Paying your road tolls by smartphone!

There are many ways to pay the road toll; different ones apply in each county. In Switzerland you buy an annual sticker and put it on the windscreen, while in Italy, France and Croatia you pay at the toll-gates
on the highways. In Austria you can buy a sticker for short or long term too. Hungary, where the toll used to be collected via a toll-gate system in the 1990s, today uses one of the most modern systems, allowing quick and comfortable payment 24 hours a day, basically at any point of the country.

Since January 2015 a toll has to be paid not only on highways but on numerous express roads and other key routes, so you need to pay special attention while planning your route, whether tolls apply on the roads you are willing to use. Although we are used to asking for “stickers” at the petrol stations, we don’t actually stick anything on our windscreens, since these stickers are e-stickers.
Besides the 10-day, one-month and annual sticker you can also buy a so-called country sticker for HUF 5000 per year per passenger car. If we are only using the roads on a certain part of the country regularly, then it’s worth to buy the e-sticker only for these counties.
However, you do not need to stop at a petrol station in order to pay the road toll, since you can do it via the internet, or even by texting, using your smartphone. On the website autopalyamatrica.hu you can use all the major bankcards to pay for the charges.
In case you decide to text the code of the e-sticker you are willing to purchase (Telekom subscribers for example can use the 30 8100 1000 regular fee number), you can immediately use the road sections with toll after receiving the confirmation message. Pay attention, however, only to drive on the road once the toll has been paid because the system will not accept subsequent payments.
You can buy a highway sticker via texting for a car licensed abroad as well. In this case, however, you have to include the car’s country mark as well. If for example you are driving a car licensed in Austria and your licence plate number is W 12345 T, your text will have to include the following code: w12345t a
Although you can’t use a foreign mobile phone to buy an e-sticker via texting, the internet purchase is available from any network, so you will be able to handle the tolls from your smartphone even if you have a foreign subscription.

This series is aimed at making your stay in Hungary as comfortable as possible and it is brought to you by Magyar Telekom Zrt., the country’s biggest mobile services provider.

©budapesttimes