What if I miss a train or bus connection in Morocco?

Missing a connection is the nightmare travellers play out in their heads, so let me defuse it: in Morocco it's usually a minor hiccup, not a disaster, especially on the trains. The conventional ONCF inter-city services run frequently on the busy corridors — Casablanca–Rabat, Marrakech–Casablanca, the Tangier line — so if you miss one, the next is often an hour or two away, and a basic second-class ticket isn't tied to a single departure the way a plane ticket is. You simply wait for the following train. I've done it; it's an inconvenience, not an emergency.

The nuance is the type of ticket. A reserved first-class seat or an Al Boraq high-speed ticket is generally tied to that specific train and seat, so missing it means you may need to rebook rather than just roll onto the next one. Even then, the fix is to go straight to the staffed ticket counter, explain (French helps, English often gets understood, and pointing at the ticket always works), and ask about the next service — staff deal with this constantly and are generally helpful about getting you moving, sometimes for a small or no extra charge depending on the fare.

Coaches are stricter, and you should treat them more like a flight. CTM and Supratours sell a reserved seat on a specific departure, and these coaches leave promptly — if you're late, it goes without you and your seat is simply gone. There may be space on a later coach that you can buy into, but a busy holiday-weekend service can be sold out, so a missed coach can cost you more time than a missed train. That's exactly why I tell people to arrive thirty to forty-five minutes early for coaches and to keep tighter discipline around them than around trains.

My honest playbook if it happens: don't panic, head to the counter, and be ready with cash for a possible rebook. If the onward leg is genuinely time-critical — a flight home, a non-refundable desert camp — that's precisely when I'd have built in slack or used a private driver from the start, because a driver waits for you and a scheduled service doesn't. For everyday city-to-city hops, though, a missed train or coach in Morocco is the kind of small bump you'll have forgotten by the time you reach your riad.