Schiphol gap time to Eurostar train to Antwerp

A difficult and frequently asked question that really does not have a good answer. Too many variables to accurately forecast a time. We were burned once when our original flight from the US never left the ground. I would wait till I was on the ground and take the first train.

No one can promise that your flight will not be delayed, for weather, or other reasons. You don't even need to say whether you have a single flight or two segments, or where in the US you are coming from, the airline, or its on-time rating. Are all in the group traveling on US passports? Checked luggage? What are the chances you'll get a "Bus Gate" and be dropped at the very end of a long concourse? We still don't know. I personally might book a train at 11:11, because 10:11 is just too risky. I've had lots of good luck, but last year, we read (did not experience) about some really bad days or weeks at Schiphol.

Have you considered paying for Comfort or Premium tickets, so that they are more changeable? Of course you have to read the rules very carefully.

Just so you know, there are several Bruges trains EVERY midday hour, and they cannot be reserved in advance. It's handy to already have the ticket, but most tickets are good on any Bruges train the same day. Antwerp is a modern station, but it's physically very big. Some of the escalators take a long time to travel so far!

Just forget taking Eurostar and take the IC train, or at least bite the bullet and wait until you are there to buy the ticket.

There is no way to predict whether your plane will arrive on-time, early, or late. You do not know how long immigration will take, how long you will wait for luggage, will a bag be missing, and if you can efficiently get to the platform, etc.

The best IC trains take 1 hour 33 minutes, the Eurostar around 59 minutes, depending on your timing, the IC train will get you there sooner than waiting for a fast train. I would probably avoid the trains with multiple connections, they are the ones taking 2 hours or more.

Just looking at a Monday in May, for example, If you can make the 8:33 Eurostar (unlikely) fine. But you could make the 8:43 IC, that gets to Antwerp at 10:16, which would be better than waiting for the 9:30 Eurostar. The 9:30 Eurostar might seem like a safe bet to buy tickets, but is it?, to be safe and get the 10:30 Eurostar, means potentially passing up several other trains that get you there sooner.

If saving a half hour in train time is important, then paying for tickets when you arrive is the only thing that makes sense.

Thanks for the advice. I was honing in on the option of making no advance reservation at all (neither Eurostar nor IC), getting to the train ticket counter, buying two tickets on the next Eurostar departure, and if they are not available buying the earliest-arriving IC train. This seems to be your collective recommendation. We are flying direct on Delta Airlines (who have a pretty good on-time record), but nothing is assured in plane travel these days. Even that we will arrive with all the doors and wheels intact! :-). Thanks again for your thoughts.

The walk up fare for the Eurostar train can be very expensive, so I wouldn’t recommend to do that.
What I do recommend is to buy a ticket from Amsterdam to Bruges using only regular intercity trains. Tickets to the regular intercity trains in both the Netherlands and Belgium are not tied to a specific train on a specific time, only to a certain day. It’s only the tickets to the highspeed trains that are tied to a specific train.
Regular intercity trains are mass transit with free seating. A ticket from Amsterdam to Bruges is valid for all Intercity trains from Amsterdam to Bruges on the day mentioned on your ticket.

Also forget whatever 3rd party website that told you that the OUI TGV operates between Amsterdam and Antwerp. Oui TGV trains don’t operate in the Netherlands.
Buy your tickets only on the official website of the train company of The Netherlands or Belgium. The website of the national railway company of the Netherlands is https://www.nsinternational.com/en

From your post on Tripadvisor I gather you seem to have fallen for Rail Ninja. Do not use that site. They are scammers.

Use www.nsinternational.nl in this case.

Thanks again, I hadn’t “fallen” for Rail Ninja, just viewed their site to help research schedules. But it is good to learn that they are considered a scam and that their Oui TGV info is incorrect.

A reliable site to look at schedules is https://int.bahn.de/en

The problem, of course, is that when you google European train schedules, Google sends you sites that pay Google to get their site listed on top. The more they pay Google, the higher they show up on the results page, an invitation to high cost providers.

Rail Ninja is useless for researching schedules. If you try to look up Schiphol to Brugge there they will tell you there are not trains...

Which is probably why you were researching Schiphol - Antwerpen separately. And that not what you should do. Train travel you plan best end-to-end, without assuming in advance what the best route is. Let the planners do that for you.

And Rail Ninja, when it does show trains, sells tickets at highly inflated prices. You often end up paying more than double. For example Rain Ninja charges you 75$ for Schiphol - Antwerpen on the IC train, whereas the ticket actually costs 21,- euro. And on www.ns-international.com you can buy a through ticket Schiphol - Brugge for 34 euro. Rail Ninja is ripping you off.

But what makes them really dishonest is that they have set up a set of websites that are designed to fool the inexperienced traveller in to thinking that they are dealing with an official source. And that is borderlin scamming in my opinion.