Skip the Bus, Ride the Kusttram Instead
There’s no open-top double-decker circling Zeebrugge, and no city-center loop bus selling tickets at a kiosk. If you came here expecting a classic bus tour, you’re looking for the wrong vehicle. The right one is a tram, and it’s better than a bus tour anyway.
De Lijn’s Kusttram is the longest continuous light-rail line on Earth, 67 kilometers and 67 stops running from the French border to the Dutch one, and it passes straight through Zeebrugge on its way along the whole Belgian coast. Board at Zeebrugge Strand or Zeebrugge Kerk and you get an open-view transit tour linking 13 seaside towns for a single ticket around €2.50, gliding past fishing marinas, sandy beaches, and Belle Époque casino facades the whole way. It runs every 10 to 15 minutes in summer and every 20 in winter, so there’s no schedule to memorize.
If you specifically want a guided coach with commentary, the closest thing that actually exists is the Port of Antwerp-Bruges’ own official coach tours, run through the port authority during summer months. These get you behind the ISPS security line into the secure container terminals, the automotive logistics compounds, and the offshore wind turbine assembly quays that you cannot walk into on your own, since pedestrian access to the working docks is strictly prohibited. That’s the real value of a guided bus here: access, not narration.
Cruise passengers already have a bus tour built into their day, whether they clock it or not. Dedicated 25-minute shuttle coaches run direct from the cruise terminal gates to the Bargeplein coach terminal at the edge of historic Bruges, and it’s usually faster than the alternative of a Zeebrugge-Dorp train connection if your ship’s schedule is tight.
Ignore any old write-up naming a “military cemetery” with tens of thousands of graves inside Zeebrugge itself, the real Commonwealth war graves here, at Zeebrugge Churchyard, are a modest wartime cemetery tied to the 1918 naval raid, not a mass burial ground on that scale. The same goes for invented squares and towers attached to Zeebrugge’s name; if a stop on a tour itinerary sounds unfamiliar even to people who live on this coast, treat it as fiction until proven otherwise. For what that raid actually looked like, see our sightseeing guide .
Verdict: the Kusttram beats a bus tour on price, frequency, and view, and the only reason to book an actual coach is the port authority’s behind-the-scenes access. Concrete tip: buy the Kusttram day pass, about €7.50, the moment you plan more than three stops, since single tickets stack up fast.