The Bella Donna floor lies behind a locked glass door on the 17th level of Copenhagen’s Bella Sky Hotel and is off-limits to men.
It is a place for women only so that they can feel safe and pampered, even though it’s in violation of gender equality laws.
“I’m not allowed to enter. I have to wait here,” says hotel manager Anders Duelund, who cannot pass through the door unless it is an emergency.
But Chren Vilander Thomsen, head of security insists: “Me, I have a pass!”as he bounds into the protected area to remove a journalist accused of disturbing the female guests on the floor.
“We’ve received a complaint and respect for our customers’ privacy is a priority,” he explains as he checks the identity card of the reporter who was seeking out some guests’ impressions of the all-women floor.
Access to Bella Donna, which means Beautiful Woman in Italian, is so strictly restricted that a female guest who wants to bring a man up to her room must ask to switch rooms to another floor.
The exclusion zone prompted one anonymous plaintiff to report the hotel to the Danish gender equality board on the grounds that “closing off the floor to men stigmatised men as aggressors,” Ms Duelund said.
Jytte Larsen of the women’s rights network Kvinfo said the complaint was “inappropriate”,
“There is just one person, a man, who claims that this is discrimination and that requires the board to address the case and rule in his favour because, according to Danish gender equality laws, it is illegal to treat people differently based on their sex,” Ms Larsen lamented.
On November 11, the board ordered the hotel to open the floor to men.
“This glass door cost €8,000, we’re going to use it now,” he said, his tone suggesting he was merely joking.
When the four-star hotel opened in May “we didn’t think we had to specially protect women,” Mr Duelund recalled.
He said the idea to create the women’s floor had nothing to do with the Dominique Strauss-Kahn incident in a New York hotel or with the March 2010 murder of a woman in a Copenhagen hotel that made the headlines in Denmark.
“It’s just a little prevention that is greatly appreciated by businesswomen who travel alone and are afraid they may be followed up to their rooms,” he explained.
“A lot of foreign women, especially Americans, come here but also Danish women who have heard about us in the media,” said the hotel’s head of personnel, Tanja Trab.
According to Mr Duelund, “when a woman walks into a hotel room, the first thing she does is check the bathroom. While the man... checks out the view, the television and the location of the outlets to charge his phone.”
Belle Tyson, an Englishwoman staying on the floor, didn’t know it was barred to men when she booked her room and pokes fun at the idea.
But she admitted the chocolates and fresh fruit laid out in the room were “a very good point”.