Public Transportation within the cities: First let me say that being in your mid 60’s and researching/planning all of the travel, making reservations for everything yourself, and the learning curve with all of the various forms of transportation for the first time in foreign countries was intimidating and frustrating at times. We had been to Italy once 11 years ago and we didn’t have to plan anything because we were hosted by a family who lived in Italy and it was a wonderful tour through my husband’s work. So… this trip was quite different with a lot of learning curves. But we figured it out! You can only prepare to a certain extent, then you just have to do it! I could not have prepared much more than I did, and I enjoyed that process but I was still apprehensive about the new experiences we would have, mainly the transportation.
We did use the bus, tram, and subway in Budapest and thought it was great and pretty easy to use. We always got a daily or several day pass everywhere we went except Salzburg, so we could validate once and never have to worry about buying anything else while in that city. In all of the cities, we never ONCE were asked to show anything! But I would never expect to ride free and there were plenty of warnings on forums about this. I was just grateful that there are such great and inexpensive transportation systems in these cities and happy to support them!
I am a little embarrassed to admit this but we had a heck of a time figuring out some of the trams and subways in Vienna. We got on the wrong tram a couple of times trying to do the Ringstrasse. We didn’t realize that there were other trams in that same area and we were not paying enough attention to the tram numbers. We ended up getting farther and farther out of the city center as we realized that we were not seeing what we were supposed to see. We finally just got off, having no idea where we were, found a subway, and took it back to where we wanted to go, which was at that point, our hotel in order to regroup! But once again, we did figure it out and realized that we shouldn’t get nervous or frustrated if we make a mistake, you can always find a subway and get back to where you want to be. Thank you google maps!
When we got to Munich, the system was slightly different because we ended up using all the S-Bahns instead of U-Bahns for our purposes. And we took the S-Bahn right to the Munich airport, about a 35 minute trip once you get on the train. The Munich airport was very nice by the way, it even had a biergarten, grocery store, and pastry/coffee stand before you entered the building. The inside was very nice with plenty of options.
Taxis: We only used taxis twice, once from the Budapest airport to our hotel and then from our hotel to Keleti station to catch our train from Budapest to Vienna. Thank you James, on the Budapest forums for all of the tips, it worked great!