If you have a guidebook, a hotel welcome folder or a saved blog post telling you to catch the L10 to the airport, you can throw it away. That line no longer exists. On 1 April 2026 the Ibiza bus network changed hands and was quietly rebuilt: new operator, new fleet, new route names, new airport services and a fare structure that punishes anyone who pays in cash.
Six months on, most of the internet has not caught up. So here is what the Ibiza bus network actually looks like now — the lines, the fares, the beach routes, the night buses — and what it means if you were about to book a hire car for an autumn trip.
The L-numbers are gone: how the new lines are named
Alsa took over the island's public bus service on behalf of the Consell d'Eivissa. The change was not cosmetic. The old L-numbers that everyone had finally memorised — L10 to the airport, L3 to Santa Eulària — were replaced by a lettered system, and the operator publishes an equivalency table on its site so you can translate between the two.
The new logic is easier than it looks. Lines beginning AERO go to the airport. Lines beginning P and A are the beach and cross-island routes. Lines beginning D are the night buses. UE lines are urban Eivissa services. Once that clicks, the map reads itself.
The practical consequence is that any timetable you find printed, pinned to a rental apartment noticeboard or copied into an old travel article is now unreliable. Check alsaibiza.es or Alsa's Mobi4U app, which also handles live tracking and tickets.
Five airport buses instead of one
The biggest single improvement is at the airport. Instead of one bus into Ibiza Town and a seasonal shuttle to Sant Antoni, there are now five AERO lines fanning out across the island:
AERO 1 runs to Sant Josep and Sant Antoni. AERO 2 connects via Es Tabaquet and CETIS. AERO 3 is the direct Ibiza Town service, from the port and Isidor Macabich. AERO 4 heads north-east to Santa Eulària and Es Canar. AERO 5 covers Platja d'en Bossa and Figueretes.
Fares depend on where you board and how you pay. A single from Ibiza Town or Platja d'en Bossa to the airport is €3.50 paid by card or QR code, €4.90 in cash. From Sant Antoni or Santa Eulària it is €4.00 by card, €5.60 in cash. For context, a taxi on the Santa Eulària run will cost you roughly ten times that, and in August you may not get one at all.
That card-versus-cash gap is the single most useful thing to know about Ibiza buses in 2026. Cash fares carry roughly a 40 percent penalty across the whole network. Buy a QR ticket on the app or the website, or tap a card on board, and you are paying the cheaper rate every time.
What an Ibiza bus ticket costs in 2026
Away from the airport, fares work on four distance bands. A hop of under 9km is €1.70 by card (€2.40 cash). Ten to 14km is €1.85 (€2.60). Fifteen to 18km is €2.20 (€3.10). Anything over 18km — Ibiza Town to Sant Antoni, say, or up to Sant Joan — is €2.60 by card, €3.60 in cash.
In other words, you can cross the entire island for less than the price of a coffee on a beach club terrace. Two people travelling for a week will spend perhaps €40 on buses against €350 or more for a hire car once you add fuel and the parking you will spend twenty minutes failing to find in Ibiza Town in August.
There are also resident travel cards at roughly half those prices, plus youth and senior cards. Those are for people registered on the island, so if you have moved here and are still paying tourist fares, that is worth sorting out at CETIS.
Reaching the beach by bus
This is where the network is better than its reputation — and where autumn demands a little care.
Dedicated beach lines serve most of the west coast and the south. P7 runs from Sant Antoni to Cala Salada. P4 and P5 go from Sant Antoni to Cala Comte and Cala Bassa. A1 and P9 reach Cala Tarida, from Sant Antoni and from Ibiza Town respectively. P6 climbs north to Benirràs. P3 and A7 drop you at Ses Salines.
Several of these carry a reduced flat fare: Cala Salada and Benirràs are €1.90 by card, which is close to absurd for the views involved. Cala Comte, Cala Bassa, Cala Tarida and Ses Salines are €3.35.
The caveat: beach lines are seasonal. Frequencies thin out through October and several routes pause entirely for the winter, along with a general timetable change across the network at the end of the month. In late September you are still fine. By mid-November, Benirràs is a walk or a taxi. Always check the current schedule before planning a day around one of these buses, especially the last return.
The night buses, still running
The D lines — the discobús by any other name — are the reason you do not need to drive at night, and they run far later than any bus service most visitors are used to at home.
D1 and D2 cover the Sant Antoni and Platja d'en Bossa corridors at €3.00 by card, €4.20 cash. D3 runs a longer route at €4.00 by card. D4 links Es Canar and Santa Eulària with Ibiza Town, with a cheaper short fare of €2.00 for journeys inside the town itself.
They are not fast, they are not quiet, and at four in the morning in August they are their own form of entertainment. But they cost a fraction of a taxi and they remove the worst decision anyone makes on this island, which is getting behind a wheel after a long night.
Taxis: useful, limited, and not Uber
Ibiza's taxi fleet is licensed and capped, which is why demand outstrips supply every summer. Fares are metered and regulated: at the time of writing the daytime rate sits at around €1.20 per kilometre with a minimum fare near €4, rising for nights, weekends and holidays, with a small surcharge for airport pickups and for booking by phone or WhatsApp. Confirm the current rates with the driver or the official app rather than trusting a figure in a blog post, including this one.
Book through the official island taxi app rather than standing on a road hoping. In July and August, rank queues at the airport and outside the big venues can run to an hour; in late September they mostly do not, which is one more argument for travelling now rather than at peak.
So do you still need a hire car?
If your Ibiza involves hidden northern coves at seven in the morning, a rural finca down three kilometres of dirt track, or small children and a lot of equipment, hire a car. For everyone else — staying in Ibiza Town, Santa Eulària, Sant Antoni or Platja d'en Bossa, mixing beach days with village markets and nights out — the bus network now covers it, at a tenth of the cost, and you get to look out of the window at the pine forests instead of at a queue.
Two rules make it work. Pay by card or QR, never cash. And check the timetable the morning you travel, not the week before — because in autumn on this island, schedules change quietly, and the last bus home is always earlier than you think.
