We stayed in the Scandic Pohjanhovi in December 2025 during a trip to Rovaniemi, Finland. Here's my review - but it's part of a series of articles about everything we did in Finnish Lapland.
First impressions were that it looked beautiful - very Scandi chic with fires blazing and sleek minimalist stylish furniture. There’s a coffee machine in the reception and a few little shelves of essentials like toiletries and food. Whilst the adults had a coffee from the machine (which I think was nice - I personally didn’t have one) we ordered the kids a hot chocolate which the reception team made at the front desk. We then explored and found a teenager’s hang out room with a table football table and a younger kid’s toy room - which was quite sparse on toys, but kids can make good use of a couple of things when they want to. There were also some desks you could work from.
However, we were a little too early to check in. So that wasn’t their fault, but you always hope your room will be ready after hours of travelling, don’t you?! So we locked our luggage in the luggage room and headed literally next door - super easy peasy - to Lapland Safaris - to pick up the clothes we’d hired. More on that in another article.
Eventually our room was ready, so we lugged our luggage (including back packs too big for tired kids to carry) AND all of our hired winter weather clothes and boots around trying to find our hotel room. It ends up the hotel is MASSIVE and goes underground and into a building on the other side of the road - so it’s bigger than we thought. They put us in room 404 so after some nerdy jokes between ourselves (as we run a web development agency) about how it’d be funny if “the room couldn’t not be found”... we couldn’t find the room. A new girl on reception sent us underground and across the road, just for us to get there and find it was actually back in the main hotel.
Meanwhile my eldest son was sharing a room with his Granny, and they had a bit of a trek up into basically an attic room, which was dark when we all got out of the elevator (we were still waiting for our room when they could check in) because the electrics were having work done. Their room was quite dated and felt like it had a low ceiling, with their balcony just looking out at the buildings across the road but with so much snow coming in over the sloping roof no one felt it was safe to venture out there.
As it was my Mother-in-law who was funding the whole trip, it wasn’t a very nice room for her really. She didn’t have any tea making facilities so she went to reception and asked for a kettle and was told it’d cost her extra… I appreciate her room was whatever grade it was (we booked it because of the size, we just wanted a twin room) but a smaller, friendlier hotel with staff who could make common sense decisions could have given a kettle to a woman who was literally paying them thousands for 3 nights.
Our room was really nice - it had plenty of room, and the 2 kids shared a double bed whilst we had another in a separate room (I’m not sure if there was a door we could close between the rooms actually… as we didn’t try to - and the bathroom was in our side). Lots of hanging space in the kids “room” for all of our winter wear. And my sister-in-laws room was really nice as they had a separate kinda “dressing room” for their luggage and a view over a lake. We did have a big walk in cupboard for ours but it wasn’t a “wow” moment like their dressing room, and we had a view onto the busy city street.
There was also a muddle up when they said we hadn’t booked enough beds, even though we’d emailed the week before just to confirm the booking. But eventually they realised their mistake. Although that does remind me - they weren’t good at replying to emails. The group tour and clothing hire people were really quick at replying but sometimes you’d need to follow up with the hotel after a couple of weeks because the first email had just fallen by the way side. I don’t want that to sound like we emailed them a lot - just literally to ask how we should get to them from the air port, and then the week before we arrived to double check the reservation and to ask to book a table for dinner on the first night.
As we hadn’t got a reply about dinner, we booked a table as soon as we arrived at the hotel for the moment the restaurant opened at 5pm, as we had plans for the evening.
Seeing’s we got the key to our room at 4pm and then went on a magical mystery tour to room 404, we didn’t have much time to relax before heading back down for dinner.
We ordered shortly after 5 and waited about an hour for our (not cheap, but nice) food. The adults ended up taking it in turns to go back to our hotel rooms and get our warm clothes so that we could literally put them on in the lobby after we’d eaten as we were getting very short on time before our first evening adventure. The kid’s meals had come with an ice cream dessert so we asked for them before they’d finished eating just to hurry things along, and the very friendly waitress was happy to oblige although it still felt like it happened in slow motion.
Whilst I’m talking about the hotel, the breakfast was great. Lots of options for many different dietary requirements, a juice dispenser which was an ipad and a sleek tap, and plenty of “classics” as well as Finnish things to try such as rice pasties and IKEA-esque meatballs.
Basically, the hotel looked amazing, the family rooms were lovely and the food was good. The staff were generally very friendly, but sometimes too junior to know what was going on (it kinda felt it like was everyone’s first day on the job) or make customer service decisions, and aren’t good at replying to emails.
My full series of guides for Rovaniemi, Finland:
- The Ultimate Guide to Finnish Lapland, Rovaniemi
- Scandic Pohjanhovi: a review of a Rovaniemi City Centre hotel
- Wild About Lapland bespoke reindeer sleigh ride
- SnowGlow Winter Park in Rovaniemi
- Santa Claus Village, Rovaniemi - a detailed guide
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