How to be a Scandi saver – my £126 Copenhagen & Malmö trip
Flights, hostel, coach & pastries the krone-saving way
A 2023 Eurostat study found Denmark was the most expensive country in the EU. But don't let that put you off visiting the land of hygge – there are ways to experience it on the cheap. Using a few timely deals and clever apps, you can make your krone go further than a Danish cyclist crossing the Øresund Bridge into Sweden. I racked up three nights for £125.86 all in. Here's how you too can be a Scandi saver.
And if cheap trips are your thing, make sure to read MSE Georgia-May's How to multi-destination holiday like a MoneySaver.
Flights for £27.30 ✈️
Booking platform Trip.com offers an automatic £10 per passenger discount for the first three bookings you make via its free app. Combine that with its 'Low Fare Finder' and it's possible to find crazily cheap flights.
There's a bit of a trick to it, as the 'Low Fare Finder' only shows one-way flights. Without having my heart set on a particular destination, I browsed the deals and spotted a flight from London to Copenhagen for £6.90 (after the £10 app discount was applied). I manually searched for a one-way flight for the journey back and found one for £20.40 (also discounted by £10). Both were with Easyjet.
Trip.com’s deals don’t include any extras like luggage. I avoided supplementary fees by taking on one carry-on bag of the correct dimensions, and packing my own lunch for the flight.
You'll find more saving tips in our Cheap flights and Easyjet tricks guides.
Accommodation for £86.56 🏨
Denmark is among Europe's most expensive countries for hotels. It seemed a shame to save so much on flights only to blow it on accommodation, so I channelled my backpacking days and plumped for a hostel.
I used Hotels.com to search, and booked Next House Copenhagen for £86.56 for three nights. I slept in a four-person, women-only dorm.
Added bonus: Guests got a free beer every evening.
Check ahead if you should bring your own padlock for the lockers, or if they’re supplied. Next House charges for padlocks, so I made sure to bring my own from home.
See Cheap hotels for more like this. We occasionally list Hotels.com deals, too.
Coach for £6.49 🚍
From Copenhagen, it's easy to nip over to Malmö in Sweden. The two cities are connected by Øresund Bridge, an almost-8km piece of engineering which some may recognise from the Scandi-noir series Broen (The Bridge).
I booked a Flixbus return journey for £6.49.
Both Malmö and Copenhagen are walkable cities, so I didn't rack up any transport costs besides the Flixbus. (Handy if you're someone who step counts, too.)
Food for £5.51 🥮
The free Too Good To Go app, which happens to have been founded in Copenhagen, gets you super cheap eats and saves food from being thrown away. (Thanks MSE Jenny for this top tip.) I spent 49 kroner (about £5.50) and scored an embarrassment of riches from a nearby Ole & Steen.
The pastry haul (pictured below) lasted me four meals. I wouldn’t recommend only eating baked goods for that long though – a body needs fibre.
Free activities 🏞️
It's possible to fill your Danish/Swedish holidays with activities without once reaching for your wallet. Here are some suggestions for free things to do in Copenhagen:
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Street art tour (self-directed)
And in Malmö:
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St Petri (St Peter's Church)
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Street art tour (self-directed)
Look at official tourist websites for more inspiration. The Visit Copenhagen site has a dedicated Copenhagen on a budget section, and Visit Sweden has lots of info on visiting Malmö.
God rejse! (Happy travels!)
22 April 2025
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