Van Gogh Museum

How to visit without getting turned away

The mistake people make here is assuming they can decide on the day. They can’t. The Van Gogh Museum is timed-entry and online-only — there is no ticket desk at the door, and in peak months the slots disappear five to six weeks ahead. Even the free under-18 tickets have to be pre-booked. Plenty of visitors walk up to Museumplein, find the next available slot is three days away, and leave. Book a timed ticket on vangoghmuseum.nl (or an official reseller) before you fly, and treat the start time as a real appointment.

Adult entry is €25, about £22, and it’s free for under-18s — a genuinely good deal for a major collection. The optional multimedia guide is a €3.75 add-on (€2 for 13- to 17-year-olds) you choose when booking; it’s worth it, because the museum hangs the work roughly in order and the guide ties the rooms to Van Gogh’s letters and his decline rather than leaving you with wall labels. Skip it if you’d rather move at your own pace.

Timing your slot — and is the €25 worth it?

Take the first 09:00 slot or a late-afternoon one — the middle of the day is the busiest, and the rooms around the famous paintings get genuinely shoulder-to-shoulder. If your trip includes a Friday, the late opening to 21:00 is one of the calmest times to go. Allow an hour and a half to two and a half hours; add more if there’s a temporary exhibition you actually want to see rather than walk past.

If you have any feeling for his work, the entry is easy to justify: this is the largest Van Gogh collection anywhere, and seeing the Sunflowers, the bedroom and Almond Blossom in the sequence he painted them is the real reward. But be clear about what it is — a paintings museum, not a spectacular building like the Rijksmuseum next door. If galleries bore you, the €25 is better spent elsewhere. Pair it with the Rijksmuseum (a 10-minute walk across Museumplein) rather than stacking two heavy museums into one afternoon — one big collection a day is plenty.