What are Bitemojo food and walking tours?
First, a Bitemojo food tour is not a traditional experience where you book at a specific time or meet a group or a guide. Instead, it is an iPhone app with a growing list of cities around the world offering food and walking tours created by locals that are self-guided while using the app.
Isn’t that a cool vacation idea for a food and walking tour? To combine them into an app on your phone, to take the tour on your own schedule? It sounded like a new way for us to discover the Ruin Bar area of Budapest Hungary, along with trying local specialties for food and drink… so we decided to check out Bitemojo Budapest.
How does a Bitemojo food and walking tour work?
Install the Bitemojo app, select the tour you want, purchase the tour and it shows up in your app. It is self-paced, so when you start the app there is a window of time to get to your food and drink stops to claim the food (6-11 on our Bitemojo Night & The City Budapest Food & Walking Tour).
Your tour will include a combination of sights (walking tour) and bites (food tour), guided by a Google map with information windows. To start your tour, open the app to learn the starting point and go there. Our starting point on the Bitemojo Budapest tour was a sight (“discover” in the app) and the second stop was a bite (“claim offer” in the app). That’s it, very simple. Just continue following the route in the app and the sights. It feels kind of like a scavenger hunt guided by your phone. For stops including food, as you get near the location you will see a “claim offer” option that tells you what food or drink you get. Just go inside the bar or restaurant, find a seat and show the “claim” screen in the Bitemojo app to your server. That’s it.
Here’s a video from Bitemojo showing you how it works:
We tried the Bitemojo “Night & the City Budapest” tour and were glad that we did!
4 Reasons We Liked the Bitemojo Budapest Food Tour
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It was easy and we could do it on our own schedule, at our own pace.
We could start and stop whenever we wanted to, with an open window from 6-11pm to find and claim all of the bites in the tour. This meant that it was an easy walking tour of Budapest’s famous Ruin Bars, and we didn’t look like a pack of tourists (although, it seemed like 90% of the people in the Ruin Bar district were tourists). The app itself was easy to use and it allowed us to look like two people wandering around together for a night on the town.
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Where we went: Budapest Ruin Bars!
In researching things to do in Budapest, we came across multiple travel blogger posts on Ruin Bars in Budapest. What this all about? Surely we’d want to go there too? After arriving in Budapest and asking locals about Ruin Bars, we had the impression that it was just an expensive neighborhood for tourists to party, drink, and eat. We still wanted to go, we were tourists ourselves, right? Without the Bitemojo app, we probably would have walked down one street and visited one or two places. But with the Bitemojo app, we got to walk multiple areas, discover information about the buildings around us, and had included stops for food and drink. It was a good way to get an overview of the area.
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Something new… try a new type of tour to explore the city.
When we travel, we often join small group tours. You can learn so much about a place when you have a guide and small tours often allow mixing and mingling with other visitors. Although we’ve taken group walking tours and group food tours, we’d never done a self-paced tour in an app before. So, why not? Let’s give a try to see how it works and if we like it. End result? We liked it. It was our very first self-guided app tour, and we are likely to take more of these in the future.
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Trying local Hungarian food & drinks!
Through the app, we were able to try a fancy cocktail, delicous local Hungarian foods like langos, delicious local sausage, and a unique Hungarian schapps type drink called Palinka. There was also a wine stop on the tour that we were unable to finish (read at the bottom if you’re curious why).
4 Tastes of Hungary that we enjoyed that came with the “Night and the City” Budapest Bitemojo tour:
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Green Lantern : Fancy Cocktail with mango foam!
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Langos : Tasty Hungarian street food!
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Hungarian sausage and beer: You can’t go wrong that combination!
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Palinka: Tasty! Probably would not have discovered this without the tour app.
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Disclaimer: While Bitemojo Budapest allowed us to try out a tour for free, all thoughts opinions and recommendations in this review post are our own. We really did enjoy the Bitemojo tour and are glad that we tried it. At each stop, we tried the food item on the menu plus ordered additional items.
Is there a downside of using a self-guided app tour? Yes – Wifi.
If there is any downside to using the Bitemojo app is that it requires active wifi or cellular to power up and more importantly, to redeem the bites. We did not have local cellular service and instead had a rented HipPocket travel wifi, plus had a fully charged phone and phone battery case. Because we wandered in the Ruin Bar area and stayed longer in some places to enjoy additional food and drink, this drained the HipPocket wifi completely (our phone was fine) but without wi-fi to power the app at time to redeem the bite, it was not useable for the last stop on the tour which was a glass of wine at a jazz bar.
Advice for next time: If I take Bitemojo tour again, or any other self-guided tour knowing what I know now, I would turn off the wifi device during the times we were at the bars and restaurants enjoying bites. Why? Embarrasingly, our wifi died after we found out last destination, but before the “claim” screen was activated. The hostess at the restaurant was not familiar with the Bitemojo app and looked as us suspiciously when we showed it and suggested that we should just buy a glass of wine and she’d be happy to put our name on the list for seating. Feeling embarrassed (both from letting our wifi die and from being made to feel like we were tyring to cheat them in front of other guests) we ended up not staying at the last bar which was a jazz club wine bar.
SILVER LINING: We were pleasantly surprised to discover that the Bitemojo app knew that we did not get to claim that last bite/glass of wine and credited out account with a free bite. Isn’t that fantastic? Thank you Bitemojo – great customer service!
Interested in trying the Bitemojo app for your iPad, iPhone, iPod or Android device? You can download Bitemojo on Onelink here.
OTHER GREAT DAY TOURS & THINGS TO DO IN BUDAPEST