Where to stay in Amsterdam

Centrum is the medieval city plus the canal belt: the Binnenstad either side of the Damrak, the Grachtengordel ring of Singel, Herengracht, Keizersgracht and Prinsengracht, the Jordaan west of it and the Plantage out to the east. The whole thing is a semicircle with a radius of about 2 km, hinged on Centraal Station, and almost every major sight is inside it. You walk out of the hotel into the trip.

The bill comes in three parts. Money: three and four-star rooms run EUR 100 to EUR 200 a night, roughly double in summer, and the cheap end of the stock is old buildings with steep Dutch staircases and no lift. Noise: the Wallen, Leidseplein and Rembrandtplein are the city's nightlife and its tourist traps in the same streets, and a canal-facing room hears all of it. Crowds: the Damrak and Kalverstraat are shoulder-to-shoulder souvenir shops from mid-morning onwards, and the city council has spent years trying to reduce the pressure rather than add to it.

The district is not uniform, and the address matters more here than anywhere else in Amsterdam. West of the Damrak - the Nieuwezijde, the canal belt, the Jordaan - is the same walk to Dam Square, quieter, and better looking. East of it is De Wallen, where the cheap beds are. Book Centrum for a short first visit, ask which canal the window faces, and check on a map whether you have booked next to the Oudezijds Achterburgwal before you pay.

Zuid is where most people should sleep. The Museum Quarter puts the Rijksmuseum, the Van Gogh and the Stedelijk side by side with the Vondelpark behind them; De Pijp, twenty minutes east, is the Albert Cuyp market and the densest run of restaurants and bars in Amsterdam that is not priced for tourists. Metro 52 gets you from De Pijp to Centraal in about six minutes, and Amsterdam Zuid station is roughly eight minutes from Schiphol, which no other borough can match.

It is also the one borough Wikivoyage calls perfectly safe at night without qualification, and the reason is dull: it was built between 1870 and 1930 for the middle and upper classes and has stayed that way. Streets are wide, quiet after 22:00, and lined with the kind of shops that shut at 18:00.

The trade-offs are real. Museumkwartier rooms cost close to Centrum money without the Centrum walk, and the area empties the moment the museums close. The Zuidas, the office district around Amsterdam Zuid station, is convenient, cheap at weekends and completely dead on a Sunday evening. Buitenveldert, at the southern end, is a 30-minute commute from the centre and might as well be a different town. Book the Museum Quarter or De Pijp; look hard at anything further south.

West starts where the canal belt stops, at the Singelgracht, and the useful part of it is a strip about 2 km deep: Oud-West around the Kinkerstraat and the Overtoom, De Baarsjes beyond it, and the Westerpark and Spaarndammerbuurt to the north. It is 19th and early 20th-century apartment blocks, some of the best Amsterdam School architecture in the city, and a bar and restaurant scene that fills up with locals on a weekday.

Practically, it works because of trams. Lines 1, 5, 7, 12, 13 and 17 all run through it, most of them via Leidseplein or Centraal, and the walk to Dam Square is about 25 minutes if you would rather. Rooms cost noticeably less than Zuid and roughly half of Centrum, and the Westergasfabriek and the Foodhallen give you somewhere to go in the evening without going back into the centre.

Two warnings. There is nothing historic to look at - almost all of it was built after 1870 - so every sightseeing day starts with a tram. And the borough gets worse the further west you go: the cheap hotels advertised as Amsterdam West near Sloterdijk station are cheap because the view is office blocks, and west of the A10 you are in Nieuw-West, which is a different proposition entirely.

Oost runs from the Amstel all the way out to artificial islands in the IJ, and Wikivoyage's own article opens by warning that it is not one place. The part worth booking is the western end: the Oosterpark, the Dappermarkt, and the streets around Wibautstraat, which are 25 to 30 minutes on foot from Dam Square, served by metro 51, 53 and 54 and by trams 1, 12, 14 and 19, and cheaper than anything in Zuid.

The Eastern Docklands north of it are the other good option - 1990s architecture on the old harbour islands, quiet, with the 26 tram running straight to Centraal in about ten minutes. Beyond them, IJburg is 30 to 40 minutes from the centre and is a suburb with a beach, not a base for a city break.

So the district is a coin toss unless you check the address. It has almost no hotels of its own - most of the stock is apartments - very little to see, and Wikivoyage notes that some travellers are not comfortable in the neighbourhoods east of the Oosterpark. Book the strip between the Amstel and the Oosterpark, or the Docklands, and it is good value. Book by borough name and you may end up on an island.

Noord is the far side of the IJ, and the crossing is the whole point. The ferries leave from a jetty behind Centraal Station, they are free, the busiest runs every seven minutes around the clock, and the ride is about four minutes. Metro 52 does the same trip underground with two stops in the borough. In practice you are ten to fifteen minutes from Dam Square door to door for a fraction of the room rate.

The waterfront strip has enough to fill an evening: the EYE Film Institute, the A'DAM tower, Tolhuistuin and a run of restaurants in converted industrial buildings. Fifteen minutes further west by ferry, NDSM is the old shipyard turned street-art quarter, with the STRAAT museum and a skate park. East of that, the borough turns into 1960s housing and then into open farmland with actual villages in it.

Wikivoyage is blunt that Noord has stayed off the tourist map and that its amenities are not well developed, and that is the honest case against it. There are very few hotels, the restaurant coverage thins out fast once you leave the water, the NDSM ferry only runs every half hour, and you cannot walk home - there is no footpath through the IJ tunnel. It suits a longer stay, a tight budget, or a second visit. It does not suit two nights and a list of museums.

Nieuw-West is the Westelijke Tuinsteden, the western garden cities: post-1950 housing estates laid out around the Sloterplas lake, built to relieve the overcrowded old city. It is a functioning residential district of ordinary Amsterdam life, and it has no reason at all to appear in a visitor's plan.

It appears anyway, because it is cheap and because booking sites file it as Amsterdam. Metro 50 and 51 and trams 1, 2, 7, 13 and 17 run in, so the centre is 20 to 30 minutes away door to door and Schiphol about 25. That is genuinely workable if you are here for a week, on a tight budget, and prepared to treat the room purely as a bed.

What it costs you is every evening. Dam Square is over an hour on foot, so there is no walking home and no changing your mind at 23:00. There are no sights, the restaurants are neighbourhood places that close early, and Wikivoyage still flags Osdorp specifically over violence and harassment, with the caveat that urban renewal has improved things. If the saving over West or Noord is not large, it is not worth it.

Zuidoost is not attached to the rest of Amsterdam. It sits southeast of the ring road, separated from the city by the municipalities of Duivendrecht and Diemen, and it was built in the 1960s and 70s as a modernist experiment: high-rise slabs in parkland, connected by a raised metro viaduct. It has a strong Surinamese and Ghanaian community, a genuine architectural history and the Bijlmermonument to the 1992 air disaster, and none of that is why people book here.

People book here because the Johan Cruijff ArenA, the Ziggo Dome and AFAS Live are all on one boulevard, and because the chain hotels around them are the cheapest three-star rooms with an Amsterdam address. The transport is genuinely good: metro 50, 53 and 54 reach Centraal in 15 to 20 minutes, and Bijlmer ArenA is an Intercity station about 15 minutes from Schiphol.

The problem is what happens outside those 20 minutes. Dam Square is over two hours on foot, so the metro is not a convenience, it is the only option. Arena Boulevard is shopping malls, car parks and venues, dead on nights when nothing is on and packed on nights when something is. Wikivoyage still describes Zuidoost as carrying a bruised image over violence and harassment. Book it for a concert at the Ziggo Dome. Do not book it for a city break.