Escorted Amsterdam Holidays and City Tours
Amsterdam rewards visitors who slow down. The city centre is a set of concentric canals dug in the seventeenth century, lined with tall brick houses built by merchants who paid tax by the width of their frontage. Almost everything worth seeing sits inside that ring, which is why a well-planned few days here goes a long way.
Our Amsterdam holidays are short breaks with a guide, arranged so that the museum visits are booked in advance and nobody spends an afternoon in a ticket queue. You will find the current departures below, with the full itinerary and everything included on each tour page.
Frequently Asked Questions About Our Amsterdam Tours
It depends on the tour. Our Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum and Christmas Markets break travels by Eurostar from London St Pancras, with transport in the Netherlands as set out in the itinerary. Other Amsterdam departures have travelled by air, with private coach transfers at the destination. The travel arrangements are listed in full on each tour page, and if you are weighing one against the other, ask us.
Yes, provided you dress for it. The canals are lit for the Amsterdam Light Festival, with illuminated works installed along the water from late November into January, and the Christmas markets and Ice Village bring the squares to life. Museums are open and noticeably calmer than in summer. Daylight is short, around eight hours, so afternoons indoors and evenings out of doors is the sensible pattern.
All entrance fees listed on the tour page are included, and on our festive break that means guided tours in the Rijksmuseum and the Frans Hals Museum, Museum Van Loon and the Ice Village Christmas Market. Entry is arranged in advance, which matters at the Rijksmuseum where timed tickets are the norm. Anything optional is described as such, so you can see exactly what is covered before you book.
Enough to matter, though it comes in stages rather than all at once. Museum visits involve standing and slow walking for an hour or two, and the canal streets are cobbled with humped bridges that have steps. Transport covers the longer distances between visits. Everyone's idea of comfortable is different, so tell us what you can manage and we will describe the days honestly before you commit.
Dutch Golden Age painting in three museums
The Rijksmuseum is the reason many people come. Its Gallery of Honour ends at Rembrandt's Night Watch, but the quieter rooms either side are where the seventeenth century really opens up: Vermeer's milkmaid, Hals's laughing sitters, still lifes of oysters and lemons painted for people who had just become very rich very quickly.
Frans Hals is worth following out of the city. He worked in Haarlem, twenty minutes west by train, and the Frans Hals Museum there holds his enormous civic guard portraits in the almshouse where some of his sitters later lived. Seeing his loose, almost impatient brushwork up close explains why nineteenth-century painters treated him as an ancestor.
Museum Van Loon, on the Keizersgracht, is the smaller pleasure: a canal house furnished as a family home, with a formal garden and coach house hidden behind it. Our festive tour includes guided visits to all three.
The canal ring and how it was built
Amsterdam's Grachtengordel was speculative property development on a grand scale. Between roughly 1610 and 1660 the city dug the Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht in a half-moon around the medieval core, sold the plots, and set rules about how the houses could be built. The result is a UNESCO World Heritage site that still functions as ordinary streets.
Look up and you can read the dates off the gables: stepped ones are early, the neck and bell gables later, the wider classical facades later still. The hoisting beams under the roofs are still in use, because staircases inside these houses are as steep as ladders and furniture has always gone in through the windows.
A boat gives you the view the houses were designed to be seen from, and takes the weight off your feet for an hour.
Getting about the city on foot
Central Amsterdam is compact and flat, which is in its favour, but it is not effortless. Worth knowing before you come:
- Pavements are brick and cobble, often uneven, and canal bridges are humped with a few steps at either end.
- Cyclists have their own lanes and considerable confidence. Look both ways before stepping off a kerb, and do not stand in a red-surfaced lane.
- Trams are frequent and useful; stops in the centre are rarely more than a few minutes apart.
- Museum galleries involve a fair amount of standing, though the Rijksmuseum has benches in most rooms.
On an escorted break the walking comes in manageable stretches, with the coach or a canal boat covering the longer distances. If you would like a realistic idea of how much is on foot on a particular departure, ask us and we will talk you through the days.
