For decades, driving between Dubrovnik and the rest of Croatia meant leaving the country twice. The Neum corridor — nine kilometres of Bosnian coastline — sat squarely across the only road, and in August the two border posts could add an hour to the journey for no reason that benefited anybody.
What changed
The Pelješac bridge opened in July 2022, carrying the road across the bay to the Pelješac peninsula and rejoining the mainland north of Neum. The Dubrovnik–Split drive is now entirely within Croatia: about 230 km and roughly three and a half hours, with no passports, no queue and no dependence on how busy two border posts happen to be.
For travellers this removed the single largest source of uncertainty on the route. It also quietly changed the calculation on day trips — Ston is now comfortably reachable from Dubrovnik and back, and the Pelješac wine country is an afternoon rather than an expedition.
The stops worth making
- Ston — the salt pans have been worked since Roman times, and the defensive wall above the town is the longest in Europe after the Great Wall. About an hour and twenty from Dubrovnik.
- Mali Ston — oysters pulled from the bay the same morning, eaten twenty metres from where they were lifted.
- Pelješac wineries — Dingač and Postup, on slopes steep enough that the grapes were traditionally carried out by donkey.
- Makarska — two and a half hours from Dubrovnik, and the natural lunch stop if you are pushing on to Split.
Bus, boat or car?
The bus does the route in four and a half hours and stops where it is told to. The seasonal catamaran is pleasant but runs to a summer-only timetable and lands you at a port, not an address. A private car costs more than either and buys you the thing neither offers: the stops are yours, the timing is yours, and the luggage stays in the boot throughout.
Our fixed prices, stop options and journey times for this route are on the Dubrovnik to Split transfer page, and airport-to-airport variants for open-jaw flight bookings are quoted the same way.