A few weeks before visiting Amsterdam, our friends told us that if we wanted to visit the Anne Frank House, we’d have to buy our tickets online.
What we hadn’t realized at the time was how far in advance we needed to order them. I tried buying tickets the week before arriving in Amsterdam, but disaster – they were sold out for all four days that we’d be in the city.
Thankfully we lucked out by getting some last minute tickets on the day, but don’t make the same mistakes that we made. Here’s how to buy tickets for the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.
How Much Do Anne Frank House Tickets Cost?
As of April 2019, tickets for the Anne Frank House cost the following:
- Adults – €10
- Children aged 10-17 – €5
- Children aged 0-9 – Free
An additional €0.50 booking fee for each ticket applies.
Where Can I Buy Anne Frank House Tickets?
The only place that you can buy tickets is on the Anne Frank House website. Here’s the main ticket page that has more information; from there you’ll need to click through to the booking engine.
How Many Tickets Can I Buy?
There’s a limit of 14 tickets per group which can be any combination of adults and children.
When Do Tickets Go On Sale?
80% of tickets go on sale two months ahead of time. It was April 13, 2019 when writing this post, so it was possible to buy tickets up to June 12, 2019.
How Soon Do Tickets Sell Out?
Tickets seem to sell out about one month ahead of time. For example, on April 13 tickets were completely sold out up to May 11. The only exception was May 8 which only had one time slot available.
It’s therefore best to book your tickets at least one month ahead of time, but ideally even earlier than that.
When Is The Anne Frank House Open?
From November 1 to April 1, it opens from 9am to 7pm every day, other than Saturdays when it’s open from 9am to 10pm. From April 1 to November 1, the house is open from 9am to 10pm.
There are a few exceptions though, like being closed for Yom Kippur.
What Time Slots Are Available?
When buying tickets for the Anne Frank House, you choose a 15 minute time slot, like 9am-9:15am or 6:30pm-6:45pm.
They’re very strict with these time slots to ensure there’s no overcrowding within the house. We arrived 10 minutes before our 12:15pm-12:30pm slot and had to wait outside until 12:15pm. I’d still recommend getting there early like we did though as I suspect they’re strict with not letting latecomers in.
Tickets Are Sold Out The Dates I’m Visiting – What Can I Do?
This is where you have to hope you get lucky like we did. I mentioned earlier that 80% of tickets go on sale two months ahead of time. The remaining 20% of tickets are released for sale on the day itself at 9am.
The thing is, you don’t really want to visit their website at exactly 9am as there’s a good chance that you’ll end up in a long virtual line and never get tickets, which is what happened to us the first time we tried to get tickets.
For our second attempt, we got in line at about 8:30am but still had no success. In the above image you’ll see that we were 724th in line; that screen automatically refreshed every minute, with the number of people ahead of us reducing each time, but it was sold out by the time it got to zero.
Third time’s a charm though and that time Shae did things a little differently. She got in line at 8:25am and manually refreshed the page every minute. I’m not sure if refreshing manually affected our chances, but it certainly didn’t seem to have a negative impact.
In fact, she managed to get through at 8:58am, two minutes before the ticket sale was due to go live. Again, I’m not sure if that’s an anomaly, but it might have contributed towards getting our tickets before they sold out.
Summary
If you know when you’ll be in Amsterdam far enough ahead of time, book your tickets two months in advance to ensure that you can lock in tickets for the date and time you want. If tickets are sold out for the day(s) you’ll be visiting, you’ll need to hope you can get tickets on the day.
It’s definitely worth the effort though as visiting the Anne Frank House was a beautiful, yet heartrending, experience. The audio tour that comes with it is excellent, as are the exhibits. Thanks to the limits on how many people can visit in each time slot, it’s also uncrowded, so you can go through at your own pace without feeling rushed.
This info came in handy to me. Thanks!
Great, I’m glad it was helpful – it’s definitely something you don’t want to miss out on 🙂
There doesn’t seem to be a way to use my US Mastercard to buy tickets to the Anne Frank House. Am I missing something or do I need to use my bank account to purchase the tickets?
When you get to the payment page, there should be Visa and Mastercard options above the bank account option. If you click on the Mastercard logo, you should be able to enter your details there.
This really was great information and very detailed as I will be traveling from the US. I plan to book for Nov 6, so then I should wait for the calendar to open up September 6th?
Yep, the tickets should become available on September 6th. It’s definitely best to book ASAP, but there should still be some tickets available if you weren’t able to buy them that day for whatever reason.
Thank you for the information. I’ve been reading a lot of older posts that mentioned waiting in line for hours and I couldn’t understand why you need to do that if tickets are timed. It sounds like I should only plan to arrive 10-15 minutes before the designated ticket time and I should be fine. That is great news! Thanks for the post.
Yep, getting there 10-15 minutes beforehand will be plenty of time. Hope you enjoy your trip to Amsterdam 🙂