Review: AC Hotel By Marriott Copenhagen Bella Sky

We had a two night stopover in Copenhagen, and decided to stay at the AC Hotel Bella Sky. This hotel has 814 rooms and is geared toward conferences, so obviously this wasn’t going to be the most charming place to stay. However, it was located close to the airport, I’ve never reviewed an AC Hotel before, and it was also pretty affordable.

How I booked my stay at AC Hotel Copenhagen

For our two night stay, the AC Hotel Copenhagen had a breakfast inclusive rate for $140 per night. This was my far the most affordable points hotel option I could find in Copenhagen. As a point of comparison, the Marriott was more than twice as expensive.

If redeeming points, a stay would have cost 25,000 Bonvoy points per night not including breakfast. Based on my valuation of 0.7 cents per Marriott Bonvoy point, paying cash was the better deal.

AC Hotel Copenhagen location

The AC Hotel Copenhagen is located adjacent to Bella Center, Scandinavia’s largest conference center. Even though Denmark has lifted virtually all coronavirus restrictions, suffice it to say that conference business hasn’t fully recovered, so the area was eerily empty.

The AC Hotel is a roughly 10 minute drive from the airport (which costs around $30 in a taxi). There’s also a train, but it requires a bit of walking to get to the station.

The hotel is hard to miss — it’s massive, and has two towers containing rooms, with a bridge connecting the two structures.

AC Hotel Copenhagen check-in & lobby

The AC Hotel seemed to be very quiet, which didn’t really surprise us. Reception was located just inside the entrance to the hotel and to the left, and the front desk associate who helped us was friendly. My friend and I are both Bonvoy Titanium members, and both of our rooms got upgraded to junior corner suites.

Our rates included breakfast, and then for our welcome amenity we could select either 500 Bonvoy points or a $10 daily food & beverage credit, so we selected the latter.

The lobby is quite spacious, given that there’s a staircase leading to the second level, where two of the other food & beverage outlets are located, as well as a bridge leading to the other tower.

Soon enough we had keys in hand and headed to our rooms.

AC Hotel Copenhagen junior corner suite

I was assigned room 1420, located on the 14th floor in the first tower. The elevators were located in the very back of the lobby.

I can’t say my first impression heading up to the room was great… here’s what the elevator looked like.

The hallways weren’t much more inspiring.

My room was located at the end of the hallway on the left.

By comparison to the elevators and hallway, the room kind of impressed me. The interior was simple but well maintained. I think it might be a bit of a stretch to call this a junior suite, but I also know that in Northern Europe a lot of rooms are compact. The room had a desk with chair at one end, a chair in the corner, a loveseat facing a TV in the middle of the room, and then a queen bed at the other end of the room.

The mattress was incredibly thin — maybe a couple of inches thick — but despite that I slept like a baby.

Back near the entrance was a luggage rack, as well as a closet.

There was an empty mini-fridge, plus a kettle with instant coffee and tea.

The room also had its own air conditioning, which worked reasonably well. Then there was a “press for rescue” button.

I liked the amount of natural light that the room had, and there was even a view of the airport in the distance.

The bathroom was also near the entrance, and was simple and functional — it had a sink, toilet, and walk-in shower. There was a partial glass partition separating the shower from the rest of the bathroom, but a bit of water still easily got into the rest of the bathroom.

Toiletries were in AC-branded tubes.

Wi-Fi in the room was fast and free. Overall I thought the room was pretty good.

AC Hotel Copenhagen gym

The AC Hotel has a spa and gym in the second tower on the ground floor. You can access this via a walkway one level above the lobby, which connects the two towers.

Or if you prefer to go the long way, you could take the bridge on the 23rd floor.

In front of the spa and gym area was a replica of the building… it seems they’re proud of the design!

While the spa is temporarily closed, the gym could be accessed by guests 24/7, and was pretty decent. It didn’t get very full, but I’d imagine if this hotel ever gets busy again, this gym would be beyond packed, given the number of rooms.

AC Hotel Copenhagen AC Lounge

The AC Hotel Copenhagen has the AC Lounge on the ground floor, which is the hotel’s lobby bar. I liked the green wall behind the bar, and found it to be pretty cute. There’s also a dining area, but at the moment there’s a very limited menu here, presumably due to lack of demand.

We did have a credit to spend here, so in the morning I had a cappuccino and a water, and in the evening had some cocktails, which were quite good.

It was pretty quiet here in general, with the exception of one conversation that I overheard…

Am I on a different planet? Sitting in hotel lobby in Copenhagen and lady strikes up conversation with stranger: "Where are you coming from?" "Ukraine." "Oh… are you on holiday?"

— Ben Schlappig (@OneMileataTime) February 28, 2022

The AC Hotel also has a market where you can buy snacks, drinks, and other supplies. A couple of notes:

• Annoyingly the hotel doesn’t offer complimentary toothpaste, but rather you have to buy it in the store; I’ve always found that even limited service properties have toothpaste for free, so is this an AC thing, or a Denmark thing?
• They had some pretty mediocre wine for $45 per bottle, so we ended up going to a supermarket and buying three bottles of wine, two meals, and all kinds of snacks, for roughly the same amount

AC Hotel Copenhagen BM Restaurant (breakfast)

BM Restaurant is the AC Hotel’s breakfast restaurant, open daily from 6:30AM until 11AM. I try not to have juvenile humor (sometimes), but… am I the only one who finds that to be a strange name for a restaurant?

The restaurant is large, and has plenty of seating. The only other guests in the restaurant were an airline crew that was headed to Greenland and back for the day. I’ll let y’all guess which airline they worked for (I was super jealous of their flight and wish I could have tagged along!). “Guess what airline this crew works for” is basically my version of Wordle, and this one took a bit of work!

I’ve gotta say, I’m not usually a huge fan of Northern Europe breakfasts, but I found the buffet to be excellent, with lots of yogurt, fruit, eggs, etc.

Breakfast ordinarily costs 185DKK (~$27) per person, so it was quite a deal that we got a rate that included it.

For what it’s worth, the AC Hotel also has two other dining outlets:

• There’s Basalt, which is intended to be more of a “fine dining” experience, but we weren’t really interested in that, especially in a deserted conference hotel
• There’s Sukaiba, the rooftop bar, though it was closed on the days that we were there

Bottom line

The AC Hotel Copenhagen did the trick for our needs. The hotel was affordable, had a good breakfast buffet, and was fairly close to the airport. The hotel was also almost completely empty, so that helped to make it pleasant. I was also happy to experience the AC brand, finally.

Of course the catch is that this is a conference hotel, so ordinarily I imagine this hotel would be packed, and I’d never stay here if my intention were to sightsee. I could only imagine staying at this hotel otherwise if I were attending a conference at Bella Center.

If you’ve stayed at an AC property, what was your experience like?