May 28, 2020

Coronavirus and lockdown … is this the time to rethink tourism in Copenhagen?

May 28, 2020/ John Heward

In 2004 Copenhagen had 136 hotels that provided 4.9 million nights for hotel guests and in that year 250 cruise liners called at the port bringing an annual total of more than 350,000 passengers to the city. Back then, there was no such thing as Airbnb … that only got going in 2009.

And by 2009 that figure for overnight stays in hotels in Copenhagen had risen to 20 million overnight stays and by 2019 risen again to 29 million and that is predicted to DOUBLE by 2030.

In 2019 there were 940,000 passengers "welcomed" to the Port of Copenhagen but the increase in the number of passengers on ships docking here is rising fast. A new fourth terminal at Oceankaj out at Nordhavn will provide facilities for even larger ships - ships with more than 5,000 passengers - so, despite the drastic impact of the Coronavirus pandemic and despite the incredibly negative press with pictures and news programmes about passengers trapped in infected ships all over the World, it is still hoped that the number of cruise-ship passengers doing a stopover in Copenhagen will increase and at a significant rate.

Exact figures for the number of tourists staying in Airbnb accommodation in the city is difficult to find on line although one site has a map showing 26,016 properties in the city that were listed at the end of last month.

That number surprised even me.

Just 4,712 of those listings are for a room in someone's home - the original idea behind Airbnb - but 21,766 are for renting the whole home - houses or apartments.

It seems to be impossible to work out exactly how many tourists are staying in Airbnb properties at any one time and Airbnb is no longer the only player in that business. It is also clear that owners and certainly Airbnb themselves have absolutely no idea how many people will actually occupy a place … they know only the number of beds advertised but can’t know how many are in them or sleeping on the sofa or the floor.

Some of these properties are owned by someone travelling or working away for a fixed time and let their property to someone to take care of it and bring in a modest income and that is fine but exactly how many of those properties registered with Airbnb are owned commercially to exploit what, for now, looks like good returns from short-term rental income? How many long weekends equals 12 months?

The reality is that all, apart from rooms let by an owner in their own home, are homes that should be for permanent residents of the city but are no longer available for long-term rent or to own. By a rough calculation those 21,000 properties could be homes for 30,000 people or maybe more …. about the same number of people that should be housed in Lynetteholm …. the island that will be reclaimed from the sea at considerable expense for new housing and new jobs. Seems sort of crazy.

For three years I lived in an apartment block where there were 16 Airbnb lets around the courtyard. Many people came, stayed, went without a problem. Often the only obvious nuisance was the sound of travel-case wheels being dragged over the cobbles in the early morning or in the evening as people headed out to the metro for the airport … you can always tell which wheelie bags are incoming Airbnb just from the noise because they stop at regular intervals to consult a phone map or the app with details of how and where to get the key. Is there no such thing as quiet wheels for rough surfaces and what happened to the days when people packed just what they could carry on their back?

But there were also bad weekends such as the one when two separate groups, with balconies on either side of the street and just a few metres along from my bedroom window, decided it would be fun to share and exchange music by blaring it out turn by turn across the street from their separate all-night parties.

And I now live in a building with just four apartments but one Airbnb listing, though thankfully that is the smallest in the block and let infrequently, but next door the building has three large apartments and all three seem to be let short term and I can tell you that, although with lockdown tourists may be rare, owners are now finding new ways to bring in income and out of the last six weekends, four have had all-night parties and by all night I mean all night with one cove, drunk or stoned or both, still shouting obscenities and witticisms to anyone and everyone walking past until 6am from a balcony just 2 metres from my bedroom window and this last weekend was the worst with very loud parties on Friday, Saturday and Sunday and with none of them starting until midnight. And by loud I mean very with women screaming for what sounded like a competition and I'm someone who can and does sleep on any train or bus or deck of a ship … the person who, notoriously, muttered and turned over and snuggled up to the warm funnel of the ship (not a euphemism) and slept through a volcano erupting with everyone up on deck to watch and ooh and ahh at an amazing spectacle where I was there but wasn’t.

Hotels, cruise ships and Airbnb bring huge numbers of people to a relatively small and densely-packed city and that is becoming more and more of a problem.

One of the major and most positive things about Copenhagen, among many positive things, is that, unlike so many cities, people do live right in the centre. The more Airbnb in the city, the less people living here. The more tourists the fewer butchers and bakers and candlestick makers and the more burger bars and tourist tat.

Most visitors want to see and tick off the same few things and, although the city council have talked about trying to encourage visitors to go out to a wider area of the city, I'm not sure how you get that across and particularly to the cruise-ship brigade who do a quick dash in on coaches to look at the shops and buy an ice cream and to tick off that list but also to complain about just how small and disappointing the Little Mermaid looks “in real life” as if either a small statue or a cruise could ever be described as real life.

In the first stage of opening the borders from lockdown, visitors from Germany, Norway and Iceland will be able to enter Denmark but what is interesting is that they can visit the city but not stay overnight and to enter Denmark they will have to have confirmed bookings for at least 6 nights outside the capital. Apparently that will remain in force until the end of August. It’s a short-term measure but could provide important information about how much it is possible to manage tourism without killing it.

Obviously, tourists bring money in and jobs are created but is there a full and independent audit of how much visitors spend? And a tally of how much profit is exported to international investors; how many jobs are real so good, permanent jobs for local people and how many jobs are temporary and taken by workers from other countries who themselves have to be housed within the city.

I'm a newcomer and I can certainly confirm that people here are welcoming and are very proud of their city and the life-style is very good - as proved by all those life-style surveys - but, curiously, few tourists seem to appreciate that that life style is actually about family life and facilities for schools and libraries and quiet parks and street corners with communally owned picnic tables in communal courtyard gardens that tourists never see but, if the numbers increase, tourists could so easily overwhelm all that.

from the ridiculous to the sublime?
Oh OK maybe the city can be too quiet.

Like most people who live here, I avoid Strøget - the Walking Street that is now more like Crowded and Frustrating Amble Street than strolling street - and at the west end, with few exceptions, it is filled with shops which seem to be aimed at visitors rather than locals.

The lockdown has meant that people in the city realise just what it is like to have quiet streets and the city to themselves. The novelty will probably wear off if it turns out that restaurants and shops cannot survive from local customers alone but it is certainly the time to reconsider just how much tourism is good for Copenhagen. It's not as bad as Barcelona or Venice or Prague but, once it becomes as bad as Barcelona or Venice or Prague, then it will be much, much more difficult to back track.

note:
In 2018 OECD published figures for tourism in Denmark in their report
OECD Tourism Trends and Policies 2018

March 09, 2020

another new hotel

March 09, 2020/ John Heward

The former offices of Falck on Bernstorffsgade are being converted by new owners - the Arp-Hansen Group - into a hotel or rather into a luxury hostel with 1,650 beds that is to be called Next House.

All original cladding has been removed and work has started within the original concrete frame that will be retained.

With Cabinn City just 65 metres away on the opposite side of the square; a large Marriott hotel immediately to the south, just 140 metres away; a new hotel, The Spectrum, that will have 632 beds, being built a block away to the east and, 500 metres to the west, The Tivoli Hotel with 679 rooms next to the new Cabinn Hotel Dybbølsbro that will have 1,220 rooms when finished, then why have planners allowed yet another hotel here? Surely, this building would have been ideal for the student housing that is desperately needed in the city even if such a development had needed tax breaks or financial support from central or city government?

January 13, 2020

an earlier scheme for a new hotel in the Tivoli gardens

January 13, 2020/ John Heward

Towards the end of 2006, the British firm of architects Foster + Partners won an international competition to design a hotel for Tivoli.

That design, like the more recent design by BIG, was to have a tall circular tower and was described by the architects as:

“driven by a careful urban strategy concerned with the preservation of Copenhagen's low skyline, the scheme comprises an elegant cluster of interconnecting cylinders that combine to form a generous podium corresponding to the heights of the surrounding rooflines. Elegantly rising from the podium, a slender sculptural tower acts as a marker for the scheme and relates in scale to the City Hall tower opposite, adding to the language of spires in Copenhagen. The landscaped roofs of the lower buildings extend the greenery of Tivoli and reinforce the buildings sustainable profile. In addition to allowing for rainwater collection, the buildings are oriented to maximise natural light and views while reducing unwanted solar gain in the summer, but capturing the suns rays in the cooler winter months.”

A photograph of a model of the proposed hotel shows just how high the tower would have been - tall enough to throw a shadow across the square in front of the city hall in the later part of the day and, visually, it would have competed with and from angles it would even have blocked views of the tower of the city hall.

If built as designed, the hotel would have had a frontage to HC Andersens Boulevard and that would have meant the demolition of Slottet - or Tivoli Castle - the building designed by Vilhelm Klein that was completed in 1893. that would have been an unfortunate loss as not only is it a good building in itself and part of the extensive and important new building works across the west side of the city in the late 19th century but it was the first home of what was then called the Kunstindustrimuseet before it was moved to Bredgade. The museum is now known as Designmuseum Danmark.

the building designed by Vilhelm Klein that was completed in 1893 and was the first home of the Kunstindustrimusset before it was moved to Bredgade in the 1920s

December 28, 2019

with so many new hotels opening is this stacking up problems for the city in the future?

December 28, 2019/ John Heward

Pressure from the number of tourists coming to Copenhagen is not as bad as it is in Amsterdam or Barcelona or Venice - or at least not yet - but parts of the historic centre do feel crowded with visitors and with the tourist season now extending through most of the year that can make the experience disappointing for visitors and frustrating and unpleasant for people who live in the city.

There are obvious concerns about Airbnb - particularly when there are problems with parties and noise at night but also because there is a general feeling that letting apartments short term removes those properties from the stock of good homes that would otherwise be rented long-term to local people.

A sudden flood of visitors that come into the city when a cruise ship docks can cause specific problems in part because most are bused into the city, causing traffic problems and in part because the ships are possibly polluting the air with their engines powering the ships while they are in the port.

But, curiously, there have been less concerns voiced about the number of new hotels that are being built or the number of large historic buildings in the city that are being converted into hotels.

The figures are amazing. In the summer of 2018 there were around 21,000 hotel bedrooms in the city but this figure will increase with the opening of 8,500 extra rooms by 2022.

In a city like New York or London, that number of new hotel rooms would seem almost inconsequential but Copenhagen has a population of just over a million people but that is over the wider area of the city and its suburbs. There are around 600,000 living in the inner city and, of course, most of the sights that visitors want to see are in that inner area. The irony is that more people live right in the centre of the historic city that in most capitals but for how much longer? More hotels and more tourists mean, presumably, that more and more commercial properties become coffee shops or gift shops catering to the tourists and drive out the shops that people who live in the city centre want and need.

Copenhagen airport is now seen as the gateway to the region so does that mean tourists visiting Scandinavia tend to add nights in Copenhagen at the start or end of their trip?

Certainly, occupancy rates for hotel rooms here now run at about 80% which is high when compared to hotels in other European cities … so you can see exactly why the construction of hotels is a go-to solution for developers and investors. Their simple conclusion would seem to be to feed the demand to reap the profit.

But how much will a rapid increase in the number of hotel rooms change the city and could it destroy or, at the very least, damage what visitors come to Copenhagen to see?

When a parcel of land changes ownership or when a large building is vacated will the first suggestion be for a hotel rather than anything else?

How much revenue is generated for the city by hotels - rather, that is, than revenue for the profit line of international investors? Jobs are created but how secure and how well-paid are those jobs? Do those jobs go to local people or migrant workers and where do hotel workers live?

Is there a tipping point between vibrant growth and the crowded exploitation of over-stretched facilities?

Tourism was seasonal but that has changed and, in any case, the aim now is about trying to attract major conferences and that would fill gaps between the end of the summer and the start of the Christmas Season and any quiet period, if there is such a thing now, between Christmas and Easter.

There has been an application from the owners of Tivoli to build a big hotel within the gardens … a tower designed by the Bjarke Ingels Group that would be 70 metres high with 18 floors of rooms. It might be round and it might have balconies covered with hanging plants but that does not disguise or hide a building of that height in that position just metres away from the city hall.

There are already something like 2,000 hotel bedrooms in the streets immediately around the Tivoli gardens so should that in itself suggest that some sort of limit or control would be sensible?

The Nobis Hotel on Niels Brocks Gade, to the south of Tivoli - just the other side of the Glyptotek, in what was the buildings of the Royal Danish Academy of Music - opened in September 2017 with 75 new rooms. At the south-west corner of Tivoli, in what was the headquarters of the Post Office, work is now moving fast to convert the buildings for the new Villa Hotel on Tietgensgade set to open in April 2020 with 390 rooms and just 700 metres away, down the railway tracks, is the building site of the Cabinn Hotel Dybbølsbro with 1,220 rooms that will make it the largest hotel and, from it's current appearance, contender for a prize as one of the ugliest hotels in Denmark.

When it opened in the 1960s, the height of the SAS Royal Hotel at the north-west corner of Tivoli, now with 261 rooms, must have shocked and upset some people in the city but the mega hotel seems to be the norm and they make the SAS seem small in comparison …. the new Comwell in Nordhavn designed by Arkitema will have 493 rooms and will open in January 2021.

Surely such a rapid expansion in the number of hotels should be discussed by citizens now rather than in four or five years time when they feel swamped by the number of tourists in their city. By then it could be too late or too difficult to control the problem.