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The Amsterdam Travel Guide

About

Who writes this, and what I actually checked.

My name is Diego Fresno. I have been to Amsterdam. I have not taken every tour on this site, and I say so on the pages where it matters.

The short version

  1. I am not a local and I do not pretend to be one. I visited, and the photographs on this page are mine.
  2. What I can do is measure: departure boards, ticket pages, opening hours, prices at six weeks out and at six days out.
  3. Every figure on this site names its source and the date it was checked. If I cannot reproduce a number, I do not print it as fact.

Why another Amsterdam guide

Because the ones that exist agree with each other a little too easily. Read five guides on when to visit Amsterdam and you will find the same advice, the same months and the same warnings, and not one price. They all say the shoulder season is cheaper. None of them says how much cheaper.

That gap is the entire reason this site exists. Not better writing: numbers. When you take a figure that everyone repeats and go and measure it against the company that charges it, the sources stop agreeing, and the disagreement is usually more useful than the figure.

What I am, and what I am not

I went to Amsterdam and walked it for a day in November. That is the honest extent of my personal experience of the city, and it is why you will not find me writing that some restaurant is the best in the Jordaan. I did not eat there.

What I do instead is the part most guides skip because it is boring: reading the operator's own booking page instead of a summary of it, sampling a timetable twice at different intervals to check the count, and printing the date next to every number so you can tell when it went stale.

The day these photographs were taken

All four are from 16 November 2018, between about eleven in the morning and half past six in the evening. They are not good photographs. They are on this page because they are mine and because they are true, which for an about page matters more than whether they are pretty.

Diego Fresno standing on Dam Square in Amsterdam, with the Royal Palace behind him on an overcast November morning
Dam Square, late morning. The Royal Palace is behind.
Diego Fresno sitting on a bench beside an Amsterdam canal, with autumn trees and a bridge behind
A canal bench in the early afternoon, with the trees still turning.
Diego Fresno standing beside bicycles locked to the railing of an Amsterdam bridge
Bicycles on a bridge railing, which is where most of them live.
Diego Fresno leaning on a railing on the Damrak in Amsterdam at night, with the lit canal houses across the water
The Damrak after dark. Half past six in November, which tells you how short the days get.

How this site makes money

Some links to tours and tickets are affiliate links. If you book through one, the operator pays a commission and you pay exactly the same price. It does not change what gets written: on more than one page the option I recommend is the one that pays nothing, because it is the right answer. The full version is on the affiliate disclosure page.

Corrections

If a figure here is wrong, I would rather know. Write to hola@diegofresno.com and tell me which page and which number. Corrections get made in the page itself, and the page says what it used to say and why that was wrong.