Is the Copenhagen Card Worth It?

City cards are a popular way of sightseeing in many European cities – they often offer free or discounted entry to various attractions and also transportation. But they aren’t always cheap, so it’s worth considering whether they offer genuinely good value. We thoroughly researched our trip to Copenhagen to see whether the city’s tourism card was worth investing in. Is the Copenhagen Card worth it? We think it’s one of the best city cards around, and we have some handy hints on to get the very best value from it.

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Practicalities of Using Your Card

You can buy your card online any time before your visit to Copenhagen.

There are various options for the length of time you wish your card to be active for:

Hop Card: 24, 48, 72 hours

Discover Card: 24, 48, 72, 96, 120 hours

There are a number of things to take into account when you use your card. The first is the misnomer that it’s actually a card because it is electronic, so you will need a mobile phone or another portable device in order to use it.

It’s fine to download multiple cards on the same device.

Your card is activated as soon as you enter the first attraction or use the transportation system. You will need a wifi signal or mobile signal for the activation. Most museums we visited had wi-fi which we could connect to.

You are allowed to visit as many attractions as you can each day. But you can only visit each attraction once, with the exception of the Tivoli Gardens where you can re-enter the park on the same day only. If you exit the garden and wish to return you need to make sure that you get a stamp from the security guards. Also, while entry to Tivoli is free using the card, you will need to pay to go on individual rides. Just queue and tap your credit/debit card at the entrance to the ride. Or you can buy multiple ride passes at the ticket machines which can be found around the park.

Pro tip: If you’re worried that you might not have enough data on your phone or can’t get a wi-fi signal on public transport, take a screenshot of the cards and you can show these as a photo whenever you need to enter any of the places you want to visit.

The card will count down the time until it expires, so you can always check how long you have left.

Choosing the Attractions

Copenhagen has an enormous number of fantastic places to visit. From a canal boat tour to historic palaces and castles, art and design galleries, science museums and the wonderful Tivoli Gardens, the city will have something to suit everyone.

In order to maximise your use of the Copenhagen card, have a think about what you would like to see and do. Copenhagen is delightful but it is an expensive city so we wanted to see as many attractions as we could. We did some research to find out which attractions were located close to each other and targeted those, so that we could maximise the number of places we could see in each day.

There are also a number of the attractions in the city that are free to visit and made plans to visit those after our cards had expired.

We spent one of our days outside Copenhagen city visiting Hamlet’s Castle at Elsinor and the fabulous Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. The train transportation was included on the card – we just had to show it to the train conductor – as was entrance to both of these fabulous places. So for us, the Discover Card made a lot more sense as we could use it outside the city.

Like many locations across the world, museums are often closed on Mondays so, if the timing of your visit includes a Monday, we recommend checking that the places you visit will be open on that day and plan accordingly.

Choosing When To Activate Your Card

We chose the 72 hour Discover card. We arrived at Copenhagen’s international airport in the afternoon and, although we could have activated it to allow us to travel into the city centre on the train, we decided to buy train tickets at the airport, not only because they are cheap (30DKK, or ~$4 each), but we knew that many museums would be closing by the time we had arrived at our hotel and settled in.

So we waited until the following morning before we activated the cards. We noticed that some museums local to our hotel opened at 9am and some at 10am. We had a leisurely breakfast on our first full day in the city and decided to visit the National Museum which opened at 10am. This initiated the 72 hour countdown. But on day four of our trip (71 hours in) we could still enter the nearby Museum of Copenhagen which opened at 9am. We were able to stay inside and enjoy the exhibitions, even though the cards officially deactivated at 10am.  

Note: It’s fine to enter attractions just before your card expires – you won’t get ejected when the time is up. However, you can’t use your card if it is due to expire while you are using public transport – it should be valid for the full length of the trip.

We hope you found these insights useful. Below is a link to the Copenhagen card if you would like to consider buying one for your trip. (We may get a small commission at no extra charge to you.)