Szemlő-hegyi Cave — Attraction in Budapest

I had such a terrible horrible experience here and just wasted 3 hours of my day.

It took me 1 hour to get here today and I was really looking forward to the cave tour. I even went on a weekday in the morning because I know weekends can get very crowded.

First of all, the tour was delayed because we were waiting on a big group. 15 minutes after the tour was scheduled to begin, the big group of about 30 people finally arrived and they were loud, were playing music, and some of the people in the group were even drunk! I talked to the tour guide about this and he was aware that people in the group were drunk but he still allowed them to go on the tour. I was shocked because many children go on this tour and this is unacceptable. Either way, this is extremely disrespectful behavior and the tour guides let it happen.

Throughout the tour, I could not hear the tour guide because the group was so loud. I even tried to stand next to the tour guide but had trouble hearing because of the group. And when I tried to go to the front multiple times, the group was pushing and shoving to get to the front too so I got really tired of trying to make my way to the front every time we moved to the next room.

I‘ve wasted my time and money here and am disappointed because I could have gone to the Labyrinth or anywhere else to spend my time and money.

When I talked to the staff about this, they blamed the group and said there was nothing they could do. The staff did not do anything and did not take ownership or responsibility. However, I told the company that they could have done a better job at organizing the groups but instead they allowed 50 people go in at once and the drunk tourists too. It ruined the experience because the cave is not that big so overall, you are stuck with a large group of a bunch of Loud drunk tourists who are taking selfies the entire time.

I had a terrible time here and am so frustrated that the tour guides would not do anything to make my experience here better even though I asked politely. I am not one to complain but I had such a bad time here and I would highly NOT recommend anyone to come here.

Edited 6.24.19

I do accept your apology because I am not one to hold grudges. However, I am respectfully replying so that everyone who plans to visit this place is aware of the culture and attitude of the staff.

You stated that a "good amount of time" was spent trying to calm down this group. This means you are admitting that you are in fact wasting everyone's time by babysitting this group by spending a good amount of time "trying to calm them down". This was very disruptive. You stated you didn't have a right to send anyone away, HOWEVER you did admit that you were aware several people in this specific group were drunk from alcohol. But you decided not to do anything about this, while you were aware people were inebriated. Unacceptable. Your "loud voice" is subjective and I am saying I had a hard time hearing. Are you saying I am lying? I asked for any type of reimbursement because I felt the service did not meet what was promised. Transportation was one of the many options I suggested for any kind of reimbursement because your company could not think to offer anything and so that was one of the things I kindly asked for. Transportation was suggested because I spent 2+ hours as a tourist coming from the outskirts of the city through walking and public buses.

Lastly, I do think it is sad that your company cannot do a better job of organizing groups and vetting the type of people who come in. Whether they are drunk, on drugs, disruptive to other people on the tour, etc. I hope you think about this and actually try to understand what a negative experience I had...

Sadly the tourist experience in this cave has deteriorated over the years. They used to have English tours before and now they have a messed up system of audio guides. This has to be improved a lot to become useful for visitors. Staff seems to not be aware of existence of their audio guides. The waypoint numbers along the route are placed in dark spots and way too far ahead of where it would be expected to start the relevant chapter. And there is a big toddler problem with visitors, but I guess it is not up to the property. Tons of young parents bringing up babies inside... Those toddlers are way more interested in exploring their own vocal abilities than the cave. Why do you do that? The tour years ago started with a projection of a nice short speleo movie. The projection room is still there, but there was no movie today. Overall, this review went down from 5 to 2 stars over the last few years. I give them a credit for the nice interactive museum at...

I had a combi-ticket for this cave and the Pál-völgyi Cave. I first saw the other cave, where I also left a review. The guide there told us at which number we were. We had a much bigger group of people in the other cave.

Here we had a small group, which was not in our benefit. The woman who guided the tour talked fast and did not tell us at which number we were. Actually, she did not say a word to us. So, when we entered the cave and she started talking, we were already at number 2... The tour therefore was not the best and very fast. We needed to skip some numbers, and by the time we finished our fourth number, the group was out of sight. Exactly at that point where there was a split. The duration for us in the cave was only 25 minutes.

I would have liked it better if we could have finished all the audio guidances. Then we could also have enjoyed the sight of the cave more (and then the duration in the cave would...