How to Save Money on a Short Trip to Copenhagen

This past year, my friends and I had a week off of school. So, we decided to travel for 3-4 days of the break, and we plugged our travel dates into Skyscanner and searched Everywhere in order to find the cheapest location to fly to from Istanbul.

Cheapest flights were to: Copenhagen, Denmark.

I was excited, because I have never been to Denmark and wanted to be able to add another country to my list (and scratch off some more countries on my Luckies of London Scratch Map). We booked our cheap flights, only to find that Copenhagen is a very expensive city to visit. Whoops! Still excited to visit Scandinavia for the first time, we started to find ways that we could cut costs to make the trip more affordable. 

Here are my recommendations for saving money while traveling in Copenhagen.

1. Because food is cheap in Turkey, but much more expensive when bought on the Danish Kroner, we made breakfast muffins and bought muesli in Turkey and took it with us on this trip. In this way, we were able to save bang on our breakfasts each morning. We only bought coffee from the Seven Eleven each morning, which in hindsight we could have saved money on as well if we had brought a French Press and coffee from home or drank tea that we made at the hostel.
2. We spent one day taking a Sandemans Free Tour of Copenhagen. We tipped the tour guide afterwards, but this still saved us money over buying a full-price tour. Plus, we got to learn a lot about the city, the royal family (I didn't even realize there was a royal family...) and politics in Denmark. Our guide had actually run for political office before, so he was very good at describing how Denmark is different from other European countries. Did you know that the happiest people live in Denmark?
3. By shopping at Netto near our hostel and then preparing food in the communal kitchen at our hostel (Urban House), we saved lots of money on lunches and dinners and were able to enjoy more food. This really came in handy when we visited Kronborg Castle; instead of having to search the town when we got hungry for lunch, we just pulled out our sack lunches that we had prepared and ate while sitting on the wall of the castle, watching Sweden across the water. It was a magical experience, as the wind whipped up from the sea and we enjoyed the sunshine. This wouldn't have been possible if we were eating at a cafe for each meal.
4. We did an out-of-the-city trip the day before we flew out of Copenhagen. We were able to buy a 24 hour ticket and use it for both our trip to Kronborg Castle, as well as our train trip to the airport. This saved us quite a bit of money on train tickets.

Overall, I loved my experience in Denmark. The sun shone for much of our trip, and I was able to relax and see some beautiful sites. My favorite part of the trip: Kronborg Castle! It was absolutely amazing, and I am a huge fan of Shakespeare so it was special to visit the setting of Hamlet. I have visited quite a few castles so far, but Kronborg took my breath away like no other. 

Visiting Copenhagen was also very educational for me. I am very interested in renewable energy, and Denmark implements a lot of good environmental management policies. It was good for me to see the wind turbines and visit the city, as afterwards I started to take an online course from the Technical University of Denmark on Environmental Management, and now the references all make so much more sense since I have been there.

Short trip to Copenhagen = success!

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