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 has always been 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 common practice for some years. If you were caught by the coastguard via a radar plot, the resulting trouble and fine were considerable. In the past, a Port of Entry always had to be called at in order to cross the border correctly, and the administrative procedures took a lot of time and were also nerve-wracking 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 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 in euros everywhere. The kuna will only be an officially accepted means of payment until 14 January. If you have large amounts of the currency from your last trip at home, you will have to exchange it afterwards (official exchange rate 1 euro = 7.53450 kuna). You can either do this in Germany via commercial banks for a fee and at the daily exchange rate, or you can go to one of the Bundesbank branches in your own federal state by 28 February (click here for an overview of branches), where you can exchange for free and at the fixed exchange 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.
