Pod Lights, Babe City
8 Mar 2022 by Amby
Sev and I were keen to celebrate some major milestones recently with a little trip. I had some criteria: I did not want to do anything related to COVID, no testing, no masks, no vaccine passports. I just didn’t feel like dealing with any of these things, as some countries at this time had a lot of rules and paperwork. Plus we only had about four days so had to stick to locations in Europe.
This left us with three options: Switzerland, Denmark, and the UK. We decided on Copenhagen, Denmark since neither of us have been there before. I thought I’d throw back to our early Selina days and booked this hostel-like accommodation, CityHub Copenhagen, where we stayed in these pods that were basically just a queen-sized bed and a little area to hang up your coat and store some things.
I initially really liked this pod idea, it felt really cozy. You can choose your bed on the top or the bottom, and there’s enough room to sit up straight in the bed. You can connect to bluetooth in the pod to play music and there are a lot of different light settings.
The hotel location is perfect, really close to major metro stations and easily walkable to the big Copenhagen attractions like Tivoli Gardens (which actually wasn’t open yet when we were there), Nyhaven, Botanical Gardens, and more.
CityHub works by getting these elastic bracelets that have a chip in them, you use the bracelets to access your pod and buy items from the automatic dispensaries, which include coffee, liquor, wine, and beer. I liked ordering things this way and thought everything was actually reasonably priced (although my idea of “reasonably priced’ has probably changed a lot since being in Switzerland the past couple months). But for example, a latte was about $1.5 and a glass of wine was $3.
There were many attractive areas to hang out and work or socialize, which we didn’t really use but were nice to look at and drink coffee in before heading out on our adventures. Generally the place was clean, the bathrooms were well equipped, and we used the CityHub app effectively to communicate with the Hub “host.,” who gave us useful instructions on how to navigate the city.
That being said, we probably would not go back. The novelty of being in a cozy pod sort of wore off after one night, and it was kind of cold in the pod. The blankets were thick and warm but there’s no temperature control in the room. We asked for a heater and they were out, but did offer another blanket. That could be okay but the hallways were also pretty cold. There were two main bathrooms with showers but both of them were kind of a long walk from our pod, and then on the last day we were there they didn’t have hot water.
The bathrooms did come equipped with free soap and shampoo and had blowdryers, which are completely essential in such a cold city as you don’t want to walk around with wet hair outside. Most of the blowdryers worked. There was also a sauna but I didn’t use it.
They gave us these plastic kimonos to wear after/before showering but we didn’t really like them. It would’ve been better if they offered an option for us to buy higher quality ones. The pod area is also so small it gets messy really fast so you have to be tidy or else you’ll feel overwhelmed by the clutter.
Overall the experience at CityHub wasn’t terrible and at $214 for three nights, or $71 per night, is one of the cheaper options you can have at this location. I think three nights is really the limit for how much time you can spend there happily, but if you don’t intend to spend much time at your hotel and just need a space to crash and get coffee, this would be a reasonable option.
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