We landed in Copenhagen on 21 November 2025 and spent three nights in a hostel around the corner from Central Station, all five of us in one room. On the fourth day we got on a train, crossed the Øresund, and spent the rest of the week in an apartment in Malmö, riding back into Denmark when we wanted Denmark.
Plenty of people do this. It is not a trick anyone invented and Copenhagen is not unaware of it. What follows is what the arrangement actually looked like with three kids in late November, including the parts that did not work.
Three nights in a Copenhagen hostel
The room had bunk beds and graffiti murals on the walls, which the girls treated as a feature. We ate pizza on the floor with a Carlsberg, because the alternative was a Copenhagen restaurant bill for five people on our first night in Scandinavia after a transatlantic flight and a Lisbon layover.
The thing nobody warns you about is the light. On our first full day the sun was gone by a quarter to four in the afternoon, which means the walking part of your day ends before the kids have finished being hungry. We were somewhere near the old post building when the wind came off the harbour and everyone stopped pretending to enjoy it.
We did one proper dinner out, in Nyhavn, and it was fine and it cost what you would expect a Nyhavn dinner for five to cost. That meal is roughly the point at which we started doing the arithmetic on the rest of the week.
What moving to Malmö actually changes
The apartment in Malmö had a kitchen, separate beds, and a door we could close. That is the real difference, and it matters more than the nightly rate does over a full week. A hostel room works for three nights and stops working somewhere around night four, particularly when the sun sets in the middle of the afternoon and everyone is indoors by five.
What you give up is that you are now commuting. Every Copenhagen day starts with getting five people to a station and ends with getting them back, and the return leg happens in the dark. If you are the kind of traveller who likes to drift back to the room for an hour in the afternoon, this arrangement removes that option entirely.
If you only have three or four nights, stay in Copenhagen. The Malmö version earns its keep across a week or more, when the kitchen and the extra room start compounding. We have written more about why we stopped moving every few days in our post on slow travel.
How the Øresund train works
Øresundståg runs between Copenhagen Central and Malmö Central roughly every fifteen to twenty minutes, and the trip takes about forty minutes over the Øresund bridge. At the Malmö end the trains use the underground platforms, so you come up into the station rather than along it. There is real luggage space, which matters if you are hauling anything more than a day bag.
The ticket worth understanding before you go is the Øresund Ticket, sold by DSB. It covers two adults and up to three children under sixteen travelling together, and you are not required to be a family to use it. You buy it from a DSB ticket machine or the 7-Eleven at the station rather than from an app. For a family of five that structure is the entire reason this works.
Fares and the exact terms move around, and the operators do not all publish the same numbers. Check the current version on the DSB site before you build a budget around it rather than trusting a blog post, including this one.
The Copenhagen days
We came back in on 29 November and spent most of it at Ripley's Believe It or Not, which was not on any list we had written down. The girls found the tilted room and the optical illusion doorway and stayed considerably longer than the exhibits warranted. Standing inside a megalodon jaw is a reasonable use of an afternoon when the alternative is being outside in a Danish November.
Later that afternoon I drank a Carlsberg at the Carlsberg brewery, which felt like the only defensible option available to me. Copenhagen is a city where the indoor options carry the trip in winter, and that is worth planning around rather than discovering at three in the afternoon in the dark.
Malmö was the better week
This is the part I did not expect to write. We went to Malmö because of the apartment and ended up liking the city more than the commute it was supposed to serve.
The Disgusting Food Museum sits at Södra Förstadsgatan 2, about a thirteen minute walk from Malmö Central. Your ticket is a vomit bag. There are around eighty foods on display, a set of smell jars, and a tasting bar at the end where staff walk you through fermented shark and surströmming if you are willing. Whatever was in the jar we all opened at the same time, the verdict was unanimous and it was not positive.
We also went to an IKEA in Sweden, which the girls found much funnier than it deserved. There is a Christmas photo board near the entrance and all three of them posed in front of it under a sign reading God Jul och Gott Nytt År. This is not a cultural experience and I am not going to claim it was one, but it cost nothing and killed a grey afternoon.
Malmö had its Christmas lights up in the city centre by the end of the month, including a set of enormous illuminated wings that Harper spotted from most of a block away and would not walk past. Lindsay found a beer bar with a draught list long enough to require actual study, and we spent one evening there and another editing footage in a bar at eleven at night with the rain going in the courtyard behind us.
Thanksgiving in a Malmö kitchen
On 27 November we cooked Thanksgiving dinner in the apartment. Three pots going at once, mashed potatoes, gravy, green beans, and Swedish meatballs, which is the only version of that meal that has ever made geographic sense. We ate off teal plates with travel tumblers standing in for anything resembling proper glassware.
That evening is the clearest argument for the apartment I can give you. There is no version of that meal that happens in a hostel room in Copenhagen, and no restaurant in either city was going to produce it. A kitchen in a country you are only passing through is worth more than the nightly rate suggests, particularly in a week with a holiday in it.
What we would change
Three hostel nights was one too many. Two would have been enough to see central Copenhagen properly, and the third night was mostly us being tired in a room with bunk beds.
The bigger issue is the last morning. Our flight out went from Kastrup, which is on the Danish side, so we were on a 5:38 train from Malmö to make it. Sleeping in another country is fine right up until the morning you have to be at an airport, and if your departure is early it eats the entire advantage you spent the week building. If we did this again we would move back across for the final night and take the hostel bill on the chin.
Would we base in Malmö again
For a week or more in late autumn, yes. The train is frequent enough that Copenhagen stays genuinely accessible, the apartment solved the problem that three nights in a hostel had created, and Malmö turned out to hold a week on its own rather than functioning purely as a dormitory.
For a short trip, no. Four days in Copenhagen should be spent in Copenhagen, where the forty minutes each way is a meaningful share of the daylight you actually have. From Malmö we carried on into Poland and the Baltics, and the next stop was the Christmas markets in Prague, which we flew to out of Kastrup on 1 December.
FAQ
Staying in Malmö to visit Copenhagen
The questions we had before we booked.
About forty minutes between Malmö Central and Copenhagen Central on the Øresundståg, which runs roughly every fifteen to twenty minutes across the Øresund bridge. At Malmö Central the service uses the underground platforms.
DSB sells an Øresund Ticket covering two adults and up to three children under sixteen travelling together, and you do not have to be a family to use it. You buy it at a DSB ticket machine or the 7-Eleven at the station. Check current fares before you budget, since they change.
For a week or more with kids, it worked for us, mostly because we got an apartment with a kitchen instead of a hostel room. For a stay of three or four nights the commute takes too large a share of the daylight, especially in winter, and we would stay in Copenhagen.
The sun was gone by around a quarter to four in the afternoon during our stay in late November. Plan the outdoor part of the day for the morning and have indoor options ready, because the useful light runs out earlier than most people expect.
Ours enjoyed it, though the smell jars are genuinely strong and children need an adult with them. It sits at Södra Förstadsgatan 2, about thirteen minutes on foot from Malmö Central, and the ticket includes the tasting bar at the end.
Yes, the same Øresund line serves Kastrup, but an early flight means an early train. We were on the 5:38 out of Malmö for a morning departure, which is the main drawback of sleeping on the Swedish side.
No affiliate links in this one. We booked and paid for the hostel, the apartment, the trains, and the museums ourselves. All opinions are our own.
