Cities where you can get to cheaper by train than by plane from Budapest

Greenpeace conducted a survey, quite an interesting one at that. The NGO compared the plane and train prices of 112 European journeys. The result was that the price of travelling by train is four times higher than travelling by plane. However, there are exceptions, and many routes starting from Budapest are among those.

According to turizmus.com, in some cases, the difference can be up to 30 times, for example, between London and Barcelona. Train companies are unable to compete with plane tickets costing merely GBP 11. However, as the Independent pointed out, “swapping planes for trains could save more than 450,000 tones of harmful emissions.”

Anyway, only 23 of the analysed 112 routes were almost always cheaper by train than by plane, which is quite a low number. In six cases, there were no direct flights between the two cities. Interestingly, several train routes that are cheaper than their flight counterparts start from Budapest.

A nice train ride somewhere in Hungary:

Travel to Prague from Budapest by train: it is worth it

Among them is the Budapest-Prague journey (Ryanair), which was always cheaper by train in 2022. Despite that, more than 100,000 people travelled by plane between the two astonishing Central European capitals. In the case of the Budapest-Berlin train journey, out of the nine days analysed, train was cheaper on six days. Budapest-Bucharest was always cheaper by train. Interestingly, the Budapest-Paris, Budapest-Venice and Budapest-Brussels directions were 12 times more expensive by train than by plane. The Budapest-Brussels route showed the second highest price difference in the analysis, preceded only by the London-Barcelona, the London-Bratislava and Madrid-Brussels directions.

HERE you may check out Greenpeace’s report.

Read HERE about the luxury train rides from Budapest to Paris and London on the Orient Express. Meanwhile, HERE is a crossover article analysing how an Austrian train development project will make it easier for people to travel from Budapest to exotic destinations like the USA, Canada or the Far East.