Thinking about going to Poland this year? We’ve got some practical advice for you!

Part I: Planning your trip

Summertime is coming and if you are planning to visit Poland this year, it might be high time to start thinking about your trip.

As a US citizen you do not need a special visa to travel to Poland. All you need is your valid American passport and some money, of course!

Speaking of money: although a member of the European Union since 2004, Poland still uses its own currency, the Polish Złoty (PLN). Some stores in major cities will also accept the European currency, the Euro. It is not known yet when Poland will become a member of the “Euro Zone” and switch to the Euro.

Major credit cards are widely accepted in Poland. Before travelling, we recommend that you check with your credit card company if they require a travel notification. If they do, you will need to inform them where and when you will travel, so they do not block your cards. Some credit card companies do not have such a requirement anymore.

(More about money in the next installment of our guide.)

1. Easy option: organized group tours

The easiest option to visit Poland is to join an organized tour. This might be a good option for someone who – for instance – never travelled to Poland before, does not know the language and feels somewhat apprehensive about it, and/or wants to pretty much “hit” the major attractions. Or for someone, who just does not want to be bothered with making the necessary arrangements.

Popular tours advertised in our area are organized by the Lira Ensemble of Chicago. You can check here if this offer fits your needs: https://liraensemble.org/lira-tour-of-poland/southern-tour/

Some local churches also organize tours. One such trip is by Father Walter Ptak of Our Lady of Sorrows Church in Farmington Hills. If you opt for a church organized tour, then most likely more religious places will be on the itinerary. However, if you go to Poland for the first time, many of the attractions you would like to see would relate to Catholicism anyway, as the traditional Polish culture is strongly rooted in religion.

2. Plan your own tour

You may, however, decide to come up with your own itinerary and organize the trip yourself. Especially, if you wish to visit places connected with your personal family history (strongly recommended!), which might be located “off the beaten track”, as ancestral villages of Polish Americans often are.

A lot of preparations – and that’s what we recommend doing – you can easily accomplish over the Internet, before you set foot in Poland.

This includes booking hotels, or Airbnb, buying train tickets for traveling within Poland, getting tickets to such popular museums as the Wieliczka Salt Mine, Wawel Castle in Kraków, Auschwitz Birkenau, Wilanów in Warsaw, renting a car and many more.

If needed, you could even call a hotel or car rental place in Poland and talk to them using for instance “Skype to phone application”, which is very inexpensive, or WhatsApp which is free.

Which brings us to the question of language

Nowadays many people in Poland, especially younger ones, speak English. They might feel a little shy at first, but they usually like to help if they can. For people working in the “hospitality industry” knowing English is a must. In addition, there are phone applications which allow for translation of voice and texts.

Traveling to Poland

If you want to take a direct flight to Poland (to Warsaw or Kraków) from Detroit, without any stopovers, you will have to drive to Chicago or Toronto first. Such flights, offered by the Polish airlines LOT, also depart from other American cities (New York, Miami, Los Angeles, but not Detroit).

Two airlines offering popular flights from Detroit to Poland, are Delta and Lufthansa. With one stopover, usually in Amsterdam (Netherlands) or Frankfurt (Germany) you can get to most of the biggest Polish cities, such as Warsaw, Kraków, Gdańsk, Katowice, Poznań or Wrocław.

Usually, when you get on a plane in the evening, you will reach your destination around noon the next day. There is a six-hour time difference between Poland and the US (EST), and going there, you will be “losing” six hours, while getting back, you will be “gaining” these six hours back. Therefore, traveling back, if you leave in the early morning from Kraków or Warsaw, you could be in Detroit early in the afternoon on the same day.

(For people who want to cut the cost of the flight, there are many more options, with more stopovers and longer traveling times.)

We strongly recommend booking a flight with the “over the Atlantic” part being the first leg of the trip. In our experience, in case there are delays due to bad weather, problems with a plane or any other temporary obstacles, these problems are usually much easier to handle while still in Detroit, or when you are already in Europe.

So, instead of, for instance, going from Detroit to New York, and from New York to Kraków, we recommend that you go from Detroit to Amsterdam (or Frankfurt), and from Amsterdam (or Frankfurt) to Kraków.

If you chose to travel through Amsterdam, you might want to opt for a later connecting flight to your final destination in Poland (if such a flight is available) and use a few hours to explore this interesting city. For such a side trip you will need a minimum of 5-6 hours.

You won’t need to worry about your luggage. Once it’s checked-in to your final destination in Poland, it will stay with the airlines. If your cabin luggage is still too heavy to take with you while exploring the city, there is an option to leave it at the airport at the “Baggage Storage” in Terminal 1 (or in a locker.)

The Amsterdam airport (Schiphol) is very well integrated with the city, with trains to downtown departing from there every few minutes.

Once downtown, you can walk to the city center, then take one of the walking tours or canal tours of the city, or perhaps visit one of the famous museums (Van Gough Museum or The Rijksmuseum, which is the national museum of the Netherlands). There is also the Ann Frank House and the infamous “Red Light District”. You won’t have time to do much more, but it still will be a memorable visit to this historic European city.

As already mentioned, you don’t need a special visa to travel to Poland. You will, however, have your passport checked and stamped by a border control officer at the airport when you first land in Europe. If you travel through Amsterdam, it will be in Amsterdam, and once you arrive in, let’s say Kraków, you won’t go through the passport control again; all you will need to do is to claim your luggage.

It is possible, as Poland, together with most European countries, belongs to the “Schengen Zone/Area” (first established in 1985, Poland has been a member country since 2007). The Schengen Zone/Area is the area without any internal borders. This allows visitors to move from country to country within the entire area without any additional passport controls (unless special regulations are implemented) once they are admitted at the first “point of entry”. For example, this writer crossed the Polish German, Polish Czech, or Polish-Slovak border by car many times, sometimes not even aware that we had crossed it, as there are no check points anymore.