Amsterdam takes two days. The rest of the country takes the train.
Which canal hour is worth booking. What Keukenhof costs once the shuttle is added. Whether Giethoorn beats Zaanse Schans when you have one free day. Reviews of every tour you can book in the Netherlands.
An hour on the canals, a timed museum slot, the windmills, the bulb fields.
Four bookings hold up a first Dutch week. What each one costs, and what the people who took it say.
01The first eveningAmsterdam Classic Saloon Boat Cruise with Drinks and CheeseA saloon boat around the ring canals with cheese and a drink. Take a late sailing and watch the gables light up from the water.
02The timed slotVan Gogh Museum TicketTwo hundred Van Goghs in one building. Entry runs by slot, and the late-morning ones go first when rain is forecast.
03The windmill dayZaanse Schans, Volendam, and Marken Day TripZaanse Schans, Volendam and Marken in one loop out of Amsterdam. The green timber village everybody pictures.
04The spring oneKeukenhof Ticket and Roundtrip Shuttle TransferKeukenhof with the shuttle included. The park opens for about eight weeks and every ticket carries a date.
Amsterdam is a harbour with streets in it. Pick your deck.
An open sloop on the ring canals, a covered evening cruise for when the weather turns, or a run past the cranes and the container ships at Rotterdam. Three kinds of boat day, and what it costs to get on board.
Amsterdam: galleries before noon, water after four.
All of Amsterdam →
The three big collections sit around one lawn in the Museumkwartier, the ring canals start four tram stops away, and the Jordaan is where the eating happens once the light goes. These three carry more travellers than anything else in the city.
Van Gogh alone, or with the boat
The collection runs floor by floor from the Dutch years to Auvers, and it is busiest between eleven and two. Several sellers pair the ticket with a canal hour for a few dollars more, which is the version to take when the afternoon is free.
Anne Frank, without a house ticket
House tickets are released on a schedule and gone within hours. The walking tours take the Jordaan, the Westerkerk and the Jewish Quarter and tell the story on the streets it happened on, which is the part a queue cannot give you.
Nine tastings around the Jordaan
Herring from a street cart, an aged gouda cut to order, bitterballen with mustard and a stroopwafel pressed while you wait. The good ones stay in the small streets and finish in a brown café rather than a tourist kitchen.
The six day trips that made Holland famous.
Working windmills on the Zaan, a village at Giethoorn with water where the streets should be, seven million bulbs at Lisse for eight weeks a year. Each of these leaves Amsterdam after breakfast and has you back for dinner.
The Dutch days out with the longest queues.
The full Dutch catalogue →These fill first in every season. What each one is, and why it keeps selling.
1
Van Gogh Museum Ticket
Enter Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum at a selected time and follow Vincent’s life through more than 200 paintings, 500 drawings, and 750 letters. You can explore permanent and temporary exhibitions at your own pace, then add a handheld guide in 11 languages. Allow at least 1.5 hours, and book early for the best time slots.
From · $32
Read our review →
2
Amsterdam Classic Saloon Boat Cruise with Drinks and Cheese
from $21
3
Amsterdam Luxury Canal Cruise + Unlimited Drinks & Bites option
from $18
4
Heineken Experience Ticket
from $28
5
Rijksmuseum Entry Ticket
from $31
6
Classic Boat Cruise with Optional Cheese & Wine
from $18
7
Evening Cruise with Optional Wine and Snacks
from $22
8
75 Minute City Canal Cruise with Audio Guide
from $17
The country is flat on purpose. Ride it.
Amsterdam has more bicycles than residents and a lane for every one of them. Past the ring road the polder lies open: dykes, sheep, a mill on the horizon and a farm selling its own cheese with coffee. Half a day on a saddle covers more of the Netherlands than a coach does in two.
Rembrandt, Vermeer and Van Gogh, all within one tram ride.
The Golden Age hangs in a handful of buildings around a single lawn, and a queue forms outside each of them by ten. Timed entry is the whole trick: hold the slot, walk past the line, and keep the afternoon for the water.
- 1Van Gogh Museum Ticketfrom $32
- 2Rijksmuseum Entry Ticketfrom $31
- 3Moco Museum Amsterdam Entrance Tickets with Banksy & Morefrom $18
What a Dutch day out costs, top to bottom.
Every tour on the site, grouped by what it costs. Plenty of the best Dutch days land under the price of dinner in the Jordaan.
Canal hours, museum entry, city walks and a cheese tasting round the corner from the hotel.
Full days out: Keukenhof with the shuttle, Giethoorn by boat, the polder by bike.
Private guides, chartered sloops and the one splurge a trip can carry.
Rotterdam, The Hague and Utrecht are forty minutes apart.
Rotterdam was rebuilt from nothing after 1940 and went vertical about it. The Hague keeps the Vermeers, the government and a pier over the North Sea. Utrecht sank its wharves a storey below street level and put tables on them. Intercity trains reach all three from Amsterdam Centraal in under an hour.
All of Rotterdam →
The Hague holds the paintings people fly in for.
The Girl with a Pearl Earring hangs in a seventeenth-century house on a pond, ten minutes from a tram that ends at the beach. Add the miniature country at Madurodam and a pier you can walk out over the surf, and it fills a day without a queue on the Amsterdam scale.
- 1Mauritshuis Entrance Ticketfrom $25
- 2City Canal Cruisefrom $17
- 3Madurodam Miniature Park Entry Ticketfrom $24
Three things the Netherlands does that nowhere else bothers with.
Canals and galleries turn up all over Europe. Nineteen mills draining one polder, a flower park that opens for eight weeks, and cobalt painted onto white glaze by hand since 1653 do not.
The Kinderdijk Nineteen
Nineteen windmills stand in a line below sea level in the Alblasserwaard, built in the 1730s to lift water out of the polder and into the river. Diesel pumps took the job over long ago, yet the mills are kept in working order and several are still lived in by their keepers. Walk or cycle the dyke path between them and the whole Dutch argument with the sea is laid out in one flat view.
- 1Kinderdijk UNESCO World Heritage Entry Ticket★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 1,477 reviews
- 2Waterbus Ticket to Dordrecht and/or Kinderdijk★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 542 reviews
- 3All-Inclusive Private Windmill Tour to Kinderdijk from Rotterdam★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 59 reviews
Keukenhof
Seven million bulbs go into the ground by hand each autumn in a park at Lisse, and the gates open from late March to the middle of May. That is the entire season. Growers plant in waves so something is always at its peak, the tulips arrive last, and every ticket is sold for a fixed date because the car park cannot take a second thought.
- 1Keukenhof Ticket and Roundtrip Shuttle Transfer★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 11,799 reviews
- 2Tour to Keukenhof Gardens with Windmill Cruise★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 2,819 reviews
- 3Keukenhof Gardens Ticket and Transfer★★★★★★★★★★ 4.5 · 2,741 reviews
Delft Blue
Delft potters spent the 1600s answering imported Chinese porcelain with cobalt on white tin glaze, and one factory has been at it since 1653. In the painting hall a decorator works freehand from a pounced outline, one plate at a time, before the glaze goes on and the kiln turns the grey line blue.
- 1Canal Cruise with Guided Commentary★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 990 reviews
- 2Royal Delft: Delftblue Factory and Museum★★★★★★★★★★ 4.6 · 588 reviews
- 3Entrance Ticket for the Old and New Churches★★★★★★★★★★ 4.4 · 229 reviews
Four Dutch bookings that will not wait.
Most of this country can be arranged over breakfast. These four run on dated tickets, timed slots and a season that takes no interest in when your flight lands.
- 01Keukenhof Ticket and Roundtrip Shuttle TransferThe park opens for roughly eight weeks from late March and every ticket carries a date. Outside that window there is nothing to visit.
- 02Anne Frank’s Story – Guided Walking Tour through AmsterdamHouse tickets are released on a fixed schedule and go the same day. A walking tour is the dependable way to stand on the right canal.
- 03Van Gogh Museum TicketEntry runs on timed slots. The late-morning ones sell out first, and they go faster still when rain is forecast.
- 04Light Festival Boat with Unlimited Drinks OptionThe festival lights the canals from late November to late January, and the cruises through it are gone by early December.
The forecast is wrong anyway. Keep a wet afternoon in reserve.
Rain here tends to come sideways for twenty minutes and then stop. The plan is the same either way: something under a roof in the middle of the day, and a covered boat if you still want the canals. Timed museum slots hold whatever the sky is doing.
By city and province
By kind of day: boat, bike, gallery or tasting
Amsterdam, the mills, the bulb fields, then the harbour city.
Amsterdam
Zaanse Schans
Volendam
Keukenhof
The Hague
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