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I've been in Poland, from the Lithuanian border to Gdansk to Wroclaw passing through various smaller towns and villages, for about ten days.

When I arrived very early on New Years Day with Lithuanian friends, one who speaks Polish fluently was trying to tell me about cheap Polish accommodation. The places she took me to all seemed to have the Polish word "noclegi" on their signs and many did not seem to be in the apps and websites I use (Agoda, Booking.com and HostelWorld mostly these days).

Do Polish people travelling in their own country use some other online resource to find these local places? The term itself seems so general that there are many Google hits but I didn't find any helpful for my question.

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    Seen the same in Norway and Spain. In Norway plenty of places just have a tiny sign "rum" along the road pointing to a farm, nothing else. I doubt you will find a listing anywhere near complete anywhere.
    – gerrit
    Jan 9, 2020 at 19:22
  • @gerrit: Complete or not, how do locals find these places? It's not like they're all in one street in the old town or next door to the tourist information kiosk. And how do they have an idea about prices? But you're right, it reminds me of the 住宿 signs in either/both mainland China/Taiwan and in Thailand I forget if it was หอพัก or something similar I kept seeing. Never checked them out though, only wondered...
    – hippietrail
    Jan 9, 2020 at 19:55
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    I've wondered the same myself. I believe they're just driving or cycling around and when they see a sign "rum" think, this is a good place to stay, and then do that (with a good accommodation owner then turning the sign around). I suspect they negotiate about the price and it wouldn't surprise me if it's all cash only such that the tax man doesn't take a share... but I've never actually stayed in such a place so I don't actually know.
    – gerrit
    Jan 10, 2020 at 9:35
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    Along with "noclegi" you can look for "wolne pokoje", ie. "available rooms"
    – Mark
    Jan 10, 2020 at 13:48
  • @Mark: Thanks. I knew there was a word I learned along with "noclegi", and "pokoje" was it!
    – hippietrail
    Jan 10, 2020 at 14:48

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I don't think that there is a single popular platform for finding accommodation in Poland. There are at least few sites that seems to have decent amount of listings like nocowanie.pl or noclegowo.pl. Also Polish equivalent of eBay - olx.pl has some offers here.

Of course AirBnb is quite popular (especially in touristic places), but prices seems to be more on European level, so I guess targeted mainly to international tourists.

In rural areas (for example near the sea or mountains) there is a lot of people offering accommodation that are not listed on any search engines. They're advertised mainly by local signage or sometimes on their own website or some local site (like this local site that has just offers from area of Świętokrzyski National Park). In cases like this decent way of finding accommodation is by recommendation - usually on local Facebook group where you will just get contact phone number. Places like this can be cheaper as they don't have to pay the middleman for advertisement (and I guess taxes).

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  • OK nocowanie.pl is finding stuff prices as low as the cheapest hostels I've stayed in and places comparatively in the middle of nowhere. I'll take it!
    – hippietrail
    Jan 12, 2020 at 0:05
  • @hippietrail: just to be clear: I have not used it as I usually stick to AirBnb, so not sure what the experience is.
    – pbm
    Jan 13, 2020 at 9:59

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