The App You Need To Download For Traveling Around Europe During COVID-19

I get a lot of reader emails, which is a good thing except that I can’t reply to each and every one is as much detail as I would often like. However, I do read every single message and if I can answer off the top of my head, I’m happy to quickly reply. Unfortunately, I don’t always have the time or manpower to answer the questions that require research.

However, I do tend to spend more time researching questions from readers when it’s something that will benefit other readers as well, like this flurry of questions from a reader named Pete, below:

“If I fly into Munich, then drive to Venice, is this a problem? Are they stopping cars at the Italian border to check for Covid swab test results? Or anything else I need to be aware of when driving from Germany thru Austria into Italy. I will be also driving thru Hungary, Czech, Poland, Slovakia, Switzerland. Do you know what the entry requirements are for driving into those countries?”

As you can imagine, my head was spinning. Pete moves around faster than I do and that’s saying something. I really had no idea what the answers were to any of his great questions. So I sent an email to my buddy Adam, who is the head of communications for Blacklane, which is based in Berlin, Germany.

Adam came back with this: “I recommend the site reopen.europa.eu. It’s also available as an app. If you click on a country, there’s a helpful menu of information and links on the right side of the screen. You can see the rules for entering from another EU member/Schengen member state and outside, get links to the country’s tourism site, etc.”

The site is awesome! And I love that they have free apps for both iOS and Android. According to their site, they provide “information on the various measures in place, including on quarantine and testing requirements for travellers, the EU Digital COVID certificate to help you exercise your right to free movement, and mobile coronavirus contact tracing and warning apps. The information is updated frequently and available in 24 languages. This should help you plan your travel in Europe, while staying safe and healthy.”

So Pete, I hope this helps with your big European trip. I know pre-Covid, we never had to worry about this sort of things but sadly, now we do, so until this pandemic is over, Re-open EU is a great app to download or website to have bookmarked.