Foreign tourists visiting this country have a new tool aimed at facilitating their stay in Poland at their disposal - an emergency hotline offering all sorts of information in three main languages.
Danuta Isler reports
The line, managed by the Ministry of Tourism and Sport in collaboration with the Polish Tourist Organisation and the Police Headquarters, is open every day from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Tourists calling two numbers: free 0-800-200-300 or a mobile 0-608-599-999 can receive information in three languages: English, German and Russian.
The friendly voices on the other side of the receiver are mostly students who take several hundreds of calls a month - mostly from tourists coming from Germany, Russia, England, Spain and the US. They have been trained by the Polish Tourist Organisation to handle all sorts of inquiries and they have the Internet at their disposal to offer further assistance. Questions vary from where to treat injuries to where to find an affordable restaurant or a pet hotel in this country.
The numbers can be found online, in publications of the Polish Tourist Organisation as well as in Polish embassies and cultural institutions worldwide. Travellers from outside the Shengen zone can find it in leaflets they receive when entering Poland. The tourist emergency line will operate till September with the plans to extend it into an automatically operated system afterwards.
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