Short answer: The Arcade Hotel Amsterdam no longer operates as a video game hotel. The brand’s owners say the original lease ended after about ten years and the property changed hands, and they state the new operator uses the name without a licence after extensively redesigning the interior. The building at Sarphatipark 106 in De Pijp is now marketed on most booking sites as De Pijp Boutique Hotel — an ordinary 3-star hotel in a good location. If you booked it for the gaming, read this before you check in.
What happened to The Arcade Hotel
The Arcade Hotel opened in February 2016 in the former Hotel Aalborg on Sarphatipark, billing itself as the world’s first video game hotel. It ran for roughly a decade. According to a notice now published on the hotel’s own domain, arcadehotel.nl, the original lease ended, the property changed hands, and the incoming operator never signed a licensing agreement for the brand while continuing to use its trademarks. The same notice says the interior and amenities were “extensively reimagined” and no longer resemble the gaming concept.
That statement is one side of a trademark dispute, so treat the legal characterisation as the brand owner’s position rather than settled fact. The practical part is easy to confirm independently: booking channels have migrated the listing to a new name, and the gaming amenities that defined the property no longer appear in current room descriptions the way they once did.
The brand itself is not dead. Its site is collecting newsletter signups and referencing pop-ups, new destinations and brand partnerships, so a licensed Arcade Hotel could reappear elsewhere. Nothing has been announced with a date or a city.
What the building is today
Same address, same 3-star category, different product. Figures below come from current third-party listings and should be re-checked at booking, because channel data for this property is unusually inconsistent right now — several sites still display legacy Arcade Hotel photos, names and amenity tags.
| Detail | What listings show |
|---|---|
| Current trading name | De Pijp Boutique Hotel (legacy names: The Arcade Hotel Amsterdam, Hotel Aalborg) |
| Address | Sarphatipark 106–108, 1073 EC Amsterdam |
| Star rating | 3-star |
| Guest scores | Around 3.6/5 on Tripadvisor from 1,100+ reviews; 7.8/10 on Booking.com from 800+ reviews, many predating the change |
| Typical nightly rate | Roughly US$100–160 depending on channel and dates |
| Extras | Buffet breakfast around €16.50 per person; Amsterdam tourist tax charged at 12.5% |
| Check-in / check-out | From 15:00 (late arrivals accepted into the night); out by 11:00–11:30 depending on channel |
| Rooms | Singles through quads and bunk-bed rooms, roughly 97–237 sq ft — small by international standards, normal for a converted Amsterdam townhouse |
| Gaming | Some channels still list a game room with a surcharge. Unconfirmed under the new operation — ask in writing before booking on that basis |
Should you keep or cancel your booking
It depends entirely on why you booked.
- You booked for the games. Cancel or move if your rate allows, or email the hotel and ask specifically which gaming facilities are still available and at what cost. Get the answer in writing before you travel — if the listing that sold you the room advertised amenities that no longer exist, that written reply is what an OTA dispute team will act on.
- You booked for the location and price. Keep it. Sarphatipark is across the street, the Albert Cuyp Market is a 7-minute walk, and the Heineken Experience and museum quarter are both walkable. At roughly €90–150 a night this is still one of the cheaper beds in a genuinely good Amsterdam neighbourhood.
- You’re travelling with kids or a group. The quads and bunk-bed rooms remain useful, but confirm actual room size and bed configuration rather than trusting old photos.
One booking habit worth adopting for this property: screenshot the listing page, including the amenity list, before you pay. Channel data is drifting between two different hotels here, and a screenshot is the difference between a goodwill gesture and a refund.
Where to actually play games in Amsterdam
There is currently no direct replacement for a hotel where the room itself is the console. The workable substitute is a normal hotel plus a dedicated arcade venue, and Amsterdam has better options for that than most European cities.
- TonTon Club — the city’s arcade institution since 2013, now running from Westergas (Polonceaukade 27) and a large waterside pop-up in Noord (Aambeeldstraat 28), alongside its original Red Light District room. Entry and board games are free; arcade tokens cost €1 each or six for €5, with bulk deals for groups. Pinball, Japanese imports, air hockey and a kitchen, which makes it a full evening rather than a stop.
- VR Game Park — a 600-plus square metre underground VR arcade for groups who want simulator-style play instead of cabinets.
- Board-game and console cafés across De Pijp and Oud-West — useful filler on a rainy afternoon, though none offer coin-op depth.
If gaming is the point of the trip, book a hotel near a tram line into Westerpark or Noord rather than paying a premium for in-room consoles that no Amsterdam hotel currently guarantees.
Getting to Sarphatipark 106
The old directions circulating online send people to the wrong tram. Tram 24 runs along Ferdinand Bolstraat between Centraal Station and VU Medisch Centrum; its Marie Heinekenplein stop is about a 10-minute walk from the hotel and it does not call at Amsterdam Zuid at all.
- From Schiphol: take the train to Amsterdam Zuid, roughly 6 minutes, then metro 52 two stops north via Europaplein to De Pijp station. From there it is about a 6-minute walk east along Ceintuurbaan. A taxi or ride-hail runs about 12–20 minutes depending on traffic.
- From Amsterdam Centraal: metro 52 southbound to De Pijp, about 8 minutes, then the same short walk. Tram 3 or 4 to the 2e van der Helststraat stop on Ceintuurbaan is the alternative and puts you roughly 3 minutes from the door.
- From the museum quarter: walk. The Rijksmuseum is about 20 minutes on foot through the neighbourhood, which is the nicest way to arrive.
Amsterdam charges its tourist tax as a percentage of the room rate, currently 12.5%, and it is usually collected at the property rather than by the booking site. Budget for it separately.
What the original hotel was like
Worth recording, because it explains why the name still generates searches. The Arcade Hotel offered 42 individually designed rooms for one to four guests — some listings showed 36 as the build-out progressed — each with an NVIDIA Shield for streaming plus a retro console, and four consoles in the quads so nobody sat out. Gigabit fibre Wi-Fi was part of the pitch, which mattered in 2016 more than it reads now.=
The publicly accessible ground floor did the heavy lifting: a Mini Arcade with around 25 coin-op cabinets, a lobby stocked with retro consoles and analogue games, a high-end gaming PC room, current-generation consoles including PS5 and Xbox Series X, a comic book library, life-size chess, a bar, and a small garden. Guests drifted into multiplayer sessions and informal tournaments with strangers, which is the part former guests describe most often and the part hardest to reproduce with a games console bolted to a hotel TV.
