Yesterday, I saw a person sharing a picture in a tweet on Twitter in which he showed a bill he received after paying in Budapest. The price for what he had bought was 3000 HUF, but if we would have paid in Euro, the price would have been 12,5 Euros. So, that might sound nice at first, but if you do some investigation (or if you know what the difference is supposed to be), you know that 12,5 Euros equals something like 5000 HUF.
This is a typical way for restaurants, cafes, and stores to get some extra income, by letting tourists pay way more than they should if they decide to pay with euros instead of the local currency, the Hungarian forint.
Of course, the restaurant can do as they like and since you are in Hungary, you should pay with Forints. But it still feels like robbing you in daylight with such big differences like in the example above. You might say that the restaurant later has to spend time walking to an exchange office in order to get some HUF, but still, most Hungarians would gladly walk to an exchange office in five minutes in order to earn those extra 2000 HUF. And if you have quite a lot of guests paying in euros, the difference will be much higher than just 2000 HUF.
Do you get it? So, even though you are allowed to pay with euros, it isn't necessarily a very smart thing to do, at least not in Budapest.
Do you have any similar experience that you can share from either Budapest, or other cities in Europe that still has a local currency and not the Euro?
Write a comment and let me hear from you!