Airport
Amsterdam Schiphol Airport (AMS)
Schiphol is the country's one large international gateway, and its shape is unusual enough to be worth reading before you land: a single terminal under one roof, three departure halls that share the same shops and the same arrivals level, and a full railway station in the basement. It stands on the drained bed of a lake, below the sea outside, held there by the water engineering the country built its landscape with. For most travellers the airport comes down to two questions — which pier the gate letter sends you to, and which train you want from downstairs.
Updated 2026-09-22
- CodesAMS · EHAM
- Passengers per year (2024)66,828,453
- Elevation-3 m
- ServesAmsterdam
- Official websiteschiphol.nl
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One terminal, three halls, piers through the alphabet
Schiphol has no separate terminals. The check-in areas are numbered as departure halls, and Hall 1, Hall 2 and Hall 3 open off one continuous building above a single arrivals level, so moving between them is a walk rather than a shuttle bus. Which hall you use is set by your airline and printed on the boarding pass, not by where you are flying. Gates, by contrast, are lettered: the piers run through the alphabet, and that letter, not the hall number, decides how far you walk.
The letters also carry the border. Some piers are Schengen and some are not, and one of them is split over two levels serving both, so the same letter can mean two different walks and two different regimes — read the level on the screen, not only the gate. Airside, the Schengen and non-Schengen zones behave like separate buildings joined by passport control, which is why a connection that crosses between them costs a queue even though you never leave the roof.
Schiphol Plaza and the station underneath it
The hall the arrivals doors open into, Schiphol Plaza, is a public concourse rather than an airport corridor: shops, a supermarket, the car hire desks and the taxi rank are all in it, and anyone can walk in without a ticket. Directly beneath it is a proper railway station rather than an airport shuttle stop, reached by escalator from the same floor, with intercity trains to Amsterdam and to the other big Dutch cities leaving from its platforms through the day and most of the night.
Because that station belongs to the national network, the ordinary rules of the Dutch rail system apply at its gates — including one catch travellers meet nowhere else on the journey: the fast services that use the high-speed line south carry a supplement on top of the normal fare, bought with the ticket or from the post on the platform. International trains call here too, so a run on to Belgium or France can begin in the basement instead of in the city.
The border, the kiosks and the hall that sets your arrival time
Arriving from another Schengen country there is no passport control at all: gate, baggage belt, Plaza, out. From outside it you meet the Marechaussee, the military police force that staffs the Dutch border, and that hall is where an arrival loses its time. Chipped EU passports qualify for the automated gates; everybody else waits for an officer, and non-EU visitors on a short stay are registered digitally instead of stamped, a self-service kiosk step that only bites the first time.
Which document any given passport needs before boarding — including the airside transit permit a few nationalities require even when they never enter the country — is a question for the entry rules of the Netherlands, not for the terminal. Departures run in banks, and the building shows it: the long-haul push in the morning and the European one later in the day leave the security lanes nothing like the hall you see between them. Long-haul check-in also closes sooner than people expect.
Taxis, transfers and the car you probably do not need
The official rank stands in front of Schiphol Plaza, signposted and worked by dispatchers at busy hours. Dutch airport taxis run on the meter rather than a posted flat fare, so a ride into the city costs whatever the traffic costs; a transfer booked before you fly is the way to fix the price instead. Ignore anyone who offers you a car inside the building and walk out to the marked rank.
Car hire desks sit in the Plaza with the vehicles in the garages alongside, and the long-stay car parks run free shuttles to the same doors. A hire car earns its place for the coast, the bulb fields and the villages the trains reach awkwardly. It earns nothing at all for a stay in Amsterdam itself, where parking is scarce and expensive and the train from the basement beats the motorway door to door. Collect the car on the way out instead.
Long waits, early starts and the practical end
Hotels cluster in two rings, one at the airport itself and one in the office parks and towns immediately around it, most of them running their own shuttles. For a pre-dawn departure that beats a bed in town, because the first trains of the morning do not always line up with an early check-in. Left luggage comes in two forms: self-service lockers airside, past security, and a staffed counter landside below the arrival halls. A bag locked airside cannot be collected on a trip into the city.
For a long landside wait, the panorama terrace above the departure halls puts you out over the apron with the aircraft in front of you. An eSIM bought before you fly has the phone working the moment you land, and the airport's free wireless will set one up if you leave it too late. Cash machines are easy to find in the Plaza, but travel light on notes: money in the Netherlands is a card and phone affair, and when a terminal offers to convert the amount for you, refuse.