DIY Lapland has anybody done it

pudding

Has anybody been to Lapland and booked it on their own without any travel agents.I was thinking of booking my own flights to Finland etc.Has anybody done it
Thanks

pboae

What did you have in mind? I've been up to Kiruna and the Ice Hotel in Sweden, which is within Lapland. Though Lapland isn't a place as such, it's the region where the Sami live(d), and covers at least 4 countries.

blue_haddock

The one problem you may have is that there are very few scheduled flights to the far north of Finland - you would have to fly to either Helsinki or Tampere then get an internal flight. You could get the train but it's a fairly long (8hours +)

pudding

I was thinking of flying to Tampere and then getting the train to the north...trying to search on the net for info and looking at The Canterbury Tales brochure for ideas..(I can't afford that)..we just want to stay somewhere to see snow/santa reindeers etc...There seems to be lot's of resorts mentioned so no idea where to go really
(Was going to do the overnight train)

blue_haddock

Well from Tampere you can get the train to Rovaniemi which is on the very edge of the arctic circle - from there you can visit Santa Claus world and also use it as a base for exploring the area.

pudding

Thanks i will look into that....Will we be ok with transport etc getting to the hotel/station...Do we need to hire a car (sleigh ha ha)

mr87009

We did it about 3 years ago.

Flew to Tampere with Ryanair. At that time they had only recently started flying there so it was dirt cheap :-)

Then got the overnight train to Rovaniemi, stayed there one night and got the overnight train back to Tampere the next night, giving us two full days in Rovaniemi.

You can catch the service bus from Rovaniemi to the Arctic Circle and Santa's village etc. There is no admission charge to the village, just to take part in any of the activities (visit Santa, ride on reindeer, post a letter etc etc).

On the second day we did a husky trek and snowmobile drive - great fun and well worth the additional expense.

I found and booked everything on the internet, for this sort of thing you only get the most out of the trip with a lot of research.

Any questions feel free to ask!

Matt

pudding

what a great help mr87009 (matt)..That's really helped...Can you remember where you stayed in Rovaniemi as the hotels are coming up really expensive..I found the bus service to santas village on the rovaniemi tourist info website..Is food expensive etc...Did you go before xmas or after?I want to go for xmas day but I think it might be cheaper to go before hand

shazziere

Pudding,dont know if this helps but we went to lapland in December.I totally agree that canterbury travel was sooo expensice but we found a website called https://www.santadays.co.uk which is part of colchester travel.They have most of the different companies offering lapland trips but are nearly all at least 10 to 20 % discounted than the operator than themselves.For example,we did the Santa Spectacular with Esprit and found it was nearly £250 cheaper through santadays than through esprit themselves.Esprit were brilliant and because they had the majority of rooms in a particular hotel we were able to get a room for 5 which wasnt available anywhere else.The company was brilliant ....esprit and santadys!

Just a note...we went to Holiday club in saariselka but stayed in the self catering bit.You still took all meals in the hotel but you had loads more room.A few other people we know also went to Rovaniemi and were very disappointed as they felt it was very impersonal.

hope this helps

pudding

Thanks Shazziere..Great help...We have just been looking at hotels etc in Rovaniemi so I will have a look elsewhere too...Thanks

BillScarab

We went with Emagine just before Christmas who were cheaper than Canterbury but still cost a lot. We stopped in Muonio which is much further north than Rovaniemi. Friends went to Rovaniemi just before we travelled and had hardly any snow but we had plenty so if you can I'd recommend going further north to be more sure of snow. There's not much point in going otherwise.