Transport from airport in Budapest to City Center?
Dec 26th, 2010, 01:23 AM
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Transport from airport in Budapest to City Center?
Hi Fodor Forum Friends,
What is the best way to get from the airport in Budapest to the central area of the city, around Deak Square? We will be a family of 6 (no little kids) and a bunch of suitcases. Interested in both the least expensive way, and also the most convenient way. Also, what is the price? THANKS!
What is the best way to get from the airport in Budapest to the central area of the city, around Deak Square? We will be a family of 6 (no little kids) and a bunch of suitcases. Interested in both the least expensive way, and also the most convenient way. Also, what is the price? THANKS!
Dec 26th, 2010, 02:02 AM
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We took a cab - there is an official booking stand just outside the airport doors and you get a ticket with a set price. Apparently its best and cheapest to use this way if you are going to take a taxi - our hotel warned us not to take a taxi without a set price.
Dec 26th, 2010, 09:03 AM
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What jamikins said. Check it out here. Deak Ferenc Ter is in zone 2. They give an even better deal from the city back out to the airport (because they have a guaranteed return load).
You will probably have to get two cabs.
You will probably have to get two cabs.
Jan 5th, 2011, 09:53 AM
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If you come with six people you might do better to book an airport transfer beforehand. Two single taxis can come out more expensive than to book a cab with space for everyone of you. The cheapest is of course public transportation, but that is not nice with lots of suitcases, children and so on!
Apr 1st, 2011, 05:12 PM
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Here's a more comprehensive description of the current choices available:
Zona Taxi no longer has the contract to provide taxi service from the airport to the city, and there are several other new options since the last time this thread was updated.
You can use Public Transit, a Shuttle Bus, or a Taxi. The latter two are offered both by the (more expensive) 'official' provider, who pays a fee to the airport and gets in return a series of booths to assist travelers, and by unofficial providers, who can at times be unscrupulous.
Here's a guide to the options, and to avoiding problems if you chose to seek an unofficial choice.
To start, Can one take PUBLIC TRANSIT?
Yes. But should one? That depends.
For some people there is a bit of a thrill to diving right into a locale by using the public transit (or whatever alternative the locals use)to get in from an airport in a city they have never visited. It's a kind of explorers' badge of honor, and it saves money (though often at the expense of time).
In Budapest, this should be reserved for the very, very thrifty or the diehards.
The transit system is counter-intuitive to many people (if you want to use it from the airport, be sure to research it thoroughly to avoid possible fines), though it has a kind of internal common sense once you get the hang of it. Hungarian is a language that few outsiders speak, and you can't get by with another language when faced with a person who speaks only Hungarian. It is neither Germanic nor Romance nor Slavic nor Asian. The good news is that many, many people speak some English. The bad news is that the bus drivers and Metro cashiers often do not.
Finally, it is a long and awkward commute in from the airport unless you are headed somewhere near Nyugati train station and are arriving at Ferihegy 1 Airport (the budget carriers). There is a train directly from Ferihegy 1 to Nyugati. Nyugati is a major train station, but it is not in the center of town (figure 2-5 Metro stops back towards the airport to get to the city center).
http://www.bud.hu/english/transport/train
Note that http://bud.hu is a pretty good source for things like departure and arrivals information and other airport-related topics. It is somewhat limited on its information on transport in, however.
In general, all of this information is about reaching Pest; public transit to Buda from the airport is an especially poor idea and depends entirely on what part of Buda you are heading to (for the Hilton and the Castle District it's a bus a metro and a second bus).
Having said that, if you are headed for the city center, or are arriving at Ferihegy 2 (the primary airport), public transit involves a bus (#200E) from the terminal to get to the metro terminus at Kobanya/Kispest (Blue Metro, which is the #3 line). From Ferihegy 1, same thing: the 200E stops there as well.
The bus requires a ticket. The Metro requires a second ticket. Purchase a ticket from newsstand or from a machine. There are also unlimited public transirt passes, of three sorts and multiple durations. The most costly is the Budapest Card (which is available at the TourInfo booths at the airport and includes a wide range of discounts to sights and restaurants), and the consensus seems to be that for most people it is not worth the extra cost. The normal passes are often a good deal and extremely convenient ... so convenient that it may be worthwhile even if you are an inveterate walker (as we are; for us, the individual tickets are a better deal but we still buy passes much of the time just to avoid the hassle of always having a ticket when we need one). Finally, there are extremely cost-effective family passes.
Only the Budapest Card is is available at the Airport. For the others you must go to a cashier at the Metro station (some Metro station machines also sell them). So, unless you buy a Budapest Card, you will need a ticket for the 200E bus.
At Kobanya Kispest you are at the end of the line for the Blue Metro, so any train will take you into town. There are stairs up to the station when you get off the bus (look around for the elevated train station and the steps up to it).
Deak ter is the center of town, and the two other Metro lines all intersect there (you can use a single ticket to transfer to a new Metro at Deak ter, but you cannot use a single ticket to transfer between buses and Metros).
Deak ter is an insanely complicated area once you surface above ground; the odds are pretty good that you will find that you have to go back down and come up somewhere else to get wherever you are headed, like the gopher in Caddyshack.
From there, to the Castle District, take the #16 bus. To most of central Pest, walk.
The cost is about €2-3 per person depending on route and what tickets you buy 9and the exchange rate that day).
SO, your second option is a SHUTTLE BUS:
Two options here; some are big fans of one or the other. I am not.
There is the official Airport Shuttle. You buy a per-person ticket and it takes you to pretty much anywhere in the city center. Of course, it also takes everyone else in the bus to wherever they are going, so it potentially has a bunch of stops before yours, and a longer trip than a taxi. And more roundabout. And when it is full, it is, well, full so you get to know your neighbors. All of this would make lots of sense if it weren't fully as expensive as a taxi is for 2 riders, and more expensive than a taxi for 3 or more. So if there are two or more of you, there is simply no reason to consider this option.
There is a booth for the official shuttle, and it is hard to miss.
www.bud.hu/english/transport/airport_shuttle
BUT WAIT, there's, as they say, more...
There is a new competitor to the official shuttle; a larger bus but with similar willingness to take you more or less anywhere in the center. And it is MUCH cheaper, but also a good deal harder to find because the airport management is waging a small war against the unofficial carriers (they get a fee from the official ones, but not from the unofficial ones).
centraleasteurope.com/blog/…
and for the daring (willing to trust GoogleTranslate):
http://translate.google.com/translat...langpair=hu|en
Plainly, given the lack of support from or even within the airport, this is a somewhat more daunting option, but far cheaper and perhaps rather more comfortable.
Which brings us to my preferred option: TAXIS
Three different viable approaches:
Option 1 (my least favorite):
There is an "official" taxi company, Fo Taxi. They have booths inside and outside the terminal, and will get you to the city center for about 5000-6000 HUF (€20-25 depending on exchange rate and quoted fare on any particular day). Fo is an old and trusted and reliable company and, for jobs within the city, I occasionally use them. I find that their cars are not as good as those of City Taxi and that their drivers more frequently do not speak any English, and that their dispatchers are less professional than City Taxi (+36 1 211 1111). But they have the official contract with the airport and City Taxi does not.
'Official' means they pay the airport for the privilege and it means that the airport not only gives them that booth within the terminal but also appears to allow them to leaflet and discourage other taxi companies from working at the airport. Do not believe the leaflets if you are handed one, the competing taxis are not illegal; but they are, it is true, totally unregulated and you have no reason to believe that they will be reliable or offer a fair price.
I have my reservations about Fo Taxi's service, but will limit myself to saying that their website is useless, their drivers seldom speak any English (though their dispatchers do, but that's not enough to ward off the possibility of miscommunication), and their equipment is not off a uniformly high standard. From a rider's perspective, the former provider, Zona Taxi (now basically defunct) was better.
Which brings me to
Option 2 (somewhat better):
Arrange with another reliable taxi company to meet you at the airport. City Taxi will do it, and there are others as well.
http://citytaxi.hu
The single most important thing to be sure of, however, in booking in advance, is that the taxi does not charge you for waiting time at the airport. That can mount up very swiftly. Otherwise, the fare will be within a couple of Euros of Fo Taxi's.
Which brings me to
Option 3 (in my view, THE BEST):
My wife and I arrange with a specific, extremely trustworthy and able, driver, who speaks a fair amount of English. He meets us as we exit the secure area of the terminal, with a sign with our names. He does not charge for waiting time.
His name is Alajos Pulai, and I got to know him when he spirited me through an unbelievable traffic jam from the airport the first time I visited Hungary. I was so impressed that I got his number and have been using his service ever since, and recommending it to our guests. He managed to find a group of guests arriving at Nyugati Station in the middle of a political demonstration centered around the station several years ago, got them through the teargas and the mob scene, into his taxi and to their destination in record time (I should say that this was pretty much them only serious police action around a demonstration in the city in the past decade). Our guests were impressed. He has helped others deal with lost luggage in some pretty heroic ways.
Anyway, we recommend him and use him and others on TA seem also to have similar reactions if you search on his name.
[email protected]
He has a new website at http://budapestairportaxi.com.
Zona Taxi no longer has the contract to provide taxi service from the airport to the city, and there are several other new options since the last time this thread was updated.
You can use Public Transit, a Shuttle Bus, or a Taxi. The latter two are offered both by the (more expensive) 'official' provider, who pays a fee to the airport and gets in return a series of booths to assist travelers, and by unofficial providers, who can at times be unscrupulous.
Here's a guide to the options, and to avoiding problems if you chose to seek an unofficial choice.
To start, Can one take PUBLIC TRANSIT?
Yes. But should one? That depends.
For some people there is a bit of a thrill to diving right into a locale by using the public transit (or whatever alternative the locals use)to get in from an airport in a city they have never visited. It's a kind of explorers' badge of honor, and it saves money (though often at the expense of time).
In Budapest, this should be reserved for the very, very thrifty or the diehards.
The transit system is counter-intuitive to many people (if you want to use it from the airport, be sure to research it thoroughly to avoid possible fines), though it has a kind of internal common sense once you get the hang of it. Hungarian is a language that few outsiders speak, and you can't get by with another language when faced with a person who speaks only Hungarian. It is neither Germanic nor Romance nor Slavic nor Asian. The good news is that many, many people speak some English. The bad news is that the bus drivers and Metro cashiers often do not.
Finally, it is a long and awkward commute in from the airport unless you are headed somewhere near Nyugati train station and are arriving at Ferihegy 1 Airport (the budget carriers). There is a train directly from Ferihegy 1 to Nyugati. Nyugati is a major train station, but it is not in the center of town (figure 2-5 Metro stops back towards the airport to get to the city center).
http://www.bud.hu/english/transport/train
Note that http://bud.hu is a pretty good source for things like departure and arrivals information and other airport-related topics. It is somewhat limited on its information on transport in, however.
In general, all of this information is about reaching Pest; public transit to Buda from the airport is an especially poor idea and depends entirely on what part of Buda you are heading to (for the Hilton and the Castle District it's a bus a metro and a second bus).
Having said that, if you are headed for the city center, or are arriving at Ferihegy 2 (the primary airport), public transit involves a bus (#200E) from the terminal to get to the metro terminus at Kobanya/Kispest (Blue Metro, which is the #3 line). From Ferihegy 1, same thing: the 200E stops there as well.
The bus requires a ticket. The Metro requires a second ticket. Purchase a ticket from newsstand or from a machine. There are also unlimited public transirt passes, of three sorts and multiple durations. The most costly is the Budapest Card (which is available at the TourInfo booths at the airport and includes a wide range of discounts to sights and restaurants), and the consensus seems to be that for most people it is not worth the extra cost. The normal passes are often a good deal and extremely convenient ... so convenient that it may be worthwhile even if you are an inveterate walker (as we are; for us, the individual tickets are a better deal but we still buy passes much of the time just to avoid the hassle of always having a ticket when we need one). Finally, there are extremely cost-effective family passes.
Only the Budapest Card is is available at the Airport. For the others you must go to a cashier at the Metro station (some Metro station machines also sell them). So, unless you buy a Budapest Card, you will need a ticket for the 200E bus.
At Kobanya Kispest you are at the end of the line for the Blue Metro, so any train will take you into town. There are stairs up to the station when you get off the bus (look around for the elevated train station and the steps up to it).
Deak ter is the center of town, and the two other Metro lines all intersect there (you can use a single ticket to transfer to a new Metro at Deak ter, but you cannot use a single ticket to transfer between buses and Metros).
Deak ter is an insanely complicated area once you surface above ground; the odds are pretty good that you will find that you have to go back down and come up somewhere else to get wherever you are headed, like the gopher in Caddyshack.
From there, to the Castle District, take the #16 bus. To most of central Pest, walk.
The cost is about €2-3 per person depending on route and what tickets you buy 9and the exchange rate that day).
SO, your second option is a SHUTTLE BUS:
Two options here; some are big fans of one or the other. I am not.
There is the official Airport Shuttle. You buy a per-person ticket and it takes you to pretty much anywhere in the city center. Of course, it also takes everyone else in the bus to wherever they are going, so it potentially has a bunch of stops before yours, and a longer trip than a taxi. And more roundabout. And when it is full, it is, well, full so you get to know your neighbors. All of this would make lots of sense if it weren't fully as expensive as a taxi is for 2 riders, and more expensive than a taxi for 3 or more. So if there are two or more of you, there is simply no reason to consider this option.
There is a booth for the official shuttle, and it is hard to miss.
www.bud.hu/english/transport/airport_shuttle
BUT WAIT, there's, as they say, more...
There is a new competitor to the official shuttle; a larger bus but with similar willingness to take you more or less anywhere in the center. And it is MUCH cheaper, but also a good deal harder to find because the airport management is waging a small war against the unofficial carriers (they get a fee from the official ones, but not from the unofficial ones).
centraleasteurope.com/blog/…
and for the daring (willing to trust GoogleTranslate):
http://translate.google.com/translat...langpair=hu|en
Plainly, given the lack of support from or even within the airport, this is a somewhat more daunting option, but far cheaper and perhaps rather more comfortable.
Which brings us to my preferred option: TAXIS
Three different viable approaches:
Option 1 (my least favorite):
There is an "official" taxi company, Fo Taxi. They have booths inside and outside the terminal, and will get you to the city center for about 5000-6000 HUF (€20-25 depending on exchange rate and quoted fare on any particular day). Fo is an old and trusted and reliable company and, for jobs within the city, I occasionally use them. I find that their cars are not as good as those of City Taxi and that their drivers more frequently do not speak any English, and that their dispatchers are less professional than City Taxi (+36 1 211 1111). But they have the official contract with the airport and City Taxi does not.
'Official' means they pay the airport for the privilege and it means that the airport not only gives them that booth within the terminal but also appears to allow them to leaflet and discourage other taxi companies from working at the airport. Do not believe the leaflets if you are handed one, the competing taxis are not illegal; but they are, it is true, totally unregulated and you have no reason to believe that they will be reliable or offer a fair price.
I have my reservations about Fo Taxi's service, but will limit myself to saying that their website is useless, their drivers seldom speak any English (though their dispatchers do, but that's not enough to ward off the possibility of miscommunication), and their equipment is not off a uniformly high standard. From a rider's perspective, the former provider, Zona Taxi (now basically defunct) was better.
Which brings me to
Option 2 (somewhat better):
Arrange with another reliable taxi company to meet you at the airport. City Taxi will do it, and there are others as well.
http://citytaxi.hu
The single most important thing to be sure of, however, in booking in advance, is that the taxi does not charge you for waiting time at the airport. That can mount up very swiftly. Otherwise, the fare will be within a couple of Euros of Fo Taxi's.
Which brings me to
Option 3 (in my view, THE BEST):
My wife and I arrange with a specific, extremely trustworthy and able, driver, who speaks a fair amount of English. He meets us as we exit the secure area of the terminal, with a sign with our names. He does not charge for waiting time.
His name is Alajos Pulai, and I got to know him when he spirited me through an unbelievable traffic jam from the airport the first time I visited Hungary. I was so impressed that I got his number and have been using his service ever since, and recommending it to our guests. He managed to find a group of guests arriving at Nyugati Station in the middle of a political demonstration centered around the station several years ago, got them through the teargas and the mob scene, into his taxi and to their destination in record time (I should say that this was pretty much them only serious police action around a demonstration in the city in the past decade). Our guests were impressed. He has helped others deal with lost luggage in some pretty heroic ways.
Anyway, we recommend him and use him and others on TA seem also to have similar reactions if you search on his name.
[email protected]
He has a new website at http://budapestairportaxi.com.
