
Knowing that in modern civilization, people can only live together in a regulated world, politics, and regulations are an absolute must for a harmonious society.Yet we must face the fact that the world of innovation and initiatives often comes from the private sector. We see too often, that regulations are outdated as they are defining a world much older than the one we are living in. The difference in speed compared to the difference in regulation is enormous and this is killing a lot of great initiatives, innovations, and solutions, feels Tobias.
Governments and politics are generally open and of course highly interested in these innovations which are often a benefit for the population and the environment. As entrepreneurs from the private world, it’s important to participate actively during such momentums of exchange.
The shortage of staff is of course also a big topic,per Tobias. Many bus companies are facing severe issues in finding drivers. There is a lack of software engineers and many other domains of expertise. He believes the usage of AI will support the industry in the long term and will absorb partially the shortage of staff.
While challenges and finding the right solutions are an integral part of any business and Tobias’ role, he expects that his team will continue to love what they are doing and that they continue working honestly, loyal, team-oriented, and with passion in an open feedback culture! “We have to stay “hungry” and agile and never give up! The rest will come automatically and we are talking about our common team goal of transporting 10M passengers via our platform flibco.com!” he concludes.
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Awards:
2014 – Won the best marketing concept award from the World Travel Awards organization.
2016 – Received the “Made in Luxembourg” label
2016, 2019, 2022, and 2023 – Obtained the label of socially responsible enterprise (ESR) from the National Institute for Sustainable Development and Corporate Social Responsibility (INDR)
Afterthought
Looking at his illustrious career, we asked Tobias if he would like to change anything in his career.
Tobias: “So far there is really nothing I would change. Everything in my life had until now a deeper sense and I would not miss a second of it! I am now 37 and already over 5 years in a CEO position with the power to establish something that I fully support. At the same time, I feel still quite young, meaning that I have still a lot of possibilities and options to create the life on this planet that I foresee. So my clear goal is that if in 20-30 years someone asks me this question once again, my simple answer stays the same: “Nothing”! ;)”
Quote: “It always seems impossible until it is done!”