Anne Frank House Without the Stairs: Private Step-Free Virtual Reality Experience

The Anne Frank House is a seventeenth century canal house and the route through it is the route the family used. The museum publishes exactly what that involves, which is more useful than any adjective:

• Three steep staircases going up and three ordinary ones coming down
• Two smaller staircases along the way
• One high step of 39 cm
• Handrails on both sides of some steep flights, one side only for others
• Seating at the beginning and the end of the route, and nowhere in between

The museum is equally direct about access: the historic section containing the Secret Annex is not accessible by wheelchair or other mobility aids. Part of the modern museum section can be reached by lift with a staff member’s help, but that is the exhibition, not the hiding place. No ticket changes this, so if stairs are the obstacle, refreshing the ticket calendar will not help.

We bring the Secret Annex to you in Virtual Reality. The headset takes you through the hiding place room by room, furnished as it was during the war rather than emptied as the museum keeps it today, at whatever pace suits you. A guide is with you throughout, telling the story and answering questions, exactly as they would on a walking tour.

It is not a replacement for standing in those rooms, and we would not pretend otherwise. It is the closest thing available to someone the building itself excludes, and for many people it shows more than the museum route does, because the Annex appears as the eight people in hiding actually lived in it.

All of these are private, arranged around one person or one family, and none of them involves stairs.

At your hotel. We come to you with the headsets. A quiet corner of the lobby or a meeting room is enough. This suits people who tire easily and families who would rather not move a relative across the city.

At a ground floor location of ours. A step-free venue in the city, if you would rather come to us and make an outing of it.

A street-level walk through Anne Frank’s Amsterdam. The neighbourhood on foot with no stairs at all: the Prinsengracht, the Westermarkt, the streets the family walked. The Virtual Reality experience comes partway through or at the end. Wheelchair users are welcome and we plan the route with the cobbles and bridges in mind.

On board your river cruise ship. We can come aboard river cruise ships moored in Amsterdam and run the whole thing in the lounge. River ships only, please note. We cannot bring the equipment onto ocean cruise ships.

Worth being straight about, because it affects which of our tours you should book.

Our small group Anne Frank experience finishes with the Virtual Reality section up one flight of stairs. One flight is nothing like the museum’s three, but it is not nothing, and we cannot change it on a shared departure. Other guests are booked on it and the location is fixed.

The step-free formats above are private only. That is not a sales pitch, it is simply the reason they work: a private booking is what lets us choose the venue, come to you, and set the pace around one person rather than a group. So if stairs are a problem, book privately rather than joining the small group tour and hoping.

• Wheelchair users and anyone using a walking aid
• Visitors who can walk but not climb, or not repeatedly
• Older travellers who would find three steep flights and no seating hard going
• Anyone who finds small enclosed rooms difficult
• Families where one person cannot do the museum route and nobody wants to split up
• River cruise passengers with limited time ashore and limited mobility

If part of your group can manage the museum and part cannot, we can run this around their museum slot so nobody spends the afternoon waiting on a bench.

There is no online booking for this one, deliberately. What works depends on where you are staying, how much walking is comfortable, how many of you there are and when you are in Amsterdam, and that is a conversation rather than a form.

Tell us what you need and we will come back with options and a price. Contact us here. If you are still hoping to get into the museum itself, our Anne Frank House ticket date calculator tells you when tickets for your date go on sale.