3 day Amsterdam itinerary

The two best-known three-day itineraries add up to 10,135 words. Between them they contain no measured journey time at all, and both do the same thing with the third day: fill it with more Amsterdam. One of them has a reader in the comments asking exactly which ticket he needs for Zaanse Schans and Giethoorn, answered down there and not in the article.

That is the shape of this whole search. The first two days of any Amsterdam trip are not really in dispute: the same museums, in roughly the same order, and we measured that order ourselves. The third day is the one actually up for grabs, and the one with a cost nobody puts a number on before you book it.

Days one and two, in one table

These two days are the two day itinerary and this page does not repeat them. The order below is the shortest of every possible order of those stops, calculated on the walking network rather than guessed, and each day is broken down stop by stop in that guide.

Two things from that guide matter here. Day one starts at the Rijksmuseum because it closes at 17:00, the tightest window of the three museums. And the Anne Frank House sells tickets online only, released every Tuesday at 10:00 for a visit six weeks later, so it is the one fixed point in the trip and the third day is the flexible one by default.

Day three is the only real decision

Two days covers the three big museums and the old centre. What the third day buys you is a choice, and there are only two versions of it: get on a train, or stay and see the parts of the city that a two day plan cuts.

This usually gets answered with adjectives. Charming Haarlem, picturesque Giethoorn, vibrant Rotterdam. None of those words tell you the thing you need, which is how much of the day you get to keep.

How much day each trip actually leaves you

A day trip does not last a day. It lasts however long the daylight lasts, minus the travelling. Amsterdam gets 16.8 hours of daylight in June and 7.7 in December, so the same trip can be a comfortable day or most of a journey depending on when you go. The table below is that subtraction, for all ten destinations.

The train times are one way from Amsterdam Centraal and the walk is from the arrival station to the square people are actually going to. Return travel is twice their sum. The last two columns are the month's daylight minus that, which is not the same as opening hours but is the honest ceiling on a day out.

What the table says, plainly: seven of the ten cost under two and a quarter hours of return travel and leave you more than five and a half hours of daylight even in the worst month of the year. For a third day, most of this list is easy.

The other ceiling on a day trip: the last train back

Daylight is one limit on a day trip. The other is the last train home, and it is not the same for every town: five of these destinations run a train through the night, and two stop before midnight.

The Hague is the one to watch. Its direct trains run every half hour from six in the morning until nine at night and then simply stop: the last one leaves at 20:47 on a Tuesday. It is the only one of the eight that closes in daylight, and it has 30 direct trains a day against Haarlem's 146. On a Saturday it holds out until 00:17.

At the other end, Utrecht, Leiden, Delft and Rotterdam all keep one train an hour going past three in the morning, and Haarlem runs until 01:10. If the plan involves dinner before coming back, those five allow it and Gouda, which stops at 00:19, does not.

These are direct trains only, with no change. After the time in the table there is usually still a connection involving a change of train, which at that hour and in a country that is not yours is not the same proposition. Giethoorn has no direct train at all, not even to Steenwijk, which is its station, and Volendam is a bus, so neither is in the table.

One thing worth saying because it cuts against us as easily as for us: these journey times are the median across the whole timetable, and they land within three minutes of what the railway's own planner quotes for the fastest trip in the table above. Two independent sources agreeing is the reason to trust either.

In December, Giethoorn is mostly the train

Giethoorn costs 5 hours 20 minutes of return travel. In December, with 7.7 hours of daylight, that leaves 2h22 in the village: more than twice as long travelling as being there. In June the same journey leaves 11h28, and nobody would blink at it.

This is the clearest case on the page for why the month belongs in the decision. Giethoorn is not a bad day trip and it is not a good one: it is a summer one. The village is famous for being walked and boated along a canal path, which is a daylight activity, and in December the daylight is the constraint rather than the timetable.

It is also the one destination in our day trips guide where an organised coach earns its price, and for the same reason: it picks you up in central Amsterdam and gives you back most of the travelling.

How many of the ten still work, month by month

The subtraction above, done for all twelve months. The last column counts how many of the ten destinations still leave you six hours of daylight once the travelling is paid for, which is our rough line for a day that is worth the fare.

From March to September all ten work and this page is unnecessary: go wherever you like. In December only four do. That is the entire argument for costing a day trip in daylight rather than in kilometres, and it is why the answer to "which day trip should I take" has a month in it.

Giethoorn is the only destination that drops below four hours in any month, and it does it in three: November, December and January. Everything else on the list clears four hours even at the winter solstice, so in practice the winter question is not which trips are possible but which are comfortable.

What the third day costs in fares

Return fares, second class at the full rate, from the same planner query as the journey times. A third day out of Amsterdam costs between eight and forty euros in transport, and the cheapest of them is not the nearest.

Zaanse Schans is 8,40 euros return and Haarlem 11,00, so the two easiest third days are also the two cheapest, which does not usually happen. At the other end, Giethoorn is 58,00 euros return in fares alone, which is half the price of the organised tour that includes the coach, a guide and Zaanse Schans on the way.

Volendam is not in the table on purpose. Its bus is run by EBS rather than the national railway, and the planner shows the timetable but not the fare, so we have no number we could read and are not printing an estimate.

The three that leave you the most day

Haarlem: 52 minutes of travel, all in

15 minutes on the train each way and 11 on foot to the Grote Markt. It is the cheapest third day available in time, and it leaves 6h50 of daylight in December and nearly sixteen hours in June.

At that price a third day does not have to be a whole day: Haarlem works as a morning, which is not true of anything else below Utrecht in the table.

Zaanse Schans: 68 minutes, and the windmills

17 minutes to Zaandijk Zaanse Schans and 17 on foot across the river. The most photographed day trip from Amsterdam is also the second cheapest in travel time, which is worth knowing before booking a coach for it.

The fare is 4,20 euros each way. That is the number the whole day trips guide is built around, and it is the largest gap on this site between what a place costs to reach and what it is sold for.

Utrecht: 78 minutes, and a whole city

26 minutes by direct train and 13 on foot to the Domplein. Utrecht is the one entry near the top of this table that is a full city rather than a village: 360,000 people, its own cathedral tower and a canal system on two levels.

If the reason you want a third day is that two days of Amsterdam left you wanting more city rather than less, this is the trip on the list that answers that.

If you would rather not leave Amsterdam

There is a perfectly good third day inside the city, and it is made of exactly the four stops that a two day itinerary has to cut. We ran them through the same walking matrix and the same optimiser.

52.8 minutes of walking in that order. 118 in the worst order of the same four stops, which is 9.43 km against 4.2. With four stops you are already playing for over an hour, because the A'DAM Lookout is across the water and everything else is not.

One warning on that first leg. The 12 minutes from the A'DAM Lookout to Centraal cross the IJ on the Buiksloterweg ferry, and the routing engine treats the crossing as though it were a street: it counts no waiting and no sailing time. The ferry is free and runs constantly, but read that 12 as twelve plus a boat. It is the same caveat that applies to staying in Noord in the accommodation guide.

Going to the Lookout first is what makes the day work: it means the crossing happens once, at the start, instead of being a return leg in the middle.

Is three days enough

Three days covers the three big museums, the old centre, and one trip out, and that is a complete visit by any reasonable standard. The walking is not what limits you: 74.8 minutes across the first two days and 52.8 more if the third stays in the city.

What three days does not give you is two day trips. Taking both Giethoorn and a second destination means dropping a museum, and in the winter half of the year the daylight makes that decision for you before your preferences do.

The last two columns of the main table are the time available, which is arithmetic, not the time needed, which is a matter of taste. Three hours in Utrecht might be plenty or half of what you wanted.