Scandic Hotels. Oh, dear oh dear.

“Experience a brand-new hotel buzzing with life. With Scandic Spectrum, we created just the sort of hotel we ourselves dream of checking into. A place, not just for sleeping …but for being.”

I stayed at the Scandic Hotel recently in Copenhagen, Denmark.

Opened in June 2022, it’s one of the newest hotels in the city, with 632 rooms: and a bizarre level of annoyances. What annoyances, you ask? Well, let me tell you.

The lights

“As part of the only hotel chain in Denmark awarded with the Nordic Swan Ecolabel, it is second nature for us to consider both people and planet, and meet the environmental standards regarded as the highest in the world.”

I wonder whether the Nordic Swan Ecolabel is something that tells people whether they should make light switches the most complicated things in the world? Because this hotel has succeeded.

I suspect that the lights in the hotel rooms are controlled via IP - that when I press a light switch, it sends a signal to a very underpowered Sinclair ZX Spectrum somewhere in the bowels of the hotel, which is surprised to be awakened, and then looks up what room you’re in, and slowly tells the light controller in the room which light to turn on.

The result is that if you press a light switch, there’s a pause of about a second and a half, with no affordance to tell you what is going on. Then, and only then, will the light start turning on - but it takes a few seconds to fade up.

The upshot of all of this is that none of the lights work. You press them and nothing happens. So you press them again and nothing happens (because what you’ve done there is turn them off). The icons on the light switches don’t match the shape of the actual physical lights in the room.

Scandic Hotels know that this is not very good, because this is the only hotel I’ve ever seen with a framed instruction poster about how the lights ought to work.

Even after my second night in the hotel, I was still bewildered by them.

The breakfast booking system

We are named the way we are for a reason: At Scandic Spectrum everyone is welcome.

A hotel with 632 rooms knows that it has a problem at breakfast, where not everyone is going to fit at the same time.

It therefore has a booking system. You must book a slot at breakfast, and there are messages all over the place with a QR code reminding you to book your slot.

All this would be good if someone checked, but nobody does. Just turn up for breakfast at whatever time (I forgot what time I booked one morning) and nobody cares. Nobody even checks if you’re staying at the hotel.

The lifts

These are lofty surroundings in more than one sense of the word.

All the elevators are in the middle of the property. This means:

a) there are too many of them (five? six?) to stand in front of and wait. You can’t see all of them easily, and you have to run to the one that has surprised you with its arrival, only for it to slam its doors shut because you were too slow.

b) it’s a long walk to your room once you do manage to find an elevator. A really long walk.

There’s a good reason to have “north” and “south” elevators (or, yes, in this property’s case, “east” and “west”, pedant).

The television

A place with room to be yourself and time to enjoy life with others. You will find everything you need for a short stay at the hotel.

The TV had four live TV channels. Count them. Four. All in Swedish. For a large international hotel such as this, you’d have thought that CNN, or BBC News, or something might be a good plan? But no. Four.

It also has Chromecast, which uses a website called cast2.tv, which at the time when I visited, didn’t actually connect.

It’s a little thing, but since I was working in the room for a bit it would have been nice to cast some music to the speaker; but it wasn’t having any of that.

The left-luggage

At Scandic Spectrum, business and pleasure are not each other’s opposites. On the contrary!

All the above really wouldn’t be worth a blog post like this, were it not for the left luggage procedure.

I was going to check out just before 12pm and go to the airport. But what I’ll normally do is to check out early (9am or 10am), and ask them to take my bag while I wander aimlessly around town for a bit. That helps the hotel, you’d think, because they know that I’m checked out, therefore they can clean the room for the next guest.

“I’m just checking out,” I said, cheerily, “would you be able to take my bag for me?”

“There’s a luggage store downstairs,” said the man behind the counter. OK, a bit rude, but I’ll go down to the luggage store downstairs, I thought, and will pop my bag in there.

But no. Oh, no. For the luggage store is a set of lockers, with a credit card payment machine. They charged me the equivalent of $8.75 to store my bag for two hours.

So even though I was doing the hotel a favour by vacating my room early - it was paid-for until midday after all - I now get stung for an additional fee just for clearing out of my room earlier than I needed to.

Cheers, Scandic Hotel. But I stay in much cheaper hotel chains, and they don’t charge me to keep my bag when I check out. And this was a very negative end to a stay - the very last memory of the hotel was that it fleeced a further $8.75 out of me, just to keep my bag, during a time when I was still paying for my room. An awful last memory to have.

In conclusion

“You will always receive a warm welcome, whether you booked a meeting space for the morning or a suite for the week. Not because it says so in some manual but because we love working in an atmosphere buzzing with life day and night.”

While there are plenty of reasons to recommend the Scandic Spectrum, I’d suggest… find somewhere where the guest is actually welcomed, not merely tolerated.