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I am renting a car this summer in Dubrovnik. I will drive to Split and I am considering driving into Bosnia-Herzegovina (Mostar/Sarajevo) and maybe Montenegro.

My rental company confirmed that I can “drive from Dubrovnik to Split for free but driving into Bosnia would cost 75 EUR in permission to drive abroad”. This is non-sense. You cannot drive from Dubrovnik to Split without entering Bosnia!

So to understand this better:

  1. Is the documentation to drive from Dubrovnik to Split the famous “Green card”?

  2. Is the documentation to drive from Dubrovnik to Split different to the documentation required to drive into the whole Bosnia (e.g. from Dubrovnik to Mostar)?

  3. Is the Green card unique for each country (e.g. Green card to go to Bosnia wouldn’t work for going to Montenegro) or is the Green card more like a “car passport” that can be used to drive into any country authorised by the rental company?

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It is quite common, both in Europe and elsewhere, that rental car usage is geographically restricted. This is not directly related to the green card. The green card is issued by the insurance company and tells where the car insurance is valid. What you need is a rental contract, allowing you to use the car where you intend to use it. The insurance for the car may very well be valid for Bosnia, even if the rental company does not allow you to drive there.

  1. You need a green card to enter Bosnia (to prove that the car is insured there), but this alone is not enough. The rental contract must also allow you to enter Bosnia. It is very unlikely that the rental contract is checked at the border, but if something should happen in Bosnia and the rental company realizes that you were there without permit, you may face problems.

  2. Yes, the rental contract is different.

  3. No, the car only has one green card listing all countries, for which the insurance is valid. Or more precisely: The green card is per default valid in all countries participating in the green card agreement, but some countries may be excepted from coverage. Usually the non-covered countries are listed on the card.

For details about your rental company, you will have to contact them to clarify. It may very well be that the rental company allows you to pass the short stretch through Bosnia to get from Dubrovnik to Split without allowing you to drive elsewhere in Bosnia. It is also perfectly possible to go from Dubrovnik to Split without entering Bosnia at all, but you will then have to take a short ferry e.g. from Ploče to Trpanj.

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  • "It is very unlikely that the rental contract is checked at the border": in my experience it is not that unlikely. It has probably happened around half the time or more frequently. But maybe this has changed recently. The last time was a few years ago, and I remember being surprised not to be asked for the car's documents. Also my experience is mostly driving into Croatia with a car rented in Bosnia, so maybe it isn't indicative for the opposite case.
    – phoog
    Commented Mar 30, 2019 at 14:07
  • @phoog When driving from Dubrovnik to Split, you will only enter Bosnia for about 10km to pass through the so called 'Neum Corridor'. I was of the opinion that at least Croatian cars are (were?) allowed to transit Bosnia there usually with no checks at all, but perhaps my knowledge is outdated.
    – Tor-Einar Jarnbjo
    Commented Mar 30, 2019 at 22:25
  • I've only crossed through Neum once or twice since Croatia joined the EU. We've been choosing routes to avoid it because we hear that the wait times are worse than they used to be. I do know that they opened larger border stations when Croatia joined the EU, presumably to have higher capacity and probably also because the previous Klek station was several hundred meters inside Bosnian territory. There's apparently an agreement to provide a formal transit corridor that has not been implemented. There's also a bridge under construction to connect the motorway to Pelješac, avoiding BiH entirely.
    – phoog
    Commented Mar 31, 2019 at 14:50

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