For national travel, www.9292ov.nl provides a door-to-door itinerary. After delays due to security issues, it will be possible to travel with the new OV-chipkaart (www.ov-chipkaart.nl) in more and more places during 2009 till, eventually, all services should be using this smart-card system.

Cards are issued anonymously or for a particular individual. You buy a pass (or ’load‘ it from a bank account) and swipe the ticket upon entering and leaving the bus, metro, or tram. You pay for the distance travelled, unlike the current zonal system, the paper strippenkart.

With a strippenkart, a journey costs EUR 1.60 for one zone (two strips) and there are discounts for kids and pensioners or for multiple strips (15-45). You can stamp more than one person on a strippenkaart and it is valid for an hour, regardless of transfers between, say, metros and trams. Night buses have a separate strippenkaart.

If your journey includes one or more transfers and one of the public transport companies is not yet ready for the OV-chipkaart, paying by OV-chipkaart means you would pay the boarding rate twice. In this case, it is cheaper to use strippenkaart for the the entire journey.

In most regions, season tickets and strippenkaart will continue to be valid as long as the launch of the OV-chipkaart throughout the Netherlands has not been completed. Afterward, travel tickets other than the OV-chipkaart will gradually be cancelled. This will be announced in time, in the media and by the public transport companies.

Strippenkaarten work by stamping the card, either yourself (in the small yellow machines) or more often by a conductor or driver, at the beginning of the journey. You stamp the card one more strip than the number of zones through which you are travelling. You may also stamp for more than one person on a single card, which will no longer be possible with the new OV-chipkaart.

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