Amanda L.
Yelp
Schiphol, Amsterdam's airport, is simply wondrous! It is MASSIVE, so definitely give yourself a ton of time to navigate here if you have that luxury. AMS can be a bit chaotic, given how massive it is, especially if you need to go through customs. There normally is more than one customs gate, but when I was here looking to transfer flights, it appeared that only one customs gate was open and the line navigated through what felt like half of the airport!!
Luckily, truly so luckily, I was only in this line for 10 minutes tops before they opened up the other gate as well, which was conveniently right by where I was standing in line, so they redirected us to the new gate and I was able to get through customs there in significantly less time than had I had to wait in the original customs line. I cannot emphasize to you just how long that line was! So I think depending on the time of day and week that you come here, you might run into that issue of a long customs line, but hopefully AMS is aware enough of this fact that they will know when to open up the other customs line to prevent a crazy long queue from existing for too long!
After customs and as I navigated through to my new gate, you enter almost this shopping district/indoor mall area. There are a ton of signs to help navigate you around and are very easy to manage as many will be in English or at least contain numbers that help you to easily find your way.
I needed to go to drop off some of my bags at bag storage first, and I had gotten a little turned around there, but there were tons of AMS employees stationed throughout to help get me back on the right track!
Additionally, AMS literally has a train station stop within the airport, so it is very easy (and very cheap!) to use public transportation to get from here to the Amsterdam city center and I highly recommend it!
All in all, AMS is simply just delightful. I'd happily come back here for any and all layovers! What a treat of an airport to fly in and out of, on top of an already positively stupendous trip to the Netherlands!