Apps worth installing before you travel to Poland

Poles are some of the most enthusiastic mobile users in Europe. Train tickets, parking, parcels, payments – almost everything has an app, and most of them work in English. For a visitor, ten minutes of downloading at home saves a lot of queuing, pointing and guessing later.

Start with a data plan: free roaming works for EU phones, and for everyone else a travel eSIM is the easiest option.

Getting around

Jakdojade is the app most Poles use for city transport: it plans door-to-door routes by tram, bus and metro and sells tickets for many cities, so you never need to hunt for a ticket machine. A ticket bought in the app must be activated before you board.

Koleo combines timetables and tickets for PKP Intercity, regional trains and most local operators, so you can plan Kraków–Zakopane or Warsaw–Gdańsk in one search. For long journeys on Express InterCity trains, the PKP Intercity app is also worth having for seat reservations.

Bolt, Uber and FreeNow are usually the cheapest way to get a taxi, especially from airports and stations. More in our guide to taxis and airport rides.

Everyday essentials

Eating, shopping and parcels

Delivery apps are handy after a late flight, when most kitchens have closed – see which ones work best in food delivery in Kraków. Too Good To Go is a favourite with students and anyone on a budget: bakeries and cafés sell their end-of-day leftovers in “surprise bags”.

Money

• Your own banking app – check that card payments abroad are switched on, and turn on notifications so you see every payment.
• A multi-currency card such as Revolut or Wise makes it easy to pay in złoty at a fair rate.
• Polish payment apps such as BLIK need a Polish bank account, so they are only useful if you are moving here. See Polish currency, cards and ATMs.

For longer stays

Allegro, Poland's biggest online marketplace, and mObywatel, the government's digital ID app, are worth knowing about if you live here – mObywatel is for Polish residents only.

Before you go: a five-minute checklist

• Download offline maps for the cities you are visiting in Google Maps.
• Add a payment card to Jakdojade, Koleo and a ride-hailing app at home, while you have Wi-Fi.
• Download the Polish language pack in Google Translate.
• Save the emergency number 112 in your phone.
• Sort out mobile data – a travel eSIM if your plan does not include EU roaming.

Sources

• Official App Store and Google Play listings of the apps mentioned