Day 72 - Budapest to Sofia, Bulgaria

We had to drop the hire car off at the airport by 9.30am but our flight wasn't until 1.40pm so we had lots of time to kill. The departure gate area was chaotic with people so we found a quiet coffee shop until our check in was open three hours before. When we joined the snaking queue we realised we should have lined up when we arrived and not been sitting in a cafe. We spent an hour in the queue fighting off late comers who seemed to think they could push in in front of us.

We finally reached the check in desk after letting people on early flights go ahead of us only to be told that we hadn't checked in. That's what we thought the check in desk was for, we were told we had to go to another counter to check in and that we also had to pay to check in! By the look of the angry and crying faces at the counter in front of us we weren't the only confused ones and it also looked like it was going to be expensive.

When we finally made it to the Wizz Air check in desk we were told we had to pay an extra €45 each (AUD$150 total) as we hadn't checked in online and it was now too late to do so. M showed the only email we had received that explicitly said that we did not have to contact the airline before our flight and we had not received any emails about checking in online. We were told it was in the T&C's and it was our fault we had not read all the T&C pages. Eventually we were rudely shown the T&C's and in the many pages there was a single (already) highlighted paragraph explaining the charge. We were then asked to move aside as we were holding up other passengers! Of course if we wanted to fly we had to pay, so we did. A New Zealand man behind us was charged €45 extra to purchase his ticket though an agency and then another €75 because he had purchased 10kg of luggage but had 17kg. Lesson learned ... we will never fly Wizz Air (what kind of a name is that anyway?) ever again!

We went back into the check-in desk to start the process again. Things didn't improve much on the other side, even though Budapest airport is large there aren't any toilets past the main area, none near the gates and quite incredibly, none after you pass through customs.

Things seemed to be looking up when we found that because we had purchased luggage we had priority check in but this too turned out to be a furphy, what it meant was that we were loaded onto the standing room only non air conditioned bus first. The plane was also a worry as it was old and the seats were so small that people with long legs were sticking their knees into the people's backs in front of them.

Other than that the flight was fine, apart from the continual flogging of in flight purchases, did they really think they were going to get more money out of us?

The taxi situation in Sofia airport was very strange, we joined a queue to book with a woman at a window office and she then proceeded to make a large amount of phone calls for the next 15 minutes, it seemed she was just phoning everyone she knew to see who could take this queue of tourists into the city. We were finally told we had a taxi and sure enough there was one waiting out the front for us, we're not sure how the others behind us got on, hopefully they made it into taxis as well.

After checking in to our nice Airbnb we walked into the city to find somewhere to eat, interestingly we passed a vegan restaurant with the same name and storefront as as one down the street from where we live, not what we'd expect in Sofia, Bulgaria!