Buda, Pest, and every day out in between.
Which of the Danube cruises is the one people mean. Whether the Széchenyi ticket is worth the queue. What a ruin-bar crawl really costs. Every bookable tour in the city, read and ranked.
Everything in Budapest is arranged around one river.
Buda on the hill, Pest on the flat, nine bridges between them and a boat every twenty minutes. A cruise is the cheapest hour in the city and the one thing nearly every visitor ends up doing — so it is worth knowing which boat you are getting on.
Budapest is a spa town that happens to be a capital city.
Around 120 thermal springs come up under the city, and the bathhouses built on them are the reason half of Budapest’s visitors come in winter. Széchenyi is the big yellow one with the chess players outside; Gellért is the Art Nouveau one; Rudas keeps the original Ottoman dome. They are not interchangeable and the tickets are not either.
All 29 bath and spa reviews →
What Budapest actually books.
Every review →Ordered by how many travellers have been and left a rating, not by what anyone wants to sell you. The river takes the top of this list and keeps it.
1
City Highlights Cruise with Welcome Drink
1-hour Danube highlights cruise from Dock 42 with a welcome drink. See Parliament and Buda Castle lit up, great photos from deck.
From · $14
Read our review →
2
Unlimited Prosecco, Beer and Aperol Spritz Cruise
from $28
3
Széchenyi Spa Day Ticket with Optional Upgrades
from $51
4
Nighttime or Daytime Sightseeing Cruise
from $14
5
1-Hour Evening Sightseeing Cruise with Drink
from $28
6
Budapest Danube Cruise and Dinner Options, Live Music and Dance
from $54
7
Historic Cruise with Welcome Drink
from $12
8
St. Stephen’s Basilica Entry with Terrace Option
from $9
Six Budapest days, and the best way to book each.
The castle hill, the parliament, the courtyard bars of District VII, the market-hall food walks, the Bend of the Danube upstream. Most itineraries here are built out of these.
An hour on the Danube costs less than lunch.
Every reviewed tour on the site sorted by what it actually costs. Budapest is the rare capital where the famous thing is also the cheap thing.
Sightseeing cruises, bath tickets, walking tours, the Basilica terrace. This is where most of the city lives.
Dinner boats with live music, spa days with a massage, the full-day runs out to the Bend and the Plain.
Private guides, chartered boats and the countryside days where a driver waits while you eat.
Four things in Budapest that will not wait for you.
Most of this city can be booked from a café the morning of. These four run on fixed calendars, capped rooms and one departure a day — decide on them before you fly and the rest of the trip stays loose.
- 01Parliament Building Entry Ticket and Audio GuideThe interior is guided and timed. English slots are released in blocks and go days ahead in season; there is no walk-up queue worth joining.
- 02Sparty – The Ultimate Late-Night Spa Party TicketThe bath party at Széchenyi runs on Saturday nights only. It is capped at the door and sells out weeks out in summer.
- 03Classical Music Concerts in St Stephen’s BasilicaConcert nights are fixed dates in a working church, not a nightly programme. The good seats are the first to go.
- 04Full-Day Puszta Tour with Lunch and ShowThe horse shows keep the ranch’s timetable, not the city’s — one coach out on show days, and it fills.
Budapest keeps its hardest history in plain sight.
Two parts of the city’s twentieth century are told on foot, by guides who research them for a living. These are walks, not attractions, and they are listed here as such.
The Jewish Quarter
The streets behind Dohány Street were the wartime ghetto. The same blocks now hold the largest synagogue in Europe, the metal willow in the memorial garden behind it, and — a few minutes north along the embankment — sixty pairs of iron shoes left at the water’s edge. The walks are slow and they stop where they need to.
Jewish heritage walks in Budapest →
The Years Under the Party
Hungary spent four decades inside the Eastern Bloc and the evidence is still standing. Andrássy út 60 housed two secret police forces in turn and is now a museum. The statues taken down in 1989 were not destroyed; they were re-erected together in a field on the southern edge of the city. Guides here explain what the buildings were for.
Communist-era history walks →The bars are in the ruins, and that is not a figure of speech.
All night tours →District VII’s courtyard bars grew inside condemned tenements — mismatched furniture, a Trabant in the yard, four floors of rooms that were flats. Szimpla started it and the neighbourhood followed. Guided crawls exist because the good ones are unmarked doors.
Guided Tour to Ruin Bars with Games and 6 Shots
Read our review →Budapest is better in the cold, and it is the only capital where that is true of the outdoor pools.
The outdoor thermal pools at Széchenyi stay at 38°C through January — steam, snow on the parapets, chess boards still going. Everything else worth doing here in winter is indoors and cheap: a cellar wine tasting, a paprika-and-pastry walk, an organ concert, a kitchen with a chimney-cake iron in it.
Hungary starts about forty minutes past the last tram stop.
Day trips from Budapest, roughly in order of how far you have to go. Every one of them is back in the city for dinner.
Etyek
Gödöllő
The Great Plain
Lake Balaton
Eger
TokajThe big lists, by size
Danube River Cruises91 tours
Walking Tours140 tours
Buda Castle Tours55 tours
Segway Tours35 tours
Thermal Baths & Spas29 tours
Budapest Food Tours40 tours
Danube Bend Day Trips47 tours- Every review on the site →
The newest Budapest reviews.
All recent →
Vacation Photographer to collect great memories
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Walk to recent and aged spiritual sanctuaries near Budapest
Read our review →
Guided Tour of the Parliament Building in Spanish
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The only Wine Cocktail Club in Tokaj, Lunch & Fun, Hungary
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True Crime Walking Tour in the Buda Castle district
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Lake Balaton Tihany & Tapolca Cave Lake trip by Private Transport
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