Nobody runs in Tivoli Gardens in Copenhagen. There are no signs forbidding it. No announcements, no posted rules, no stern-faced staff patrolling the paths. People simply arrive through the gates, feel something shift in the air, and slow down. It happens every time, to locals who have been coming here since childhood and to visitors encountering it for the first time. The place does something to you. It asks you, quietly, to be present.

That this happens inside 82,750 square meters in the middle of a major European capital — flanked by Copenhagen’s central train station, a short walk from the canal — makes it either miraculous or very, very Danish. Probably both.

Copenhagen CEO

Susanne Mørch Koch has been CEO of Tivoli since 2020, when she arrived to run one of Denmark’s most beloved institutions at the precise moment it was forced to close. The Covid timing was, she will tell you, a baptism of fire. What followed was a masterclass in institutional resilience: Tivoli delivered record revenue in 2025, with both visitor numbers and revenue showing sustained growth over the past five years. The numbers matter because they fund what cannot be counted — the memory, the magic, the particular quality of an afternoon here that Danes carry with them their entire lives.

“This is not something we pretend,” Mørch Koch tells me as we walk the grounds on a warm afternoon, past Japanese pagodas and Arabian flourishes that somehow feel entirely at home. “The Danes come here for music, for dinner, as a family to go on the rides. It’s impossible not to mingle with other people here. You stand next to them listening to the music. You sit next to strangers. You wait in line. It’s just the way the place is.”

We have just come off the Roller Coaster — the wooden one, built in 1914, which Mørch Koch rides with the practiced calm of someone who has done it a hundred times and would do it a hundred more. Beside us, a grandmother gripped her grandchild’s hand on the descent and screamed. Both of them were laughing. This, more than any strategic framework, is what Tivoli is selling: shared experience between strangers, across generations, in real time. You cannot put that in an app.

And Tivoli, to its credit, is not trying to.

“We try not to use the phone too much in here,” Mørch Koch says. “If we develop things where you need your phone to understand it — to check wait times, to fast-track — then you have your phone in your hands all the time. The mobile is a helper before you arrive. But when you’re here, we try not to need it.” She pauses. “We want to be analog.”

In an era when every experience — the luxury hotel lobby, the museum, the airport lounge — seems designed to pull you deeper into a screen, Tivoli is doing something quietly radical. It is betting that what people actually want, even if they don’t know it yet, is to put the phone down. To stand in a queue and talk to whoever is next to them. To wait a little. To look up.

“A little waiting time,” she says, “we don’t think is a bad thing. You ground yourself before you go on the ride. You get time to talk. You might meet other people. For us, a Tivoli experience where you wait a little — that’s perfectly fine.”

Mørch Koch came up through McKinsey, then became CCO of DSB — Danish Railways — before running Danske Spil, the national gaming company. The trajectory sounds, on paper, like the wrong preparation for running a place that operates on memory and feeling. She knows this. She also knows that nobody with the wrong preparation could have delivered what she has.

“You can’t management-consultant this thing,” she says, with the quiet confidence of someone who has earned the right to say it. “You can’t approach it as a problem to solve. The McKinsey brain is useful for investment discipline, for strategy. But you also have to know when to put it down and just feel. And that part, you can’t learn at McKinsey. That’s experience. That’s intuition. You just know by feeling.”

What she is describing is a dual mandate that very few executives are asked to hold simultaneously: deliver commercial performance rigorous enough to satisfy a publicly listed company, while safeguarding an institution that functions as a repository of national memory. Tivoli is majority-owned by the Augustinus Foundation, listed on the Danish stock market, and expects revenue of around DKK 1.4 billion this year. It is also the place where Hans Christian Andersen strolled and found inspiration for The Nightingale, where Walt Disney came in the 1950s and went home to build Disneyland, where Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong played and where Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II once visited. These two realities — the balance sheet and the legend — are not in tension at Tivoli. Under Mørch Koch, they are the same thing.

“We can never compete with Disney or Universal,” she says plainly. “We don’t have those wallets. But we have something that can’t be bought for money, and that’s people’s memories.”

Copenhagen Memories

The memories accumulate across seasons. This summer, for the first time, a major section of the gardens has been closed for the most ambitious capital investment in the park’s history: the full transformation of the area near the Demon ride, bringing new rides, streetscape, and covered dining spaces expected to open before the season ends in September. In The Pagoda, the rotating Michelin residency programme — which began with chefs who needed persuading and now has applicants knocking on the door — assembles fifteen stars across the season. The Friday night open-air concerts are celebrating their 30th year. A book is in production with a world-class Danish photographer, not a promotional object but something built to hold the stories before they disappear.

Nimb Hotel in Tivoli

TIvoli

What Mørch Koch is building, in aggregate, is an experience company whose product is human connection — and she is doing so with a contemporary rigor that belies the institution’s age. The innovation does not feel like rupture because she will not allow it to. Every new element is held up against a simple test: does it feel like Tivoli? Does it deepen what is already here, or does it merely perform newness for its own sake? A Takashi Murakami artwork installed in the new area: yes. A fast-track app that keeps everyone’s eyes on their phones: no.

“We need to not stand still,” she says. “It’s not a museum. We need to row in the times we are in. But we cannot miss too much with the memories that are embedded in you.” She thinks for a moment. “And we don’t want to either.”

There is a version of this story that would be easy to write: heritage destination reinvents itself, CEO talks about innovation and the future, bullet points about sustainability commitments follow. That story would be accurate and entirely beside the point. The thing Tivoli is doing — the thing Mørch Koch is trying, carefully, to protect — is more interesting than reinvention. It is continuity. Stubborn, disciplined, emotionally intelligent continuity.

It is a place that understood, before the rest of us did, that the antidote to overstimulation is not more stimulation delivered more cleverly. It is a garden in the middle of a city of Copenhagen where nobody, without being asked, runs.