Ibis Centrum Reviews

We travelled to Budapest in late September with Easyjet from London Luton as we always find Easyjet to be very good on price and have never suffered a delay.

We stayed at the Ibis Centrum (75 euros per room per night), which is ideally located and not too far away from the main sights etc. See below for how to get there. Raday Utca is ";pedestrianised"; (as it is lined with parking meters you know this is somewhat of a misnomer) has lots of nice bars and restaurants and, also, a very good sandwich shop where you can get a bacon and egg breakfast (to eat in) for £1.50, much cheaper than the 8 euros charged by the Ibis! We also got some take away baguettes for our flight home, which were half the price of the ones in the airport. There is also a supermarket and a couple of boutiques and souvenir shops.

Across the main road, there is the Irish Cat bar, which is very good too, but unlike most Irish Bars we have visited, they do not open until the afternoon, although they stay open until very late in the morning. The market hall is worth a visit, but don't buy any souvenirs on the first floor, they are much cheaper in the little streets across the road, which lead down to the river. Having said that, the things on the ground floor are quite good value, I got a great string of dried whole chilli peppers for about 75p, which should last me a couple of years. We liked Budapest, which in a lot of ways is like Prague, with the exception that their shops are closed on Sundays, apart from the Mammut shopping centres and the like. This didn't bother us too much as we took the Metro and went up to the Zoo and the English Park, taking in Grundels for Sunday Brunch (not too bad when you consider the price of everything on the normal menu!).

The public transport system is very good and very cheap, but you must remember to validate your tickets before getting on a metro train and whilst on a bus, failure to do so results in a hefty fine and they do check! When we got off at the Zoo, two burly guards ensured that not one single person got past them until their tickets had been closely inspected. A taxi to our hotel, if arranged via the Ibis, was about £17, but we used the Repterbuz and metro, which only cost £1 each in total! The instructions on the net state that there are blue bus ticket machines near the taxi rank at Ferhigey airport, but since they have now opened a lovely new terminal, this is not the case. The first thing you must do is get some coins, there is a change desk and, also, a cafeteria as you come through arrivals. You can then buy a ticket on the bus 170 HUF, which you need to validate.

The bus stop is just on the main road, to the left of the airport entrance (same side). It takes you directly to the metro station, again you need 170 HUF per person for a ticket, you will see some orange machines on the way into the underground, insert your ticket to get it validated, the IBIS Centrum stop is Kalvin Ter and when you get off the metro look for the Raday Utca exit, you will see the hotel as you come up the steps, it is about 15 metres away. All the ticket machines have instructions in English and almost everyone we spoke to put us to shame by speaking very good English. For a capital city Budapest is surprisingly reasonable, although there are the odd places which are quite expensive, but we did not spend as much as we thought we would.

The weather was lovely even though it was almost October, but we did need a jacket on the evenings. We enjoyed it so much we intend to go again.