Budapest reopens: what the city felt like in summer 2021

The cautious return

Budapest reopened to most international visitors in late May 2021, which meant that by June the question was not whether you could go but whether you should, and whether the city would be recognisable when you got there.

We went in the second week of June. Three nights, which felt modest given the previous eighteen months of restricted movement, but also felt like enough to assess the situation without over-committing to a city that was still finding its operational footing.

The short answer: Budapest was open, functional, and genuinely pleased to see visitors, in a slightly raw way that has nothing performative about it. The restaurant owners who had survived on takeaway and government support for fourteen months were not tired of tourists. They were tired, full stop, but not of tourists.

What was different at the airport and on arrival

The bus 100E from BUD airport was running on its normal schedule. The driver was masked; we were masked; the handful of other passengers were masked. This was uniform and uncomplicated in a way that felt efficient rather than fraught — Hungary had a reasonably clear health infrastructure at the border by this point and the admin on arrival was lighter than expected.

The city centre felt immediately like a lower-density version of itself. Andrássy út had pedestrians, but not the density of summer crowds. The Chain Bridge — which in 2019 we had crossed in a slow-moving procession of tourists — was walkable at normal pace. The ruin bar district had people on the streets but the enormous bar-crawl groups that normally saturate it on summer weekends were absent or reduced.

This was the defining quality of Budapest in June 2021: the architecture, the light, the logistics, the food — all fully present. The volume of people — specifically the volume of international tourists — was at maybe 40-50% of a normal summer. The result was a city that felt unusually accessible.

The food scene, reconstructed

The restaurant situation was complicated in ways we had not anticipated. Some of our previous favourites had closed permanently. Others had pivoted to takeaway and not quite pivoted back. A few had done something more interesting — used the shutdown to renovate, reconsider, or in one case relocate to a better space.

The best restaurants guide reflects the current landscape, which by mid-2021 was in genuine transition. What we can say about that specific June: the places that had survived were, on the whole, the places with substance behind them. The tourist-trap restaurants on Váci utca that relied on foot traffic from visitors who would not return — some had simply not reopened. The places that fed regulars, that had something beyond location going for them, were open and in some cases more focused than before.

We ate extremely well that trip. The prices had not changed meaningfully — central Budapest dining remained roughly €12–20 per person for a main course at a mid-range restaurant, beer around 900–1,200 HUF — and the quality, freed from the need to feed enormous volumes at tourist-season pace, was noticeably higher in several places.

The ruin bar question

District VII in June 2021 was operating, but not at full strength. Szimpla Kert was open — we went on a Tuesday and a Friday — and both evenings were enjoyable, less crowded than any previous visit in summer, with a clientele that felt predominantly local-and-expat rather than tourist-majority.

Several of the larger venues that depend specifically on pub crawl traffic and organised group events had not yet restarted their full programming. The pub crawl industry was running at reduced capacity — some operators had not resumed; others were running abbreviated formats.

For the independent visitor, this was unambiguously good. The ruin bars in June 2021 were more interesting than they had been in August 2019. Whether that relationship inverted as tourist numbers recovered is something subsequent visitors can assess. The nightlife guide tracks what is currently operating.

Széchenyi: the baths as bellwether

The thermal baths were open, capacity-limited, and functioning as a more intimate experience than usual. We booked our Széchenyi day tickets online (essential — the advance booking system was being used to manage the reduced entry numbers), arrived at opening, and had the outdoor pools at roughly thirty percent of their normal occupancy.

This is worth describing. The outdoor pools at Széchenyi on a full summer day can hold several hundred people, which is fine but not tranquil. At thirty percent, you could genuinely stretch out. You could hear the water. The chess players were there; the summer tourists were not yet. It was the best Széchenyi experience we have had.

By July, we were told, the baths had filled again — the domestic Hungarian tourist market and the first wave of international returnees were enough to bring numbers back to significant levels. But that window in early June was a genuine gift.

The thermal bath comparison guide covers the full options. In summer 2021, our recommendation would have been any of the major baths — all were operating and less crowded than usual, including Rudas and Lukács.

The day trips: quieter than they should have been

We took the HÉV to Szentendre on the second day. The train was nearly empty. The town, which in June 2019 had been comfortably busy by mid-morning, was operating at a fraction of its usual capacity. The restaurants on the main street had outdoor seating, staff, and menus, but many of the tables were unoccupied at lunchtime.

This had a quality of sadness about it, honestly. Szentendre’s tourism-adjacent economy — the wine cellars, the galleries, the museums, the restaurants — is calibrated for a normal summer. June 2021 was not a normal summer. Several of the galleries were running reduced hours. The Marzipan Museum was closed. The wine cellar was open and delightful, as it reliably is, and we spent more time there than planned partly because it was good and partly because we felt an obscure loyalty to a place that had endured a very difficult year.

The Szentendre day trip guide and the Danube Bend page have the current logistics. By 2022 and certainly by 2023, the town had recovered its normal summer character.

The airport and transport back to normal

By June 2021, the airport (BUD, Liszt Ferenc) was operating with full departures and arrivals but with border procedures that took longer than pre-pandemic. The bus 100E was running on its regular route and schedule. The metro network — all four lines — was operating, with the gap-hour closure extended during the lowest-demand period of the pandemic having been restored to normal hours.

The Bolt app, which we have used without incident on every Budapest visit, was fully operational. The city’s organised taxi scams (unlicensed drivers at Keleti railway station, at the airport, in the tourist districts) were quieter than usual for obvious reasons — there were fewer arrivals to target — but the advice remains the same: use Bolt, not any taxi that approaches you.

What summer 2021 demonstrated

The summer of 2021 made a case that Budapest is an excellent destination in conditions of low tourist density, and also made a case that low tourist density has costs for the people and businesses that depend on normal volumes.

Both things are true. The visitor who went in June 2021 had an unusually good experience — uncrowded baths, accessible ruin bars, restaurants with time to think about your order. The city’s workers and business owners were in a more complicated situation. The thermal bath operators who had been running at capacity in summer 2019 — thousands of visitors a day — were at a fraction of that in June 2021. The dinner cruise operators on the Danube were running half-empty boats.

The experience is not replicable now, and it would not be desirable for it to be — the city functions best as a city, not as a case study in reduced-occupancy tourism. But the memory of it is useful as a template: the parts of Budapest that were most valuable in that reduced state are the parts that are most valuable whenever the crowds are slightly thinner.

The baths at 9 am on a weekday. The ruin bars on a Tuesday. The Christmas markets in the first week of December before the school holidays begin. The Danube embankment at 7 am when the cruise boats are still docked.

Go in May. Go in October. Go on a Tuesday rather than a Saturday. The best time to visit guide makes this case with data. The version we experienced in June 2021 just made it viscerally, in a way that is harder to forget.

The practical takeaway: the Budapest that is available at quieter times — the shoulder season guide covers spring specifically — is not a diminished version of the peak-season city. It is often a better version. Planning around that fact, rather than following the calendar of everyone else, is the most reliable way to have the kind of experience that makes you want to go back.