Best of Eastern Europe: Budapest, Prague & Krakow

Days 1 to 4: Budapest

Fly into Budapest, a city split down the middle by the Danube into two distinct characters. Check in to your hotel on the Buda side, with views across the river toward Pest, and take your first evening to walk along the water as the Chain Bridge and the Hungarian Parliament light up after dark.

A private guide leads you through Buda’s Castle District the next day, with Fisherman’s Bastion giving the best view in the city back across the river, before crossing into Pest for Andrássy Avenue and the Parliament building itself.

An evening soak at one of Budapest’s thermal baths follows, a genuinely Hungarian tradition rather than a tourist add-on, and one of the more memorable ways to end a day anywhere in Europe.

Give the following day to the city’s ruin bars, converted courtyards and derelict buildings turned into some of Europe’s most distinctive nightlife, concentrated in the Jewish Quarter around Kazinczy Street. Worth knowing directly rather than glossing over, Hungary’s political climate has grown considerably more restrictive toward LGBTQ+ visibility in recent years, and while a real scene still exists here, it keeps a lower public profile than in Prague or further west.

Days 5 to 7: Prague

A direct seven-hour train carries you north into the Czech Republic. Check in to your hotel in the Old Town, with the evening free to walk the cobbled streets before the sightseeing begins in earnest.

Prague is one of the few major European capitals to have survived the twentieth century almost entirely untouched, and a private walking tour makes the most of it the next day, taking in Prague Castle, Charles Bridge, and the Astronomical Clock in the Old Town Square, still ticking through its fifteenth-century mechanism on the hour. In the evening, a river cruise along the Vltava puts the whole skyline on display, lit against the dark.

Spend the final day in Prague at your own pace. The city’s café culture rewards slow mornings, and Vinohrady, a short walk from the center, is worth knowing as home to Prague’s main LGBTQ+ scene, quieter and more residential than the tourist core but genuinely well established.

For something different, a day trip to Terezín, the former concentration camp an hour outside the city, adds a heavier, necessary counterpoint to an otherwise lighter few days.

Days 8 to 10: Krakow

Another direct seven-hour train carries you into southern Poland. Krakow was one of the only major Polish cities left largely undamaged by the war, and it shows the moment you arrive, a medieval old town that never had to be rebuilt from rubble the way Warsaw did.

Check in near the Main Square, Rynek Główny, one of the largest medieval town squares in Europe, and spend the evening among its cafes and the Cloth Hall at its center.

The next day divides between Wawel Castle, seat of Polish kings for centuries, and Kazimierz, the city’s historic Jewish quarter, now a district of galleries, bars, and synagogues that survived where so much else in the region didn’t.

In the afternoon, a guided visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, an hour and a half outside the city, is not an easy addition to a luxury itinerary, but it is very often the reason people say this trip mattered more than any other they’ve taken.

On your final day, it’s worth knowing that Poland’s own political climate has improved in recent years. The so-called LGBT-free zone declarations that drew international criticism through the early 2020s have all been repealed, the last one falling in 2025, and the current government has taken a markedly more moderate line than its predecessor.