This story about the Copenpay program in Copenhagen, Denmark, spotlights an honoree on our list of Bright Ideas in Travel 2025. Read the full list.
There is something special about arriving anywhere by train, but it’s especially wonderful in Copenhagen. As you step out of your ride and gaze up at the vaulted wooden beams of the Danish capital’s Central Station, you’re already just minutes from the historic center, and connected to an extensive web of public transportation. On top of that easy access, train travel is estimated to produce about 90% fewer CO2 emissions than travel by air, and so seeing the world by rail is a habit in which anyone can take pride.
Copenhagen is turning that satisfying feeling of having done one’s part to preserve the planet into material rewards through a popular city-wide program called Copenpay. This year, the summer-long initiative entered its second year, offering tangible benefits to travelers who choose to arrive by rail or engage in other eco-conscious behaviors during their visit. After seeing great success in 2025, Copenpay’s organizers are hoping to continue the program next year and inspire other European cities to follow the model.
Copenpay was first launched in July 2024 as a way for the city to encourage visitors to participate in hands-on activities, like picking up litter from parks or taking a kayak to help clean the city’s waterways (already some of the cleanest in Europe, and dotted with swimmers in the warmer months). For their efforts, travelers were rewarded with free cultural experiences like museum entries, guided tours, and bike rentals. There’s no registration necessary, no app to download, no form to fill out. Copenpay operates on an honor code—just show your bike rental receipt at the restaurant Bryggeriet Apollo, for example, and you’re given a complimentary beer. This sort of honesty system is a conscious choice on the part of the organizers to emphasize Denmark’s culture as a “high trust society.”
In 2025, Copenpay expanded dramatically in both length and ambition. It ran for three months instead of one, from June to August, and involved over 100 participating institutions, including the likes of Kronborg Castle and the National Gallery of Denmark. This year, Copenpay did not just look at what visitors did in the city, but how they got there. If you came to Copenhagen by train or by e-vehicle—or simply stayed in the city for four nights or more—you were entitled to a reward. Showing evidence of that eco-conscious choice got you a free bicycle or boat rental, entry to a museum, or one of many activities and benefits offered throughout the summer.
During my visit to Copenhagen, I received a free kayak trip in exchange for collecting rubbish from the city’s canals, courtesy of GreenKayak, a Copenhagen-based environmental NGO that has invited volunteers to do cleanups in this way since 2017. As I explored the Erdkehgraven canals with an enormous trash bucket in tow, I encountered more herons, coots, and moorhens—as well as sunbathers and people out for a Sunday swim—than I found items of debris. At the end of a kayaking trip, volunteers weigh the trash they’ve collected and report the amount. The haul I brought in was not substantial: one wine bottle and a drink can were all I had to show for 45 minutes’ work. Other cleanup schemes with Copenpay offer benefits like a free sauna, a meal, or free entry to a concert; here, the reward was the kayak trip itself. That afternoon, with the late summer sun shining down, I passed locals having picnics and barbecues on the shore, even a couple shucking oysters on their boat, and could not help the feeling that Denmark was onto something special.
