Hello, I will be land in Netherlands in Dec. 21 and I want to go directly to Rotterdam. what is the cheapest way as i am still a student and don't have much money.
Will it be possible to get a ticket in the station, and will the price be higher there?
I also want to go to Den Haag from Rotterdam Dec. 23 in the morning and return to Amsterdam at night. Is there any suggestion?
Thank you sooooooooooooooooooooooooo much!!!!
Assuming you land at Schiphol: There's two train lines from there to Rotterdam. The regular train (takes 52 minutes, stopping at Leiden, The Hague, Delft and Schiedam on the way; goes twice an hour at :16/:46 and costs €11,60 + €1 single use fee (explained below)), and "intercity direct" (takes 27 minutes, doesn't stop anywhere on the way, goes twice an hour at :09/:39, costs €11,60 + €1 single use fee + €2,30 "supplement" which you have to buy separately, due to it being a special train).
There's also a Thalys stopping at these stations (irregularly?), but you have to reserve that in advance, and I can't imagine it ever being cheaper.
We have a horrendously traveller-unfriendly payment system for public transport in the Netherlands, the "OV-chipkaart", which forces you to "check in" (hold the card up to a card reader at a gate / freestanding pillar, depending on which train station you find yourself at) and "check out" as you exit; you can buy a card for €7,50, and then load a large sum of money on it (always at least €20 more than you need to actually travel; you lose that €20 if you don't check out), to get regular travel costs (the basic €11,60 above), and all your travel movements tracked and tied together in a monolithic database.
Or you can buy single use tickets, which always cost €1 more than you'd pay otherwise, for each individual ticket (the cost of some semblance of privacy). They still require you to "check in" (even though you can't buy them in advance, and they're only valid for the day itself - luckily most ticket checking people realize how incomprehensible this is, and probably won't fine you if you forget to check in with such a single use ticket), but you can at least skip the checking out part without any penalties.
Given that you have just three train journeys to take, single use tickets should be the cheaper option.
There's no cost-effective alternatives to the train for these distances that I am aware of. There's no discounts for booking early with regular trains. Tickets are valid for the day you buy them on; it doesn't matter which specific train you take.
You can look up train times and prices .
Oh, and also relevant: Single use tickets can only be bought at the yellow ticket vending machines with blue signs above them, not at the yellow machines with yellow signs above them. There'll be ticket vending machines near the luggage carousels (so you can buy your train ticket while waiting for your luggage to arrive), and after that in the main atrium above the train platforms.
The Hague has two main train station; "Den Haag HS" (which gets 8-10 trains an hour from Rotterdam) and "Den Haag Centraal" (which gets 4). Centraal is the nicer station with clearer walking directions into the city center, but from HS it takes only a minute or two more to walk to the city center. At night there's four direct trains an hour from Den Haag Centraal to Schiphol (until 22:00), and two until midnight. From HS it's just two an hour all evening long, and then one per hour after midnight, changing at Leiden.
[ 24-Oct-2014, at 01:51 by Sander ]
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