[ GUIDE · THE DISPATCH ]

Getting Around Prague: Trams, the Funicular, and the Metro You'll Barely Need

Getting around Prague is almost too easy once you understand the time-based tickets and the validation trap. Ride Tram 22 like a local, ignore the metro mostly, and never pay for a taxi from the airport.

Planning the trip? Start with the perfect 3-day Prague itinerary — it lays out exactly where to go, and when.

Getting around Prague is one of those rare travel things that’s easier than you expect, not harder — provided you understand two quirks up front. One is how the tickets work (they’re timed, not per-ride). The other is the validation trap, which catches out roughly every first-timer including, embarrassingly, me. Let’s fix both before you set foot on a tram.

Prague’s public transport runs on time-based tickets. You don’t buy “a ride.” You buy a window of time — typically 30 minutes or 90 minutes — and within that window you can ride trams, the metro, and buses as much as you like, transfers and all. There are also 24-hour and 72-hour passes, which are the move if you’re sightseeing hard for a few days.

Buy them from the yellow machines at metro stations and major tram stops, or — much easier — through the PID Lítačka app on your phone, where the ticket activates digitally. I used the app the whole trip and never touched a machine after day one.

Now the trap. If you buy a paper ticket, it does nothing until you validate it. You stick it into the little yellow validator box on the tram or at the metro entrance, it stamps a time on it, and the clock starts. Skip that step and your ticket is worthless — and plainclothes inspectors do check, and the on-the-spot fine is steep and humiliating and they take cards now so you can’t even plead empty pockets. Validate the second you board. Make it a reflex.

Here’s my opinion, and I’ll die on this hill: in Prague, the trams beat the metro for almost everything a visitor wants to do. The metro is fast and clean and goes deep underground — which is exactly the problem, because Prague is gorgeous and you want to be looking at it, not at a tunnel wall.

The trams thread through the actual city, over the river, past the buildings you came to see. And the king of them is Tram 22.

Tram 22 is a genuine sightseeing tour disguised as public transport. It climbs up toward the castle district (Hradčany), rumbles through Malá Strana, and gives you castle views and old-town rooftops for the price of a normal ticket. Get on, grab a window, ride it up to the Pražský hrad stop for the castle, or just ride it for the views and double back. I did it twice. Once on purpose, once because I got on going the wrong way and decided I didn’t mind.

Trams run all night too — the night trams (numbers in the 90s) take over after the regular service stops, so a late dinner doesn’t strand you.

Small treat: there’s a funicular railway up Petřín hill, on the Malá Strana side, and it runs on the same transport tickets. So your tram pass covers it. You ride up, you’re at the Petřín lookout tower (a sort of mini Eiffel), and the views over the whole city are the best cheap panorama in Prague. The funicular shuts for maintenance sometimes, so check before you trek over, but when it’s running it’s a daft little joy and it costs you nothing extra.

Here’s the thing that surprises people: Prague’s airport has no rail link. None. Which sounds like a hassle and absolutely is not, because Bus 119 exists.

Bus 119 runs from the airport to Nádraží Veleslavín, which is a metro station on Line A (the green one). You buy the standard transport ticket — get the 90-minute one because you’ll be transferring — validate it (or use the app), ride the bus, then hop the metro straight into town. The whole thing costs about what a coffee and a pastry would, versus a taxi that’ll cheerfully charge you ten or fifteen times that.

If you’ve got big luggage, technically you’re meant to have a ticket for oversized bags too, a small extra one, but enforcement is light. Get it anyway; it’s pennies.

Avoid the taxi touts at arrivals. If you genuinely need a car — late flight, lots of luggage, small kids — book a ride through Bolt or Uber, both of which work fine in Prague and show you the price up front, instead of haggling with whoever’s hovering by the exit.

A couple of last things. Walking is half the joy here, so don’t over-engineer it — much of the old town and the castle area is best on foot, and the the river crossings on Charles Bridge can’t be beaten by any tram. Use transit to skip the boring or uphill bits, walk the rest. And keep your phone charged, because the whole tap-the-app-for-the-inspector system falls apart at 2% battery, ask me how I know.

You’ll have this city wired by the end of day one.

Get the app, validate if you go paper, ride Tram 22 up to the castle, and take Bus 119 from the airport — that’s getting around Prague, sorted.

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