Václav Havel Airport Prague to Old Town (Staré Město)

There is a moment, somewhere on the road in from the airport, when Prague stops being a name on a boarding pass and becomes a promise. You are seventeen kilometres out, perhaps thirty minutes from the first cobblestone, and already the city is rehearsing its overture in your imagination: the Astronomical Clock preparing to strike, the crowds gathering beneath it, the spires of Staré Město leaning together like conspirators. The Old Town is where almost every visitor begins, and rightly so. The only question is how you want to arrive at it — whether you drift in slowly on rails of copper wire, or glide door-to-door with your face pressed to the glass.

The wire and the tunnel: arriving like a local

Prague guards one small secret that catches out the unprepared romantic: there is no train, and no metro line, that reaches the airport itself. What there is instead is something quieter and, to my mind, more charming — the trolleybus 59, an electric creature that hums along on overhead wires and, not long ago, took over the route once worked by the old bus 119. You catch it at the stops just outside Terminals 1 and 2, on the arrivals level, and it carries you in roughly sixteen minutes to Nádraží Veleslavín, where metro line A waits underground.

Here is the part that delights the thrifty traveller: a single 90-minute DPP ticket, about €2, covers the whole journey — trolleybus and metro together, no second fare, no fumbling for change beneath the city. Trolleybuses come every five to ten minutes or so, frequent enough that you rarely wait. Ride line A east and alight at Staroměstská; climb the stairs and the Old Town unfolds around you, the Vltava close enough to smell. For two euros, that is the most romantic bargain in Central Europe.

A fixed fare and a face at the window

Some arrivals want none of the ballet of platforms and transfers — they want a seat, a screen, and the city sliding past. Prague's sanctioned option is the airport's own Uber and Bolt service, hailed from the marked app pickup points outside Terminals 1 and 2. The fare, roughly €22–34, is fixed in the app before you ever climb in, which spares you the ancient traveller's anxiety of the meter. It runs around the clock and delivers you door-to-door in about thirty minutes, though I will be honest: rush hour thickens the traffic and the price with it. Time your arrival for the soft edges of the day and you may find yourself crossing into the centre as the light turns golden on the rooftops.

Met in the arrivals hall

There is a particular tenderness to being expected. Book a private transfer — through operators such as Prague Airport Transfers or Welcome Pickups — and a real driver stands waiting in the arrivals hall to take your cases, the price already agreed in advance at around €25–35. For couples with heavy cases, or a small group arriving together, this is the gentlest way into a city whose loveliest streets are pedestrian lanes where taxis cannot follow. You are met, you are lifted, you are carried to the threshold of the Old Town without ever once consulting a map. It is, frankly, the way to arrive if the trip is a celebration.

Wheels of your own, and a word of caution

And then there are those who dream beyond the city walls — of Kutná Hora, of Bohemian castles, of roads that unspool into the countryside. For them the airport's car-hire desks in Terminals 1 and 2 (Sixt, Hertz, Avis, Europcar) beckon, from about €30–55 a day. But let me temper the romance with a truth: central Prague is no place for a car. The Old Town is a warren of paid zones and pedestrian-only lanes, and parking is scarce and dear. Hire a car for the journeys beyond Prague, not within it — collect the keys on the day you leave the centre behind, not the day you arrive.

However you come — humming in on the wire for two euros, or borne to the door in half an hour — the Old Town will be waiting exactly as it has for six centuries. Let Charles Bridge be your first walk at dawn, before the crowds, when the statues keep their own counsel and the river breathes mist. You will forget entirely how you got there. That is rather the point.