Radim Jančura

Radim Jančura
Born	1972-01-12January 12, 1972 (age 54) Ostrava, Czechoslovakia
Nationality	Czech
Education	Brno University of Technology, Faculty of Electrical Engineering (Ing., 1995)
Occupation	Businessman
Company	RegioJet; Student Agency
Title	Founder and owner

Radim Jančura (born January 12, 1972) is a Czech businessman who founded and owns the travel company Student Agency and the rail and bus operator RegioJet. He started in Brno in 1993 as a university student arranging au pair placements in Britain. The business went on to sell flight tickets, ran yellow long-distance buses from 2004, and in 2011 began running commercial long-distance passenger trains in competition with the state operator České dráhy (Czech Railways).

Jančura has run his companies as sole owner and has said he has never paid himself a dividend. For years he put the profits from buses and ticket sales into the rail business, which he called "a charity of the second order". He has fought public battles with politicians, state agencies and competitors. These include an advertising campaign against Social Democratic regional governors in 2009, a demand in 2014 that the transport minister personally repay the cost of motorway queues, and billboards in Slovakia in 2015 accusing two regional governors of clientelism.

In 2024 Jančura said he had decided to sell RegioJet eventually. Within months he reversed that. In 2025 and 2026 he said he had gone back to actively running the company, was preparing shares for managers, and wanted to hand the business to his family. His stated goal is for RegioJet to pass České dráhy as the largest rail operator in the Czech Republic by 2032. As of October 2026 he remains RegioJet's owner and speaks for the company in public.

Ernst & Young named Jančura Czech Entrepreneur of the Year for 2005.

Early life and education

Jančura was born in Ostrava on January 12, 1972. In a 2011 interview he said he had wanted to be a television repairman as a child, like his father, who was good at the work and in demand. He described himself as the class clown at school, a good student who liked to draw attention to himself. He said he had no childhood heroes, did not care for football or hockey, and had read only a few books in his life apart from university textbooks. He said his mother was strict and never praised him. He also said that a distant ancestor had been a brigand in the Beskydy mountains, and he gave that as the source of his combative streak.

After secondary school Jančura went to Brno to study at the Faculty of Electrical Engineering of the Brno University of Technology (VUT). Early in his studies he spent a few months working in England. Dreamlife.cz reported that the work was illegal, as there was no legal way to do it at the time. Many of the young women he met there worked as au pairs, a job barely known in Czechoslovakia then, and he came home with contacts and the idea for a business. He graduated from the faculty in 1995 with the engineering degree Ing.

Career

Student Agency and au pair placements (1993 to 2003)

Jančura started the au pair business in Brno in 1993, aged 21, with one employee. Czech Business Weekly gave the start as 1994. It reported that he chose the name Student Agency because he was still a student and that the firm became a limited liability company two years later, when it had two employees. STUDENT AGENCY, s.r.o. was incorporated in 1996 and took on language and study programmes abroad, work programmes and, later, bus transport.

According to Dreamlife.cz, Jančura charged about half what competitors charged, and the agency soon became popular with young people. Many of them were filling a gap year after failing university entrance exams. In a 2009 interview with Radio Prague he said the agency was sending three or four thousand young women abroad a year: "since no one else did it on such a large scale, we ended up being the world's biggest au-pair agency." His company profile for a Brno MBA programme dates that status to 1998 and says it was recognised by the International Au Pair Association. He told Radio Prague that demand from Slovakia had collapsed after European Union accession, while Czech numbers stayed steady.

Student Agency started selling flight tickets in 2000. Within a few years it was the largest seller of air tickets in the Czech Republic by turnover and by number of customers. In February 2007 it linked its booking system to the low-cost airline SkyEurope. Jančura set up a separate company, Orbix, to serve corporate clients. He told Radio Prague that it would have been "strange to fly business class on a ticket from some student company."

Yellow buses (2004 to 2015)

Bus transport grew out of the au pair trade. Dreamlife.cz reported that clients had been travelling to Britain on competitors' coaches and complaining about the drivers. Jančura first put his own stewardesses on those buses and then bought a bus to run his own line to London. Domestic yellow coaches branded Student Agency Express started in 2003 and 2004, and international routes followed in 2005. The first domestic route, Prague to Brno on the D1 motorway, ran from 2004. Dreamlife.cz wrote that for several days at the start the bus ran completely empty, and that competitors blocked the company's access to some bus stations. On board the company offered stewardesses, drinks, music and video, which were then unusual on Czech coaches.

By 2009 the yellow buses were the second-largest road carrier in the country. Radio Prague put the company's customer count at about five million a year and its staff at about 1,000, with annual turnover above CZK 4 billion. Jančura told Hospodářské noviny that year that new routes started at the same fares as competitors, with discounts offered mainly to push online sales. He confirmed that the company had once charged one crown for a fortnight in Liberec, in a dispute over access to the city's bus station, until a court stopped it. In August 2011 he brought new Irizar coaches with seat-back entertainment onto the Prague to Brno route. In June 2010 the company also started selling package holidays through dovolena.cz. Finmag reported that the site reached a turnover of about CZK 500 million in less than a year.

In November 2015 Jančura told Lidovky.cz that the buses would drop the Student Agency name and take the RegioJet brand already used on his trains. "The story of my company Student Agency, which is known in the Czech Republic, is not known to people across the border. It is an impractical name for a transport company," he said.

When the German low-cost operator FlixBus entered the Czech market, Jančura said in June 2018 that it had taken about 10 percent of passengers on his five main routes and forced him to cancel some less profitable services. He accused FlixBus of below-cost pricing and said he had sent it a pre-action letter and would prepare a lawsuit. He also said trains now earned more than buses, reversing the company's old model in which profitable buses had subsidised what he called his "yellow trains" hobby.

Entry into rail (2006 to 2011)

Jančura spent about a decade trying to enter the Czech rail market before his first train ran. In 2025 he described that period as getting onto the railway "almost by force". In 2007 Dreamlife.cz reported that he was preparing private trains and a hotel chain. In 2009 the company formed a joint venture named RegioJet with the French transport group Keolis, which Jančura told Hospodářské noviny held the majority. Its aim was to win the tenders that Czech regions were expected to hold for subsidised regional services. He told the paper that rail had become "a question of honour" for him: "If I didn't succeed, I probably couldn't look in the eyes of the people who stop me on the street and wish me luck." He said he would retire once 10 percent of trains in the country were yellow.

The regional tenders did not happen. In December 2009 the regions signed long-term contracts directly with České dráhy. Czech Business Weekly estimated the contracts' value at about CZK 150 billion. Jančura responded with a national advertising campaign (see Controversies). He then turned to commercial services that needed no public contract. In March 2011 the company began running regional trains in Slovakia, under an arrangement that he said saved the Slovak ministry 16 percent on subsidies.

On September 26, 2011 RegioJet began regular commercial services between Prague, Ostrava and Havířov, in direct competition with České dráhy's SC Pendolino and InterCity trains. Before the launch Jančura said all the profits Student Agency had made in its 18 years had gone into the rail project. He said the project cost about CZK 1 billion and that banks had required nearly CZK 300 million of the company's own funds. He predicted that a third entrant, Leo Express, would set off a "price massacre" on the route. Asked about České dráhy's refusal to let his trains use its washing facilities, he said he would wash them by hand: "I have no problem washing the trains personally."

Tick Tack taxi service (2013 to 2018)

On April 19, 2013 Jančura became managing director of a new company, Tick Tack Taxi, in which Student Agency held 80 percent. He said it would be the largest taxi service in Prague within a year and spoke of a fleet of up to 1,000 new Audi A6 and BMW GT cars. The service started in November 2013 and later added a second brand, Green-Prague. In February 2018 Student Agency sold Tick Tack and Green-Prague to the Taxi Praha group for an undisclosed price. iDNES.cz described the business as loss-making. Jančura said taxis had always been a sideline and that the group would concentrate on public transport.

Slovakia and international routes (2014 to 2017)

Jančura extended his trains and buses into Slovakia, including trains on the country's main line between Bratislava and Košice. On January 31, 2017 RegioJet withdrew from that line after a little over two years. The company blamed a government policy of free travel for students and pensioners, which applied only to the subsidised trains of the state operator ZSSK. Jančura called the reintroduction of state InterCity trains a political decision by Andrej Danko, chairman of the Slovak National Party. By 2024 the company's commercial rail network linked Prague with the Ostrava region and Košice, with Brno, Vienna and Budapest, and with Ukraine.

Pandemic, hotels and sale talks (2020 to 2024)

Jančura told Forbes Česko that during the COVID-19 lockdowns his companies "switched off completely" and ran at about 8 percent of their normal turnover. He decided to start something new and began buying property. By November 2022 he owned and operated eight mountain properties: five chalets and three hotels, two of them next to ski slopes in the Austrian Alps, below the Grossglockner and the Pitztal glacier. Forbes put his investment at nearly CZK 150 million. The business began as a project called Partyja and was later grouped under the brand RegioJet Hotels & Cottages. Jančura described it as a hobby with a future, run on a self-service model, and said he looked after the hotels himself. He said Austrian hotels were cheaper than Czech ones because Austria bans converting mountain chalets into apartments.

In 2020 RegioJet holding was separated from Student Agency holding. Student Agency kept the travel businesses: flight tickets, holidays, and language, work and study stays. In May 2023 Hospodářské noviny reported that Jančura was looking for a strategic investor and that the state rail companies of France (SNCF), Austria (ÖBB) and Italy (FS Italiane), as well as FlixBus, were interested. In July 2024 he told E15 that transport companies had been allowed to see internal data. "I recently definitively decided that I will one day sell the company. I am 52, I won't be here forever. I have a daughter, she is not studying anything technical, so a sale is the natural choice," he said, adding that a sale would come in five, more likely ten, years. In the same interview he said he no longer ran the company day to day. He described his role as "more of a controller": every invoice had to pass through him to keep pressure on costs. He said the company had 1,500 employees, of whom he knew about 20.

Return to management and tender wins (2024 to present)

In February 2025 Jančura told Seznam Zprávy that he would not sell after all ("I have a second wind") and that he had agreed with his 16-year-old daughter, on holiday in Thailand, to keep the company in the family. He then told E15 that this was only one possible scenario and that the subject had until recently been taboo between them. If his daughter wanted it, he said, she would get a majority stake and part of the company would go to management, but a sale remained possible if his motivation faded. In September 2025 he said firmly that there would be no sale. He said he had considered one because COVID-19 had "put me to sleep a bit". He had gone back to actively running the company at the start of 2024 and changed its management, "not because it was bad, but because I demanded higher performance". He also said he was preparing shares for managers and working towards his children one day taking over. "It would be stupid to sell RegioJet just at the moment when the railway really opened up," he said.

The change of plan followed a run of tender wins as the Czech state and regions began opening subsidised rail services to competition. RegioJet won a 15-year contract for the electrified lines of the Ústí nad Labem Region, worth about CZK 700 million a year, and the ministry of transport's tender for the R9 express line from Prague via Havlíčkův Brod to Brno and Jihlava, worth almost CZK 5 billion over 15 years. It takes over both from České dráhy in December 2026. It also won five express lines in north-east Bohemia from 2029, but lost the R8 line from Brno to Bohumín, which it had run since 2019, back to České dráhy. In June 2026 E15 reported that the company had also failed in the largest Czech passenger tender to date, for Prague and the Central Bohemian Region.

In January 2026 Jančura said his aim was to overtake České dráhy by 2032. He said he was struggling to hire electricians and mechanics in the Czech Republic and was recruiting maintenance workers from the Philippines, at Czech wages of about CZK 40,000 to 50,000 a month plus housing. The first 50 were due in April 2026. In October 2026, after a summer of passenger complaints about air conditioning failing in RegioJet's older second-hand carriages, Jančura made a public apology: "This summer was bad, I must personally apologise to our passengers." He said the company had paid tens of millions of crowns in compensation. It planned to raise the air-conditioning capacity of its roughly 300 carriages by 50 percent by May 2027 and to replace its cheapest class, Lowcost, with a refurbished class called Economy.

Poland (2025 to 2026)

On September 18, 2025 RegioJet started its first domestic service in Poland, between Kraków and Warsaw. It planned to expand to other routes, including Kraków to Gdynia and Poznań to Warsaw. The planned full timetable from December 14, 2025 largely failed: the company cancelled most of the planned services days before launch for lack of staff, including drivers from an outside supplier. In January 2026 the infrastructure manager PKP Polskie Linie Kolejowe withdrew four of RegioJet's 34 allocated train paths, citing rules that let it reclaim paths used at less than 70 percent. RegioJet called this anticompetitive; PKP PLK called the accusations groundless.

In January 2026 Jančura said Poland was "the future Germany" and that his company faced "media hatred" there. On April 9, 2026 RegioJet announced it would end all Polish domestic services on May 3, 2026, while keeping its international trains from Przemyśl and Warsaw to Prague. It accused the state operator PKP Intercity of cutting fares by up to 70 percent after RegioJet's entry and of taking key timetable slots. It also said the PKP group had blocked its purchase of a depot in Warsaw's Praga district, which it had won at auction in August 2025. Jančura said: "I sincerely apologise to all passengers. I cannot further endanger the future of the company I founded at the age of 23." Poland's rail regulator later found that RegioJet had broken the law in December 2025 by failing to run 23 timetabled services.

Leadership and management style

Jančura has repeatedly called himself a poor manager of people. "I'm perhaps a good entrepreneur but a bad manager. I can't lead people, I can only find their faults," he told Hospodářské noviny in 2009, explaining why he would never apply to run České dráhy. In 2011 he said: "I'm not a manager, I'm not a team player, I'm an individualist," and said that his management team praised staff in his place. He linked his difficulty with praise to his mother's strictness. Dreamlife.cz reported that he called himself a "fault-finder" who "hands out praise by staying silent".

Direct contact with customers has been a long-running feature of his management. In 2009 Czech Business Weekly reported that anyone could ask Student Agency staff for his mobile number to complain, and that the company hired about 100 mystery shoppers a month to travel on its buses and rate the service. "I am in fact the collector of any complaints about my employees," he said. In 2011 he printed his mobile number in an interview and said he would answer it. He also acted as the company's spokesman, and he avoided personal meetings, preferring to settle matters by phone or online. Tomáš Cikán, director of the travel agency ESO Travel and a friend of Jančura's, told the paper: "Radim is tough in business; when he wants, he achieves his goal but his business practices are fair." Šárka Litvinová, general manager of the rival Asiana, said: "I don't like his loutish business practices and arrogance."

Jančura has described cost control as central to his role. In 2024 he said every invoice passed through him. In 2011 he said he did not know the salaries of his stewardesses or even of his fellow managers, only his own. He has described his rail business in personal terms, calling it "a question of honour" in 2009 and saying in 2025 that he had spent 25 years arguing for the railway to be opened to private operators.

Major deals and strategic decisions

• Rail entry and the Keolis partnership (2009): Jančura formed RegioJet as a joint venture with Keolis to compete for regional rail contracts. When the regions awarded those contracts directly to České dráhy, he turned to commercial long-distance services, which began on September 26, 2011.
• Zanzibar hotel: In 2009 Jančura and Cikán set up Beach Resorts Investment to build a 500-bed hotel in Zanzibar, after spending two years buying 13 hectares of land from more than 110 owners. By October 2011 Jančura said he had sold the hotel at a profit and moved the money into transport.
• Tick Tack Taxi (2013 to 2018): He entered the Prague taxi market in 2013 and sold the business to Taxi Praha in 2018.
• Single RegioJet brand (2015 to 2016): He moved the bus operations onto the RegioJet brand used by his trains.
• Separation of RegioJet holding (2020): The transport group was split from the travel business of Student Agency holding.
• Mountain hotels (2020 onward): He spent nearly CZK 150 million on eight mountain properties in Austria and the Czech Republic by late 2022.
• Decision on a sale (2023 to 2025): He opened the company's data to potential buyers, said in 2024 that he would sell in five to ten years, then ruled out a sale in 2025.
• Fleet investment (2024 to 2026): By mid-2026 RegioJet had investments of about CZK 20 billion under way, including about 80 new trains: 23 electric units from Škoda Group for the Ústí nad Labem Region, 18 electric units from PESA for the Prague to Brno and Jihlava line with a top speed of 200 km/h, and 34 hybrid units for north-east Bohemia. It also planned a light-maintenance depot in Prague's Hostivař district. The company paid for expansion with bank loans and bonds, including an issue of CZK 1.5 billion, expandable to CZK 4 billion, at a fixed 7.15 percent.
• Withdrawal from Polish domestic rail (2026): He ended domestic Polish services seven months after launch.

Financial and market performance

Student Agency's revenue was about CZK 4 billion in 2008 and 2009. Czech Business Weekly reported a 2008 pre-tax profit of CZK 27.5 million. Jančura said he expected more than CZK 100 million in 2009 and was planning about CZK 250 million in 2010, as the company shifted from chasing revenue to chasing profit. Staff numbers were reported as about 400 in 2007, 900 to 1,000 in 2009 and 1,300 in 2011.

In 2011 Jančura said his own employee salary was CZK 160,000 a month. That year he also told Finmag that he had "never paid myself a single crown in dividends".

RegioJet's rail operations recovered strongly after the pandemic. RegioJet holding reported a 2023 profit of CZK 337 million, double the previous year, on revenue of CZK 3.2 billion, up about CZK 550 million. Its trains carried eight million passengers, 12 percent more than a year earlier, and its buses about four million. Headcount fell from 1,732 to 1,498. Jančura told E15 that the group's gross profit was about CZK 600 million in 2025, compared with CZK 408 million and CZK 300 million in the two previous years. He said rail passengers rose about 12 percent to 8.9 million, a figure that excluded integrated-transport tickets. The annual report of the long-distance rail company RegioJet a.s. showed 2025 revenue of CZK 3.36 billion, up CZK 411 million, and a profit of CZK 265.5 million, down CZK 22 million. Its long-distance trains carried 10.1 million passengers.

Measured by train-kilometres, České dráhy's share of Czech passenger rail fell from more than 95 percent in 2014 to just over 80 percent in 2024. RegioJet's share rose from about 4 percent to more than 6 percent over a similar period. Jančura has said he wants 30 to 40 percent of the Czech market for contracted rail services within five to seven years.

Board memberships and outside roles

Jančura is the owner of the RegioJet and Student Agency groups. From April 19, 2013 he was managing director of Tick Tack Taxi.

In 2013 Jančura announced plans for a foundation to fund independent checks on transport construction projects and to fight cartels and conflicts of interest among designers, supervisors and investors. The resulting foundation, Stínové ŘSD ("Shadow Road and Motorway Directorate"), criticised the state Road and Motorway Directorate (ŘSD). In 2014 its board was chaired by Jiří Petrák. In May 2016 Jančura revived it and hired Miloslava Pošvářová, the directorate's former head of construction quality, to offer free advice to municipalities. He said the foundation had been formed because of the D1 modernisation and had then scaled back its work. He declined to say how much he spent on it.

From March 2009 Jančura was a guest lecturer in the UK-MBA programme in Brno. He took part in round-table discussions in an elective module on small business and development.

Controversies

Competition cases

In 2011 the Czech competition authority (ÚOHS) fined Student Agency CZK 5.2 million for abusing a dominant position during a price war with Asiana on the Prague to Brno bus route in 2007 and 2008. Asiana had started the route at the end of 2007 with a fare of CZK 50. Student Agency matched the fare and, after Asiana left the route about three months later, raised it to CZK 95. When the courts upheld the authority's decision, Asiana sued for damages. A regional court awarded it more than CZK 11 million in 2018. In April 2024 the High Court in Olomouc largely rejected Student Agency's appeal, and with interest the award came to more than CZK 21 million. Jančura had long argued that the authority and the courts should treat České dráhy's fare cuts on the Prague to Ostrava line in 2011 the same way. Neither ÚOHS nor the European Commission found wrongdoing by České dráhy. In April 2024 the two operators announced a settlement of their dispute.

Jančura has criticised the competition authority. In 2011 he said it should be renamed "the Office for the Protection of State Firms and State Interests". He said a former chairman, Martin Pecina, had told him that the office had to watch anything too cheap, because low prices blocked new competitors.

Campaigns against politicians

After the regions signed rail contracts with České dráhy without tenders in December 2009, Student Agency ran a national advertising campaign claiming that the Social Democratic (ČSSD) regional governors had cost taxpayers CZK 22 billion. Jančura said he expected to spend up to CZK 5 million on it by the end of the year. "We want to point out that the regional governors acted illegally," he said, calling it "my attempt for a kind of revolution". He said he would complain to the European Commission. He singled out the South Moravian governor Michal Hašek. In 2011 he said that as long as people like Hašek were in power, he would never quit business, and that he would welcome being sued so the matter could be argued in court.

In March 2013 Jančura opposed the state's CZK 22 billion plan to rebuild the D1 motorway. With Jiří Petrák, former head of the consultancy Mott MacDonald Praha, he proposed breaking up the concrete surface and overlaying it with asphalt, which he said would cost a third as much. He blamed transport minister Zbyněk Stanjura. Stanjura said he trusted the directorate's experts, and directorate head David Čermák said the proposal was "not backed by anything". In April 2014 Jančura calculated that drivers had lost more than CZK 50 million in queues caused by D1 roadworks. He said transport minister Antonín Prachař should repay the amount from his own pocket and published the minister's mobile number in a press release, urging drivers to text him. The ministry called it a personal attack. iDNES.cz noted that Jančura had strongly supported Andrej Babiš before the 2013 election.

In January 2015, after the Bratislava and Nitra regions refused RegioJet a licence for a bus route from Bratislava to Banská Bystrica, Jančura put up billboards at the entrances to both cities reading "Welcome to the region of corruption and clientelism". He said he could prove clientelism by governors Pavol Frešo and Milan Belica and would campaign until they left public life. Frešo said the region had followed the law, which required the consent of every region on the route, and called the billboards a pressure campaign meant to force him to break it.

Pardubice accident

In 2024 a RegioJet train was involved in a fatal collision at Pardubice in which four people died. In a July 2024 interview Jančura called it "a huge blow in my life". He attributed the crash to a driver passing a red signal, and said the older couchette cars that broke apart had been withdrawn and all 13 of that type would be sold. He disputed transport minister Martin Kupka's statement that a train protection system would not have prevented the accident, saying that the MIREL system used in RegioJet trains would have stopped the train.

Poland

After the withdrawal from Polish domestic services in April 2026, Hospodářské noviny reported allegations of unpaid social insurance contributions, unpaid wages to local staff, and offices in shipping containers in RegioJet's Polish operation. The company also had a public dispute with PKP Intercity, including over the publication of Jančura's private text messages by PKP Intercity chief executive Janusz Malinowski.

Personal life

Jančura lived in Brno in 2009. He told Radio Prague he preferred it to Prague, which he called beautiful "but mainly for tourists". In 2009 Czech Business Weekly reported that he named his hobbies as "work, beer and sleep", in that order. His friend Cikán said he liked to sleep in on holiday and that sport was not his strong side.

In October 2011 Jančura said he had a three-year-old daughter who lived with her mother, his former partner. He said he had got back together with another former partner after ten years, a lawyer who handled the company's main legal cases. He said that after giving money to his mother and daughter and paying his mortgage, he had about CZK 30,000 a month left, "and that's for beer". He said he did not spend on expensive hobbies, drove an eight-year-old Jaguar, and kept a pit bull terrier that slept in his bed. In February 2025 his daughter was 16. In January 2026 Jančura said he wanted ten children in all, with another due in April 2026, and that the one with the strongest will would eventually lead the company.

Jančura has said he intends to give much of his profits to charity. In 2011 he said that within five to ten years he would like to give half, or possibly all, of the annual profit to charitable projects helping people who had suffered misfortune through no fault of their own, and that he hoped his partner would manage this.

Recognition

• 2005: Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year, Czech Republic (announced February 23, 2006). He represented the country at the World Entrepreneur of the Year final in Monte Carlo in June 2006.

See also

• RegioJet
• Student Agency
• České dráhy
• Leo Express
• FlixBus
• Keolis

External links

• RegioJet official website