CopenPay: How did Copenhagen make traveling Sustainable?

Impact on sustainable tourism

CopenPay aims to change the behaviors of tourists when they visit Copenhagen but also the impact of their journey to the city. By rewarding the ones arriving via train, the programme aims to reduce the CO2 emissions caused by short-distance flights. Also, CopenPay encourages tourists to stay for more than four days in Copenhagen, aligning with research showing that longer stays reduce the per-day carbon footprint of tourists¹. The data from CopenPay 2024 show interesting results in the shift of behavior from tourists. During its pilot phase, CopenPay saw a 29% increase in bike rentals, showing the strong adoption of sustainable travel habits of tourists¹. In tourists feedback surveys, it was revealed that 98% of participants found the program valuable and worth continuing². At a global scale, more than 100 cities expressed their interest in replicating Copenhagen’s reward-based programme, demonstrating its potential scalability¹. This growing interest from other cities, numbers of success in Copenhagen paired with studies emphasize the relevance of combining environmental awareness with economic incentive to ensure long-term efficiency of sustainable tourism programmes.

Challenges

As the programme CopenPay appears to be a success for the city and in transforming the tourists behaviors, a major issue arises that the city will inevitably face: the funding. CopenPay will be running for more than two months in 2025, therefore will have a high cost to maintain and the long-term viability and reconductibility of the programme over the years will depend on consistent funding from the city and/or public and private actors. As often in this type of programme, the financial stability will be threatened at some point. Public-private partnerships could then become the solution, especially with the help of the EU who could upscale the programme by deploying it in other European cities and therefore allocate a specific budget to this purpose.
Another challenge for this programme would be in the replication in other cities. While Copenhagen has implemented and grown the programme after the pilot year, if the EU was to lead this initiative at the level of the continent, some issues of personalisation for each city might arise. Indeed, each city being different, the programme would have to be adapted and aligned with actual urban planning and life of the city in order to increase its efficiency and ensure its success. Therefore, developing the programme in other cities will take long and might not be received the same way in every city, knowing that Copenhagen is already part of a country focused on sustainability.

Conclusion

In 2024, to face over-tourism and irritation of the residents in that regard, Wonderful Copenhagen (the official tourism organisation of the Capital Region of Denmark) created CopenPay. This initiative was a real shift in tourists behaviors and represents today an important step in the organisation’s ambition being “for 2030 that tourism in Greater Copenhagen positively impacts local and global sustainable development”. CopenPay is today seen as a pioneering model in sustainable tourism inspiring cities and demonstrating how urban mobility strategies can be thought of in favor of the environment. By using gamification to do so, Copenhagen found an innovative way to include local partners while encouraging tourists to rethink their stay in the city. This success today inspires beyond borders and raises the question of how sustainable tourism programmes align with economic, environmental and sociocultural goals on a bigger scale? Future research in that field should focus on measuring long-term behavioral shifts in sustainable tourism and the policy frameworks that could contribute to upscaling this project at a European level.