The cheapest way to get acquainted to Amsterdam is offered
by the public transport company, also known as GVB including
city buses, night buses, trams and metros. All major sights
and tourist interest locations are included in the journey
plan, as well as transportation around Amsterdam. Passengers
can choose from 24- hour, 48- hour or 72- hour GVB passes
on bus, tram or metro, depending on their transportation
needs. Transport passes can be acquired from drivers themselves,
when taking a GVB bus or tram or from any GVB ticket selling
office, located in main stations.
An alternative to passes of 24 hours and more are the so-called
stripenkaarts, a charging system calculated by the number
of zones unlike the passes calculated by the number of hours
using GVB. In other words, visitors may choose to buy a
stripenkaart with 8, 15 or 45 strips, depending on how many
zones are crossed until the destination is reached. Also
known as Strip Cards, this type of ticketing may cost €1,
60 up to €19, 20 for 45 strips. From GVB drivers visitors
can buy only 2-, 3- and 8- strip stripenkaarts; the rest
until 45 strip travel cards can be bought only in advance.
Another facility offered by the stripenkaart system is that
a single card can be valid for more than one person, as
long as there are enough strips on the card to cover the
number of zones crossed by each of the passengers.
Once the strip card is bought, it needs to be validated
using the yellow machines posted onboard of the GVB transport
or asking the driver for a stamp. The system to calculate
how many strips must be validated is quite simple: the number
of zones you are traveling within plus one. That is, if
somebody crosses three zones marked on the map, he needs
to validate four strips and so on. Strip cards also have
a temporal validity depending on the number of strips validated.
Strip cards with 2 to 4 strips are valid for 1 hour, while
cards with 17 to 20 strips reach 3 and a half hours of validity.
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