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Public transportation options in Amsterdam and intercity

Posted by on

Hi - we are family of 4 - 2 adults and 2 kids. The kids dont have their own credit cards/apple pay. Our kids are 10 and 15 years old. We are staying in Amsterdam for 6 nights in late June and plan to spend 2 days exploring AMS and the rest doing day trips to towns like Hague, Haarlem, Delft, Zaanse Shans, and Utrecht.

1/ Are there towns listed above you think we can combine for our day trips?
2/ For local AMS related travel, how should we think of using the tram system? Can I use Apple Pay to tap for all 4 of us?
3/ Even the days when we have to travel out of town, we will need to go from our hotel to the Centraal station and back which is about 15 minutes each way by tram.
4/ For inter-city travel, I am thinking on using the NS group tickets for off-peak times. I think we will start our journey only after 9am. Though we might end up returning before 6:30pm. So, might do group ticket one way and on return we might end up buying full fare. Our 10 year old will need to buy the "railrunner" ticket.

Thanks for your feedback.

Posted by
1536 posts

First of all, it seems you already did some research before posting here. Thanks for that!
Now to answer some of your questions.

2/ For local AMS related travel, how should we think of using the tram system? Can I use Apple Pay to tap for all 4 of us?

  • When you tap in and out, everyone needs their own device or card. So if you and your husband each have your own plastic credit card and you have Apple Pay on 2 devices (IPhone and Watch or IPhone and IPhone) you’re good to go. The system is set up in such a way that it will see a tap with a phone as a different transaction than a tap with an Apple Watch. That’s why you must always use the same device to tap both in and out. So someone traveling alone, can’t use his phone to tap in and his card or watch to tap out. He must use his phone again or else the system thinks it’s a new tap in.

3/ Even the days when we have to travel out of town, we will need to go from our hotel to the Centraal station and back which is about 15 minutes each way by tram.

Depending on where you stay in Amsterdam you may not need to go to Amsterdam Central Station to catch a train to your day trip. Amsterdam has many other train stations.

4/ For inter-city travel, I am thinking on using the NS group tickets for off-peak times. I think we will start our journey only after 9am.

A group ticket can make sense, but you need to carefully do the math. If you go to Zaanse Schans, a group ticket for 3 people is much more expensive than 3 singles at full fare. For prices and train schedules, see the website of NS https://www.ns.nl/en or their app

Posted by
965 posts

I'm assuming we'll be able to use our unlimited Eurail passes to travel freely intercity among Utrecht, Leiden, Amsterdam, Den Haag and Haarlem. Is that correct?

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