should I take the bus?

It depends. Buses are fine - but, if possible, first check if you can take the train or the plane. Trains can be much faster, cost only a little more, and do not require buying tickets in advance. Planes, of course, are significantly faster on most routes, but require buying a ticket long in advance and cost much, much more.

Now, of course, there are places where you can't go by either plane or train - and for these places, buses are great.

So, if both the train and the plane are off the table, take the bus.

what bus should I take?

Alright. So you know where you want to go and neither the train or the plane fit your plans. It's easy from here. Poland has a very reliable website that helps you plan your bus travel, and even plans potential connections between trains and buses.

It's called e-podróżnik, and is available in English.



On the website, you simply choose your city of departure, destination, and time, and are presented with all the various options for travel between the two. The nice thing is, if you were wrong and there is, in fact, a train connection, it will show that, too.



Now you have all the information you need, including the bus stop name, which you can then enter into Google Maps. Notice that you can even buy tickets for most routes. We don't usually recommend doing that - but it depends on the bus company. Read more below.

There are two groups of bus companies in Poland: long-haul bus companies with international routes and local bus companies with mainly short-haul routes. This chapter focuses on the former.

companies

There are a few major companies that fall in this category. The main is definitely the German company Flixbus, which connects Poland both internally and to dozens of destinations abroad. Its biggest competitor is likely Belgian company Eurolines, essentially a union of smaller long-haul bus companies, which operates as a parallel service of many of the same routes as Flixbus. These companies, however, mostly focus on Western and Central Europe.

If you want to travel to or from Eastern Europe, we can recommend Ecolines and Lux Express for travel to/from the Baltic States and Russia (Ukraine is also serviced by Flixbus and Eurolines).

Now, there are also other bus companies, of course. They are not featured here as they are not as prominent - but they can also be found using e-podróżnik.

destinations

The 4 main companies above jointly have hundreds of destinations in Europe. Below are destinations maps of each company.

tickets & prices

Buying tickets is very easy with these companies. You simply go to their website, book your ticket, pay securely by card, and show up at the departure spot. Now, it is important to book these tickets in advance (optimally 2 weeks or more).

Now, it is hard to talk about prices because they depend on the time of year and day (summer around noon is most expensive), time before departure, route, and company. However, just for a reference point, if booked one week before departure, assume approximately 0.15 zł [0.035 EUR] per kilometer traveled.

companies

Almost every municipality in Poland has its own, local bus company, whose primary purpose is to connect the municipality's main city to the villages that surround it. They are called PKS companies, and they are typically named, for example, PKS Poznań. There are hundreds of them in Poland, and together they make a tight grid of destinations in the entire country. In fact, there are almost no villages that are not connected to the grid through a PKS bus service. Please note that we are not talking about urban buses that form part of a city's public transport network, but longer-distance buses that span the entire municipality around a city.

All PKS services also appear in e-podróżnik search results.

Unfortunately, most (not all!) local bus companies are massively underfinanced and their buses are old, their services are infrequent, and they are quite unreliable. In fact, they are a relic of the country's communist past. However, there are usually the only option for travelling to some villages in the country - and that's better than nothing.

destinations

The only reasonable way to look at the destinations of these local companies is to simply enter where you want to go on e-podróżnik.

However, there are also two other methods for the daring. Firstly, you can visit the websites of these local bus companies to see their schedules and a list of destinations. Secondly, you can go to the PKS bus station or PKS bus stop in your area and look at the departure tables there. Every city has a PKS bus station (called dworzec autobusowy/dworzec PKS) and potentially multiple PKS bus stops. Villages typically have one or two PKS bus stops, depending on the size.

tickets & prices

Buying tickets in PKS buses is a bit more tricky, mainly because it's usually a very old fashioned method. PKS tickets do not have to be bought in advance. It is sometimes possible to do so, namely by finding the connection on e-podróżnik and clicking "buy ticket", but it is not necessary.

The typical way of buying tickets for PKS services is to buy them on the stop, in the bus. You simply enter the bus, ask the bus driver for a ticket (this can be difficult, bus drivers are notoriously bad at English), pay in cash, get a printed ticket, and hold on to the ticket for the entire journey.

The price of tickets depends on the bus company and route, but a rough estimate is 0.3 zł [0.07 EUR] per kilometer travelled.