The importance of staying central in a visit to Amsterdam with car

For a group of people driving to Amsterdam to stay for a few days with the following diversified agenda:

Visiting tourist attractions
Relaxing:
- Enjoying the summer weather
- Visiting bars and cafés during the day
Night life:
- Excessive consumption of alcohol
- Consumption of enjoyable substances other than alcohol
- Spurring some action in bars and clubs

how important is it that they find somewhere central to stay? Keep in mind that a car is in their hands (although it might be hard to drive when everybody is drunk during the night).

Exploring various places to stay with a price-limit in mind, I found two places for the same price:

First place: Extremely central, but the quality could be better. Furthermore, the car needs to be parked somewhere - finding a parking spot in central Amsterdam is probably not an easy task.
Second place: 10-15 km from the heart of Amsterdam, but it is extremely luxurious. The apartment also has parking spots.

Some points to consider:

How hard is it to find a place to park the car in central Amsterdam?
With the agenda of the group of people in mind, do they have to spend their time in the city's center or is there plenty to do across all of Amsterdam?
How are taxis and public transport in Amsterdam?

There are probably important points that have slipped my mind.

road-trips amsterdam

Best Answer

Finding a place to park isn't very hard, due to the prices of parking - this greatly discourages bringing your car into Amsterdam city centre. The standard solution is to park at one of the "P+R" parking garages at the edge of town and take public transport from there. This is far cheaper. (Can be as low as EUR 1/day!)

It might not be obvious to foreigners, but Amsterdam is merely the biggest city in a whole cluster of cities ("Randstad") in the West of the Netherlands, a cluster that's about as big as London. There's not just good public transport within Amsterdam, there are 24 hour train links to the neighboring cities. You can definitely visit those as well.