Budapest sticks to the world-famous Hungarian ticket inspectors

The capital city of Hungary has been acknowledged by many in the past couple of years as one of the world’s most beautiful cities, but there are a few blemishes that make this general image at least a little nuanced. Like the human ticket-inspecting in the public transport system, which is smiled at by many world travellers, because electronic ticket inspection has been introduced in Paris, London and other popular destinations more than a decade ago.

Travel sites recommend the ticket inspectors of Budapest almost as if they were special curiosities, who sometimes stand at the entrance of metro stations in freezing cold weather and sleazy clothes. They are still the ones who inspect tickets and seasonal tickets in 2017. This method is quite uneconomic, functions with a lot of errors and it puts Budapest dwellers and tourists in funny or frustrating situations quite often. Due to the bad labour conditions and low salary, anyone can become a ticket inspector, which also means that many inspectors have low qualification or are of high age, so they don’t speak foreign languages. This results in interesting situations in a city full of tourists.

Even movies have been made about this. The situation is best depicted in Kontroll, a Hungarian movie that has been screened in several foreign countries so that the audience can get to know this “special atmosphere”.