OBJECTIVES: To determine parental preferences concerning rotavirus vaccination for their newborn baby, and to calculate the potential vaccination coverage for different vaccine scenarios. METHODS: A Discrete Choice Experiment (DCE) questionnaire was sent to the parents of 1,250 newborns aged 6 weeks in the Netherlands. The DCE included nine D-efficient designed choice tasks. Panel-mixed-logit models were used to estimate the relative importance of the five included rotavirus vaccine attributes; vaccine effectiveness, frequency of severe side effects, protection duration, location of vaccine administration, out-of-pocket costs. The potential uptake or vaccine coverage was calculated for different vaccine scenarios. RESULTS: All attributes showed a significant estimate (P<.05). Parents were more likely to get their newborn vaccinated if the vaccine effectiveness increased, parents preferred a frequency of 1 in 1,000,000 children that suffer from severe side effects over a frequency of 1 in 10,000. Protection duration of 3 years was preferred over 1 year and parents preferred to get their child vaccinated at the GP’s office. Finally, increasing out-of-pocket costs were associated with decreased willingness to vaccinate. With respect to the relative importance of these attributes, vaccine effectiveness was most decisive for parents, followed by out-of-pocket costs, protection duration and frequency of severe side effects. Vaccination coverage rates ranged between 22.8% for the least preferred vaccine scenario and 87.5% for the most preferred scenario.  CONCLUSIONS: When deciding whether to vaccinate their newborn baby against the rotavirus, parents are mostly driven by the effectiveness of the vaccine, the out-of-pocket costs, protection duration and the frequency of severe side effects. Differences in vaccine scenarios resulted in a large range in expected vaccination coverage. Therefore, the context and content of the implementation strategy of the vaccination is expected to strongly affect the vaccination coverage. Specifically requesting an out-of-pocket payment of parents should be considered carefully if a high vaccine coverage is desired.