Travelling
The public transport in Amsterdam is well organized. Trams, buses, metros and even canal buses will bring you to your destination.
The public transport runs for 24 hours and 7 days per week. However, between 1.00am and 5.30am only night lines are available. For the night lines, you have to pay €3,50 for a one way ticket. During regular hours you can use the OV Chipcard.
What is the OV-chipkaart?
The
OV-chipkaart is a new means of payment for the public transport system. It is
the only card that you can use while travelling by metro, but you can also use
it in the other transport systems. It can be uploaded with credit in euros, with
which you can travel anywhere within the Netherlands.
There are personal, anonymous, and disposable cards. The disposable card can be purchased at the station vending machine. The anonymous OV-chipkaart can be bought at the ticket office and vending machines at the station. These cards allow the holder to travel immediately. The personal OV-chipkaart can be purchased from your public transport company or the OV-chipkaart Customer service department 0900-0980 (€ 0,10 p.m.).
You can upload travel credit onto your card using your bank card or cash at a vending machine or ticket office. If you have a personal OV-chipkaart, you can also select the auto-reload option, to ensure you always have enough OV-chipkaart credit with which to travel.
Checking in and checking out
At the start of your journey, you check in at the gate by holding your
OV-chipkaart up to the screen. The sound and light signal indicates your card
has been read. If you do not have a specific product on your card and,
therefore, pay for your journey using the OV-chipkaart e-purse, a boarding rate
will be deducted when you check in. The credit on your OV-chipkaart should be
at least the boarding rate or you will not be allowed to go through the gate. The boarding rate is €4 (four euros).
At that end of your journey, you check out by holding your card up to the gate screen. The sound and light signal once again indicates that your card has been read. If you are traveling using the OV-chipkaart e-purse, the actual travel costs, based on the distance travelled, minus the boarding rate is deducted from or added to the e-purse.
Transfer
Checking in and out is required when you transfer from any one form of
transport to another, except when you transfer from one train to another.
Travelling Outside of Amsterdam
If you want to travel outside of Amsterdam, but inside the Netherlands, the most convenient way to do this is by train. The Dutch train network is one of the busiest in the world and many places can be reached with it. Although the train can be quite expensive (e.g. about €40,00 for a round trip to Maastricht), you can save on it by buying a “Voordeelurenkaart”. This card costs about €49,00 per year and will give you a 40% discount on all national trains after 9.00am in the morning. If you make about more than 5 big trips by train, it might be cheaper to buy this card.
A very useful website for planning trips is 9292ov.nl. On this website you simply enter your address and the address or city you want to go and the website will give all the information (which train to take, which bus, total price etc.).
If you want to plan a trip inside Europe, there are many cheap flights available. Companies like Ryanair, SkyEurope, WizzAir, Jet2.com offer very cheap flights, sometimes even for free. A good website to compare all the flights is SkyScanner.net. It gives you the option to search the cheapest flight in a specific month or weekend to any random destination. Tip: look for flight departing from Düsseldorf - Weeze / Niederrhein (NRN) in Germany, close to the Dutch border. From Amsterdam there are buses going to this airport. (www.eurolines.nl) This takes about 2 hours and costs about €15,00 for a one way ticket. From this airport the flights are usually much cheaper than from any Dutch airport.
References
9292ov
(public transport planner)
Train
(NS)
Bus
/ tram / metro (GvB)
Eurolines
(long distance busses)
Cheaptickets
(flight planner)
Routeplanner
(car)