CopenPay: what rewarding 'good' visitors has and has not shown

In July 2024 Wonderful Copenhagen, the tourism organisation for the Danish capital region, launched a four-week experiment. Visitors who reached participating attractions by bike or public transport, picked up litter or volunteered at an urban farm would be rewarded with free coffee, museum entry, kayak trips or lunches ¹². The organisation described the idea as "transforming green actions into currency for cultural experiences" ². Two years on, CopenPay is a permanent, year-round programme, and Wonderful Copenhagen is offering the model to other destinations ¹⁰¹¹. That trajectory makes a plain question worth asking: what does the evidence show it has achieved?

The 2024 pilot

The pilot ran from 15 July to 11 August 2024 ¹. Launch coverage put the number of participating venues at more than 20, or at 24 ²¹. Rewards ranged from a free boat trip for collecting litter to a free vegetarian lunch made from local crops and guided museum tours ¹². The then chief executive, Mikkel Aarø-Hansen, told Euronews: "The idea is not to increase tourism" ¹.

Verification was light by design. Coverage at launch described a system based largely on trust, with a public transport ticket given as an example of proof ². A year later Wonderful Copenhagen's marketing director, Rikke Holm Petersen, told NPR: "We really just trusted people" ⁶. National Geographic reported that proof during the pilot could be photos or receipts, and described the scheme as running on an honour system ⁵.

The rationale drew on research cited at launch, attributed to Kantar, suggesting that 82% of people want to act more sustainably but only 22% have changed their behaviour ¹⁹. CopenPay was an attempt to close that intention–action gap with small, immediate rewards.

From summer experiment to permanent fixture

CopenPay returned in 2025 from 17 June to 17 August, with about 90 participating attractions announced before the season ³. New features included rewards for arriving by train or electric car and a bonus for stays of four nights or more. Petersen linked these to emissions from visitor travel under Wonderful Copenhagen's current strategy, while acknowledging in a podcast interview that data showing longer stays reduce emissions were not yet available ⁴.

In June 2026 Wonderful Copenhagen announced that CopenPay would continue with no end date ¹⁰. Its visitor website gives 22 June 2026 as the start of year-round operation and says participants now start and finish each action in a mobile app, then show their screen to claim the reward ¹¹. The organisation says it has made the model freely available to other destinations as DestinationPay and that more than 350 destinations have been introduced to the concept, although the same release gives two different dates for that launch ¹⁰.

What was measured, and how consistently

The headline figures come almost entirely from Wonderful Copenhagen. They include more than 5,000 participants in the 2024 pilot, a total the organisation's whitepaper says includes locals as well as visitors; "well over 30,000" participants across 2024 and 2025 combined; 1,200 kg of litter collected from the canals during the pilot; and 98% of participants saying they would recommend the scheme ⁴⁸¹⁰.

Several numbers do not reconcile across the organisation's own communications and the coverage based on them. The 2024 partner count appears as 20, 24 and 26 ³⁹⁸. The 2025 season is described as nine weeks in pre-season coverage and eight weeks in the whitepaper, with partner counts of 90, more than 70 and more than 100 ³⁴⁸. On cycling, the whitepaper reports a 29% increase in bike rentals during the 2024 pilot and a 59% increase in 2025, without stating a baseline ⁸; the 2026 announcement describes the 59% as an increase "among participants" ¹⁰. These may measure different things — which is the problem. Without a published method, readers cannot tell.

The behavioural claims are self-reported. The European Commission's tourism transition platform summarised the 2025 results as 70% of participants reporting plans to keep the habits at home ⁷. The 2026 release says seven in ten participants "report changed behavior after returning home", and cites an evaluation by the analysis agency Maple finding that 23% were motivated mainly by rewards and 48% mainly by a meaningful, educational experience ¹⁰. Sample sizes and methods for these surveys are not given in the materials we reviewed ⁸¹⁰, the whitepaper does not disclose the programme's costs ⁸, and we found no independent evaluation.

The honour system and other critiques

A trust-based design is defensible for a nudge: the aim is to make sustainable choices visible and easy, not to police visitors. But it means redemptions cannot be read as verified actions. The French outlet consoGlobe argued in May 2025 that the system rests entirely on trust and acts on the packaging of a trip rather than its content ¹². The same piece called flights, usually the largest part of a visitor's footprint, a blind spot the initiative does not address ¹². The 2025 train rewards only help visitors who can realistically reach Copenhagen by rail, which excludes long-haul markets such as North America ⁴.

Scale matters too. Copenhagen recorded more than 12.5 million bednights in 2025, a record, after growth of more than 50% over the past decade ¹⁸. Against that, a few tens of thousands of participants and 1.2 tonnes of canal litter are modest. CopenPay has shown it can engage visitors and generate attention; it has not shown that it shifts the destination's footprint.

The strategic backdrop

CopenPay belongs to a longer line of Copenhagen strategy-making that questions volume as a goal. In 2017 Wonderful Copenhagen published The End of Tourism as We Know It, built around 'localhood' and a shift from promotion towards tourism management ¹³¹⁴; its consultants describe one principle as treating visitor growth as no goal in itself, but rather increasing the value of visitors for all parties ¹⁴. Tourism for Good, the organisation's 2018–2021 sustainability strategy, described tourism as a means to a sustainable end ¹⁶. The current strategy, Copenhagen, All Inclusive, released in September 2024 and running to 2030, aims for real CO2 reductions and explicitly brings visitor travel emissions into scope ¹³¹⁵.

Residents' views supply the context. Wonderful Copenhagen's own tracking, based on 34,626 interviews between January 2022 and May 2025, found that 56% of those asked in the latest twelve months thought tourism created more positive than negative effects, against a target of 72% by 2025 ¹⁵. In April 2026 the city council voted 40 to 13 to have the administration prepare planning rules barring new hotel capacity in part of the inner city, citing concern that a high concentration of hotels and tourists strains everyday life ¹⁷.

CopenPay, in short, is a well-communicated nudge in a city where the bigger questions — volume, flights, housing and residents' consent — are being settled in strategy documents and the council chamber. Its value as a model for other places will depend on whether Wonderful Copenhagen publishes a method and data that allow others to check what it changes.