Schengen member from 2023: No more customs clearance and border controls in Croatia
Andreas Fritsch
· 09.12.2022
Reason for joy for crews travelling to Croatia by car or sailing over from Italy or Slovenia by yacht. Even better: owners and charter crews no longer have to clear in and out when crossing the sea border in Croatia, Italy or Slovenia. Until now, this was still necessary and extremely inconvenient for crews who have their permanent berth in Slovenia or northern Italy, for example.
It was even worse when skippers simply ignored this, as was quite common for a few years; if you were caught by the coastguard via radar plotting, the resulting trouble and fine was considerable. In the past, a Port of Entry always had to be called at in order to change borders correctly and the administrative procedures took up a lot of time and also cost nerves due to the limited opening hours of some offices. But now the upper Adriatic is finally the "borderless" or more precisely "bureaucracy-free" area that many have been dreaming of for a long time, and that it has been between Italy and Slovenia for years.
The euro is also coming in 2023
At the same time as joining the Schengen area, Croatia is now also introducing the euro as a means of payment, making the kuna a thing of the past. From 1 January, crews will be able to pay with euros everywhere. The kuna will only be an officially accepted means of payment until 14 January. Anyone who still has large amounts of the currency at home from their last cruise will then have to exchange it (official exchange rate1 Euro = 7.53450 Kuna). You can either do this in Germany via commercial banks for a fee and daily exchange rate, or you can go to one of the Bundesbank branches in your own federal state by 28 February ( Click here for the branch overview ), where currency can be exchanged free of charge and at a fixed rate, up to a maximum of 8,000 kuna per person. In Croatia, you can exchange money at banks, post offices or the Croatian Finance Agency until 31 December 2023. After that, this will only be possible at the Croatian Central Bank.
