Can I use cards on buses and public transport in Slovakia?

I stayed near Bratislava Castle and used trams daily down to the main station. Every stop had a yellow ticket machine, and my Revolut Visa card worked perfectly to buy a €1.10 ride. Once I forgot to validate the ticket on board and got fined €50, so be careful! In Košice, I bought tickets at a kiosk near Hlavná Street - the machine accepted cash and cards. Honestly, card payments made life easy, and I never needed coins except once when a machine was offline.

I expected to just tap my card on buses like in London, but nope - Slovakia isn’t there yet. You still need to buy a paper ticket and stamp it inside. The machine at the bus station in Bratislava took my Mastercard, but one at a random tram stop didn’t. I missed a tram once because I didn’t have enough coins. After that, I just kept €5-10 in coins in my bag at all times. Definitely not a place to rely entirely on cards for local transport.

Bratislava’s transport isn’t fully contactless yet. You need to buy a physical ticket, either from the vending machines (some do take card) or from a nearby tabak shop. There’s also a mobile app where locals buy tickets using Slovak mobile payments, but that didn’t work with my foreign card. For tourists, the easiest thing is to get a daily or 72-hour pass and pay for it at a machine in the station using card if it works, or cash as backup.

I used public transport across Bratislava and Košice, and yeah, most of it still runs on a cash-based or prepaid ticket system. There’s no contactless credit card reader on the vehicles. I bought my tickets from machines or convenience stores. A few kiosks took card, but others were coin-only. Long-distance buses between cities always wanted cash at boarding if you hadn’t booked online. Bring small change - it’ll save you a lot of hassle.

In Bratislava, buses and trams use a paper ticket system - you can buy tickets at yellow machines near stops or kiosks. Some machines take cards, but a lot only accept coins. Once you have a ticket, you validate it onboard. There’s no tap-and-go like in some other countries. I kept a stash of €1 and €2 coins on me for this. If you're using buses outside the capital, it's usually cash paid to the driver.