I read how difficult it is to secure tickets to this historical house. We’re making our first trip to Amsterdam in June. I didn’t want to miss the opportunity. Thanks to the RS Travel Forum and a lot of internet searches, I learned a lot. Seems to be a difference between the method to get tickets two months in advance and trying to get tickets the day of a desired visit. It’s been mentioned there is a queue for “same day” tickets beginning 30-45 minutes ahead of 9:00am release time. I didn’t find a queue when trying to get advanced tickets. If you’re trying to get same day tickets, I would refer you to the earlier responses by others in the posting “Anne Frank House - variable number of tickets…”
There was also conflicting info regarding when tickets first become available. It was definitely clear advance tickets are made available exactly 2 months ahead of the desired date. But as far as the time of day they are made available, the info on their website could be misread. I wasn’t sure if tickets would be released at 12:00pm or 9:00am Amsterdam time. So I emailed them directly. Here’s what I was told:
“Thank you for your e-mail. Tickets are made available two months in advance at 12.00 noon. You can purchase tickets for June 18th on April 18th from 12.00 noon on. The 20% of the total amount of tickets concerns the regular tickets. These are made available daily at 09.00 for that day itself.”
Because I’m on the US west coast, I needed to be ready at 3:00am my time (we are nine hours behind Amsterdam). Additionally, there are 2 types of entries. The first is the regular ticket (allows you entry to the house in a specific timeframe). The other is a “ticket+” (provides a 30 min introductory overview before you enter the house). We definitely wanted to try for the “ticket+”. I had tested the waters by selecting earlier dates and found that the regular entry tickets have more availability and you can usually continue to see some during the several weeks following the release. But the entries that include the 30 min introduction go VERY quickly on the morning of release. I decided to give it a try at 3am, knowing that if it failed I could at least get regular entry tickets (which was comforting). At 2:45am I setup two laptops with browsers open. I didn’t want to take a chance that something went wrong and I wasn’t prepared.
At 3:00am, I saw regular tickets become available. But not the ticket plus! So I waiting and kept refreshing and about 10 mins later, the ticket plus availability popped up. Looks like there are only 30 tickets per each timeframe throughout the day. I was able to grab two tickets at 10:15am. Scored! BUT when I got all the way through the registration process (that they force you to complete) and got to the point of payment, my order stalled. It wouldn’t let me proceed, or refresh or go back and try again. It just kept those two tickets in my cart and there was nothing I could do. So I quickly jumped to the other laptop. But I saw there were no more tickets for the 10:15 slot, so I snatched two at 12:45pm. I quickly went through the same process and was able to complete my order. Not sure why my first attempt failed. I even cleared my browser history, thinking it would make those two tickets available again and I could grab them. But it didn’t. While I initially would have preferred to get the earliest entry possible (we like to get into historical sights early in the day), I was thrilled I was even able to get the tickets and it will actually give us a free morning to do other things. I couldn’t be happier! Good luck to others!