Station calling – Visiting the Budapest Airport Hotel, your home away from home

Hotels serving airports tend to be either dreary or expensive or both and all too often they do not much care about their guests who are in transit and are unlikely to become regulars anyway. One can find good examples of how it can and should be done at the several hotels around Brussels airport and we have now found one that really excels 5 minutes from Budapest Ferihegy airport.
Welcome to the Airport Hotel Budapest.
Jump on their shuttle bus (which you can even pre-order to meet your flight) and you will be taken through an industrial park still being developed near the airport and passing by Hungarian low fare airline Wizzair’s headquarters, you arrive at the hotel after a ride of about five minutes.
The house opened in July 2008 and it looks brand new inside and out. The surroundings could do with a bit of landscaping but that will surely come. Inside you enter a pleasantly appointed, atrium-style lobby with the front desk facing the restaurant. Off to the left is a nice little cafeteria.
Even if you only stay for one night, the restaurant will play an important role in your sojourn. First of all, it is open 24 hours a day! No matter how late you arrive or how early you rise because of jet-lag, a tasty meal is available at all hours of the day and the night. How many big name hotels can boast this kind of service?


Having such a powerhouse of a restaurant also enables the hotel to offer catering for your events and the quality is excellent across the board.
While many houses will charge you extra for breakfast, at the Airport Hotel it is included in the room price! And not just any breakfast either, you get to enjoy a buffet in the best American style. If you prefer the lighter, continental kind of breakfast, you will not be disappointed either.
The rooms are comfortable in both size and arrangement, decorated in taste and equipped with all modern amenities you can think of. The only thing I missed was an alarm clock… Come to think of it, the nice flat panel TV did have a small LCD display that might double as an alarm clock but it was not visible in the dark and left me with this feeling of missing something. Why would I want to have an alarm clock? Well, not everyone has a watch on which you can select the time for any of the time zones and even your cell phone might not set itself to local time automatically. On many an occasion arriving in Seattle or some other far away place, tired and not up to setting watch and phone, I entrusted myself to the hotel alarm clock as the best means of making sure that I would not be late for my meeting next day. There are places that offer an automatic wake up service via the phone but for me the little red leds of the old style alarms hotels seem to frequent the world over are the only ones of value…

Of course a hotel is only as good as its people. In this respect the Airport Hotel Budapest is there at the top, right alongside the very best in the world. Checking in and checking out is an affair accompanied by a lot of friendly smiles and the waiters in the restaurant really go out of their way to make you feel appreciated and at home. And this is the same whether you walk in there at 12 noon or 12 midnight. Great show!

Conferences are the lifeblood of most hotels and the designers of Airport Hotel Budapest have obviously not forgotten this. The conference rooms have large French-windows allowing in plenty of light and this is really cool. I hate conference rooms tucked away in the basement from which you emerge at the end of the day blinded by the setting sun. There is air-conditioning but the doors can also be opened. May be not the best solution from an environmental point of view but boy did I love the fresh air we let in during the coffee breaks!

So why would you want to stay at the Airport Hotel Budapest rather then at one of the houses in downtown? The center of Budapest is about 20 minutes from the airport… if you are lucky. If not, it can be anything up to 45 minutes if you try to commute during the rush our. With the Airport Hotel Budapest being conveniently near the airport and offering everything a business traveler could possibly need, you can comfortably travel in the morning when your meeting starts and work late on the day it ends and never have to worry about being late for your meeting or missing your home-bound flight because of traffic jams.

All you have to do is have the meeting at the Airport Hotel Budapest and reserve your overnight accommodation also there. You will not regret it, guaranteed!
You can find their web site (available in NINE languages) here.

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