Put in your ship's times and pick the cities you would like to see. We work out how long you really have ashore once the queue to disembark, the traffic on your actual date and a proper safety margin are taken off, then show only the tours that fit.
These two numbers decide everything below. They are the minutes we refuse to plan a tour into, so if your ship tenders ashore by lifeboat, or you simply want a bigger cushion, raise them and watch the list shorten.
From the moment the ship is alongside to the moment you are actually walking down the quay. Large ships and tender ports take longer.
Kept completely free before all aboard. Nothing is ever planned into it. This is the slack that absorbs a late train or a long lunch.
Door to door from the cruise terminal to the exact spot where your guide waits. Public transport figures are Google Maps journeys built on live RET and NS timetables, so the walk and a typical wait are already inside them, and every train leg was cross-checked in the NS reisplanner. Driving figures include five minutes to drop off and walk in, because these meeting points sit inside pedestrian zones, and are rounded to the nearest five minutes.
| Meeting point | Metro & train | Taxi or car | How the journey runs |
|---|
The bar at the top is the shape of your day, not of any one tour. It runs from the moment the ship is alongside to all aboard, and splits into three: the time it takes to get off, the time that is genuinely yours, and the safety margin pinned at the right that nothing is ever planned into. Travel time changes with every tour and every city, so it lives on the tour cards where it belongs.
Traffic is applied automatically. Driving times were measured off peak. On a weekday, a leg that starts between 07:00 and 09:30, or between 16:00 and 18:30, gets fifteen minutes added, because the A13 towards Delft and The Hague is a different road at those hours. Weekends get nothing added. Trains and the metro are never adjusted, they run to a timetable. Fifteen minutes is a deliberate allowance, not a measurement.
The return leg is always calculated from the furthest city on the route rather than the nearest, so a multi-city tour is judged on its worst case. The three cruise-port excursions work differently: pickup at the terminal is always included, so their stated duration is the whole day door to door. The two small-group ones are shared rather than private, English only, and priced per person; the custom one is private, runs in six languages, and is priced per group.
Ship times move. This tells you whether a plan is sane, it is not a guarantee, and the written guarantee belongs on the page next to it.
One thing worth knowing before you step off: Wilhelminaplein metro station is a seven minute flat walk from the terminal, and from there the metro reaches Rotterdam Centraal in about six minutes for €1,66 per person. Passengers are routinely quoted €150 for a taxi to do the same journey.
