April Trip To Amsterdam

There is no one size fits all answer here. Everyone is different with regards to what they prefer. Amsterdam is a great city with great museums and amazing restaurants. It’s also a very popular and busy city, especially during the second half of April when the tulips are expected to bloom. This year Easter is very late at April 20, which means Easter coincides with the blooming of the tulips. This creates the perfect storm for hotel demand to go thru the roof and room rates to skyrocket. Not only in Amsterdam, but to a lesser extent also in nearby cities like Haarlem and Leiden.
You can use Google maps to help you find out how long it takes to train from one place to another and to see which base makes the most sense to you.

April is peak tulip season in the Netherlands, have you checked prices on accommodations for your dates? It's easy enough to take the train to Amsterdam from Haarlem or Leiden or the reverse, just factor the train time into your daily plans. If you want to go to Anne Frank house and Corrie Ten Boom house, read up on the advance purchase ticketing process as they sell out quickly in advance (plenty of advice in this forum, do a search).

I've just returned from a trip to The Netherlands. You can save a lot of money by staying outside of Amsterdam and day tripping into that city instead as hotels in Amsterdam tend to be very expensive. The caveat to doing this however is that I found Amsterdam to be a very fun but also very exhausting city and having a hotel right there to go back to in the middle of the day for a little break was worth it. Also, it rained very heavily while I was there and having that room to go back to and change into some dry clothes was very nice. My advice would be to stay in Amsterdam only for the time that you spend in Amsterdam. For the rest of your Netherlands trip, base yourself out of somewhere else. Haarlem, Leiden, The Hague, and Delft would all be great places to look into providing you book a hotel that's close to the train station. I stayed at a hotel in The Hague about a 5–7-minute walk from the main train station and it worked out perfectly for day tripping around the country.

Jane, book Corrie ten Boom house tickets asap. We found the tickets gone months in advance. So excited for you!

It's a toss up on the "where to stay" question because it's all good options and all work because the train system is efficient.

For us, on our last trip in July, we stayed in Amsterdam for part of the trip and from there, we did the Anne Frank house, the Resistance Museum, and the Corrie Ten Boom House as a natural grouping of the WWII experience from different and sometimes overlapping perspectives. Definitely book the Anne Frank and CTBH tickets as soon as you know when you want to visit and the tickets become available. We stayed in Leidseplein area and rented bikes for the time there, so we rode to all those places - AF a few minutes away, Resistance a fairly short ride, and Haarlem & the CTBH a bit longer but pleasant ride between cities. The great part about Haarlem and a mid-morning CBTH tour was it left the afternoon open to ride farther afield with a loop out of Haarlem to Zaandvort and the North Sea beaches. Dinner in Haarlem and the ride back to Amsterdam thanks to the long summer days.

We've stayed in both Leiden and Delft, and really liked both cities. Also with bikes in both places, we able to easily visit local sites but also go out and about to other nearby places like Rotterdam (RS walk was good there) and the Hague (easy train connection for that one) for more wandering and the Mauritshuis museum. But it's tough to know - with Bruge, Lux, and Brussels also in your mix, how much overlap these all add. With the exception of Kinderdijk, Amsterdam alone is an easy choice to cover those other two sites you list. And while folks love Kinderdijk, for someone like me who is fine looking at windmills but doesn't need the tour inside, it's never been a priority to add. It's still - simply due to the size of the Netherlands and the popularity of Kinderdijk - a side-trip from any of the places you mention. I'm sure folks who went to Kinderdijk will suggest their best options for visiting.