ICDE 2027 Copenhagen: Travel Guide and Where to Stay

ICDE 2027 runs from 17 to 21 May at Vesterport in central Copenhagen. The IEEE International Conference on Data Engineering is the A*-ranked flagship for database systems research, and the 2027 edition is its 43rd. Two things about this one are worth knowing well before you book: the conference uses two venues rather than one, and the submission deadline you are probably thinking of has already passed.

There is a second submission round. ICDE splits its research track across two rounds, which catches out people used to single-deadline venues. Round 1 closed on 11 June 2026. Round 2 closes on 11 November 2026, with a rebuttal period from 8 to 15 January 2027 and notifications on 10 February 2027. There is no revise-and-resubmit option in either round, so decisions are straight accept or reject.

That February notification leaves roughly fourteen weeks between finding out and flying, which is almost exactly the median across the conferences we track. Comfortable, but not generous enough to leave your hotel until March. More on that timing in our piece on how conference timing actually works.

Two venues, two minutes apart. ICDE 2027 runs across Imperial Bio and the Scandic Copenhagen, both at Vesterport. Imperial Bio is a 1,002-seat cinema on Ved Vesterport with the largest single screen in northern Europe, which makes it an unusually good plenary room and a genuinely memorable place to give a talk. The Scandic Copenhagen sits about 130 metres away on Vester Søgade, facing the Lakes.

The practical consequence is that everything happens in a two-block radius between the Lakes and Copenhagen Central Station, five minutes’ walk from the station and ten from Tivoli Gardens. If you have been to a Copenhagen conference at the Bella Center out in Ørestad, forget that geography completely. This one is central.

Getting in

Copenhagen Airport (CPH) is 8 km from the centre and one of the better-connected airports in northern Europe, with direct transatlantic and intra-European service. The M2 metro runs from the terminal to the city in about 15 minutes for roughly 40 DKK, or about 6 USD. Trains also run to Copenhagen Central Station, which is the more useful arrival point for this conference: from there Vesterport is one stop or a ten-minute walk. A taxi is 300 to 350 DKK.

From within Europe, the train is often better than flying. Copenhagen is on the direct line from Hamburg and Berlin, and Malmö in Sweden is 35 minutes away across the Øresund Bridge.

Once you are there, Copenhagen barely needs public transport. The centre is flat and compact, and the city has the best cycling infrastructure in the world. A 24-hour transit pass runs about 100 DKK, but a rental bike will serve you better for a week in May.

Where to stay

Everything below is within walking distance of both venues. Distances are from Imperial Bio.

Zero commute. Scandic Copenhagen is one of the two venues, which makes it the obvious choice and also the one that sells out first. When a conference runs inside a hotel, that hotel’s rooms go early and mostly to people who booked the week registration opened. Check it now rather than in March. Four stars, lake views, and the breakfast buffet Scandic is known for.

The design landmark. Radisson Collection Royal Hotel is two minutes from the venue and is the building Arne Jacobsen designed in 1960 as Copenhagen’s first skyscraper. He designed the furniture too, and the Swan and Egg chairs are still in the rooms. Five-star pricing, but if you are going to splurge once, doing it inside a piece of design history beats doing it in a generic luxury tower.

Budget, and still walkable. Steel House Copenhagen is 130 metres from the venue, which makes it closer than most of the four-star options. It is a hostel, but it has private ensuite rooms as well as dorms, plus an indoor pool and a shared kitchen. For students and anyone self-funding, this is the easy call.

Mid-range. Absalon Hotel is a family-run place in Vesterbro, five minutes away, with a well-regarded Scandinavian breakfast and free bikes. Wakeup Copenhagen Bernstorffsgade is about fifteen minutes out and is the cheapest proper hotel of the group: small rooms, but clean and well run.

Worth the extra walk. Villa Copenhagen occupies the 1912 central post office eight minutes away, with a heated rooftop pool and a garden courtyard, and is the right pick if you are bringing a partner or adding a weekend. Hotel Kong Arthur is fifteen minutes north along the Lakes, an 1882 building with an organic breakfast and a small spa, on a much quieter street than anything near the station.

One booking warning. ICDE lands on 17 May, which is right at the start of Copenhagen’s peak season. May to August is when the city is at its best and also when it is most expensive and most booked. This is not a destination where you will find a good rate in April. The full list is on the Copenhagen city page, and if you are weighing the official block against booking yourself, we went through that trade-off here.

Between sessions

Torvehallerne is the move for lunch. The covered market halls near Nørreport are ten minutes from the venue and are the best place in the city to work out what smørrebrød is actually meant to taste like, alongside very good coffee and pastries. If you would rather have Danish food explained than guess at it, the Copenhagen walking food tour is a small-group walk through the city with tastings along the way, and it works well as a first-evening thing before the conference starts.

Nyhavn is the postcard, and it is worth seeing once. Buy a beer and sit on the quayside rather than eating at the restaurants lining it, which charge tourist prices for ordinary food.

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is 45 minutes north by train and is the single best half-day in the region: a world-class collection in a building that steps down through sculpture gardens to the Øresund Sound. If you have a free afternoon, spend it there rather than in the city.

If you have a full free day, go and look at the Forest Tower. An hour south of Copenhagen in the woods near Gisselfeld, Skovtårnet is a 45-metre spiral observation tower built almost entirely of wood, designed by the Danish practice EFFEKT and opened in 2019, reached by a 900-metre walkway through the treetops. It is a genuinely unusual piece of structural engineering and the kind of thing that tends to land well with an audience that attends conferences about systems. The day tour from Copenhagen handles the transport, which is the awkward part otherwise, and also stops at two of Thomas Dambo’s Forgotten Giants, the huge recycled-timber troll sculptures hidden around the edges of the city.

Freetown Christiania is the self-governing commune in the middle of the city, car-free and unlike anywhere else in Europe. And Sweden is 35 minutes away across the bridge. Malmö is a genuinely different city with a good old town, and it is close enough to be an evening out rather than a trip. We wrote about it as a base for ECCV 2026, which is the same journey in reverse.

Copenhagen’s 2027 run

ICDE is not the only reason to be here next year. Copenhagen hosts an unusually strong cluster in 2027:

• ETAPS 2027, 10 to 15 April, the 30th edition of the joint conferences on theory and practice of software, hosted by the University of Copenhagen, the IT University and Aalborg University. Satellite events run 10 to 11 April, main conferences 12 to 15.
• TACAS 2027, 12 to 15 April, running inside ETAPS.
• ICDE 2027, 17 to 21 May.
• ISMB 2027, 18 to 22 July, bringing the computational biology community to the same city.

If your work spans formal methods and data systems, April and May 2027 are five weeks apart in the same city, and a single trip covering both is not an unreasonable plan.

Deadlines for all of these are tracked on our deadlines page. If you spot something out of date, tell us.