Last week we were travelling from Tiszafured to Hajduszoboszlo changing in Debrecen, which is a fairly large town with a reasonable service to and from both places. All went well until the ticket inspector on the second train said that we had an incorrect ticket which was actually routed via Karcag, a slightly shorter and therefore cheaper route and we would have to pay the excess (a matter of pence) plus what in the UK would have been a Penalty Fare for being off-route. Now this was technically true but hardly our fault - as the Tiszafured-Karcag train was a litle unit which only ran twice a day and the next one was in about six hours time, we assumed that the ticket office would have sold us a ticket via Debrecen, so we merely checked the destination not the "small print" - after all we were hardly likely to sit on a station platform for six hours to save 10p!
So a penalty fare it was, and we would I believe have had reasonable cause for formal complaint - except that the state-run MAV clearly haven't been eating from the same trough as the moneygrabbing TOCs in the UK - the penalty fare amounted to 500HUF each, about £1.30, the kind of figure classed as a "supplement" to use express trains in HUngary, so we let it be.
So a penalty fare it was, and we would I believe have had reasonable cause for formal complaint - except that the state-run MAV clearly haven't been eating from the same trough as the moneygrabbing TOCs in the UK - the penalty fare amounted to 500HUF each, about £1.30, the kind of figure classed as a "supplement" to use express trains in HUngary, so we let it be.
