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OV Chipkaart for kids?

Posted by (Michigan) on

Hello,
We are looking forward to our trip to the Netherlands this month. We will be visiting several cities and traveling with our kids, ages 11 and 13. The tap-on-tap-off with credit cards seems to be a great option for transportation, but the problem is that our kids don’t have their own credit cards :) (we also don’t have Apple Pay set up on phones, though maybe we need to look into it…)

We were planning to get the kids OV chipkaarts. I’m hoping other families can chime in on what they used. Are the OV cards a good solution? Maybe there’s another option we haven’t thought of? Is it relatively easy to check the balance and reload? I read somewhere that the kiosks for purchasing and reloading were slowly being removed as more people just tap to pay with credit cards.

(When I searched the forum, many OV Chipkaart questions were several years old, forgive me if this has been asked recently and I missed it.)

Posted by
3094 posts

For kids under 12 you can buy a Railrunner for 2,5, which gives them free travel. You can also get a "Kids Free" subscription, but you need a personal OV chipcard for that, and I do not know if the NS has woken up to the fact that people living outside of the Netherlands might be interested in that as well. I would aks in the station.

Posted by
6 posts

Thank you for the information about the Rail Runner! I’ll be sure we book that for our daughter when we travel by train. I had assumed we’d use trains for longer trips between towns and busses in town (getting from one side of town to the other…). Is it reasonable/efficient to use trains to get from one area of Amsterdam to another? We don’t mind walking a bit, that’s part of experiencing a city.

Posted by
8638 posts

Is it reasonable/efficient to use trains to get from one area of Amsterdam to another? We don’t mind walking a bit, that’s part of experiencing a city.

Trains are of limited use within Amsterdam, unless you are staying near Sloterdijk Station or Amsterdam Zuid Station, and need to get to Centraal.

Within Amsterdam, most of the central area is very walkable, but you might find the trams useful, maybe the Metro, buses if you are going further. I usually just put a destination into Google Maps, compare walking vs public transport, if a tram saves me significant walking, then great, or I just walk. The OV Chipkaart, and tap-to-pay are good for all public transport (Trains, buses, trams. and metro) in Amsterdam and throughout the Netherlands.

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