The ultimate guide to Finnish Lapland, Rovaniemi, Finland

My Mother-in-law really wanted to take her Grandchildren to meet Father Christmas before they were too old. We (the adults) objected on the basis that it costs a BLIMEN FORTUNE to go to Lapland, especially the weekend before Christmas (very much “peak time” by their pricing calendars) but as she was set on the idea, I said we might save some money if we researched it and planned each activity ourselves, rather than purchase a package. So, I carried out lots of research, did lots of planning - and here’s the itinerary we followed. I’m very relieved to say it all went smoothly and everything ran to schedule!

This has gotten super long so I'm splitting it into various articles. This first one covers the essentials around booking and transport, and the others cover our hotel and activities.

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

Booking Lapland from the UK

We booked our flights and hotel in June. We paid about £650pp which included an extra (large) cabin bag each so we didn’t need to check in luggage. It also included reserving seats so that we were all sitting together, as we had young kids in the party. Despite this, EasyJet did then move some of our party and it took my Sister-in-law a 40min battle on the phone to ensure her kids weren’t sat on their own, and then they tried to break us up from our kids on the return flight so that another kid wasn’t sat on their own… yeah, it didn’t make sense at the time either. Make one of our young kids sit without an adult so another 10 year old could sit with her Mum… I totally get why she wanted to sit with her Mum, but for the same reason none of our kids wanted to be without an adult either. In the end a couple who were travelling without kids overheard the confused conversation we were having with the flight attendant and stepped in to volunteer.

Anyway, my point is, the flights were expensive. And they did go down in price between June and December (as my husband set up a tracker to track the prices just out of curiosity - although that only made it more galling that they went down in price). But we were a party of 10, who all wanted to fly together and be in the same accommodation, and accommodation was getting very booked up even in June, so we paid what we paid so that it was all secure. (My friend booked accommodation for Lapland before flights were released… they then later went to buy flights and they were for the wrong days so they had to tie in some random all night train journey. That didn’t appeal.)

We quite fancied a lodge or chalet, or somewhere with a kitchenette at least as that makes meal times with little kids easier and cheaper. But we couldn’t find anything available (for an OK price). Plus, whilst I don’t mind driving abroad no one else in our party really wanted to - and I was kinda glad we didn’t hire a car when I realised I’d have been driving on ice / really slippery conditions in the dark for 4 days. So we stayed in a City Centre hotel in Rovaniemi - the Scandic Pohjanhovi.

Getting to the city centre from Rovaniemi airport

Rovaniemi airport is teeny tiny, and after a quick hug with a welcoming Polar Bear (person in costume) we literally walked out of the terminal within a few steps and found the bus we’d researched.

The buses around Rovaniemi, the airport and Santa Claus’ Village are SUPER easy. This is the airport express bus website: https://www.airportbus.fi/ . You can buy your tickets online in advance (€7 for an adult, or €4 for children aged 4-12) but the website makes you buy one at a time (the apologise they don’t have a basket function) so as I didn’t want to enter my card details 10 times (as we were a party of 10) we just bought them when we got on the bus.

The buses run very often - the website says every 25 minutes but sometimes it felt more often - and it’s a 15 - 30 minute ride into the City, depending on which part you’re going to. (And because on the odd occasion the bus would go a random way - after 4 days there we did the bus loop A LOT of times and noticed the odd curve ball.)

Therefore, getting from the airport into Rovaniemi couldn’t have been easier.

We had mixed thoughts about the Scandic Pohjanhovi. Because they won't be relevant to lots of people reading this, I'll split them into their own article here.

Hiring warm clothes for Lapland

As I’ve mentioned, we hired our warm weather clothes from Lapland Safaris, paying about €65 each for 3 days. We were careful to pick them up fairly late on Friday so that we could drop them back just before our flight on Monday and it’d all be within 72 hours… but having given back the giant sacks of clothes with no one even checking them or logging our name, I don’t think we need have worried too much, they seemed very relaxed.

Our hire included padded overalls (with long sleeves - so not dungarees), leather boots which were fleecy/woolly on the inside, mittens (again, leather with cosy linings), a beanie, a scarf, and boot socks (which we wore over normal socks).

Now, the clothing was probably the main issue we had on the trip. Well, the clothing combined with the weather. If you’re going to hire clothing, I’d totally recommend Lapland Safaris - everything was clean and new seeming (and from wearing it for 3 days in snow we know it doesn’t go back like that) and the people helping us find the right sizes when we picked it all up were lovely.

But for the adults especially, the padded overalls were problematic. A few people in our party decided they were a bit on the large size, and we didn’t really have time to go back and change them (due to our action packed itinerary). But the main issue was that if you just wore thermal leggings underneath them, as jeans or thicker trousers would have been too much, you then couldn’t really take them off when you went into a cafe or indoor attraction at Santa Claus’ village. So then you were uncomfortably hot, and trudging around with the jacket arms knotted around your waist in an attempt to not over heat when indoors.

The week before we’d gone the temperature had been minus 25 degrees… the day we arrived it was 1 degree. Which is a massive difference! We’d gone fearing the worst, and on the last day it was minus 17 (which on a husky ride, with wind chill, apparently felt like minus 30), but overall it wasn’t that cold. So some of the adults just wore walking trousers with leggings underneath, lots of layers and a warm coat rather than the overalls. No one wore the scarf and hat - we all had our own hats and/or snoods. We did love the mittens though - ends up mittens are really toasty.

We all also varied between the hire boots and our own walking boots, especially my 4 year old who generally stuck with the £10 snow boots I’d bought him from Aldi before we left (which he wore on the plane over).

The good thing about the overalls is though that you can roll around in snow and not get any in the gap between your coat and trousers - they’re durable and rugged and perfect for the kids rolling around having snow ball fights.

So… yes the overalls were great for the kids and personally I wore mine all the time. But, depending on the actual temperature whilst you’re there, and your activities, you might not need to hire clothes.

When my Auntie and Uncle did a similar trip but for adults - without Santa Claus’ village - they were taken from their hotel to their activity, and back to their hotel for meals. Once they left their hotel, they were outside the whole time, so they didn’t have frequent changes of temperature. On a trip like that, hire clothes would be more comfortable.

Our itinerary in Finnish Lapland

As I mentioned, I put together our itinerary in Finland rather than pay more for a package. There were a few things we were all keen to do:

• Reindeer ride
• Husky ride
• Snowmobile ride
• See the Northern Lights
• See Santa

We also were really keen to spend the night in a glass roofed igloo, so we could watch the Northern Lights above us all night. But I just couldn’t deliver on this one… There were 10 of us, which meant we had to find an igloo willing to squeeze in 5 people (as 3 igloos would be crazy money) and they seem to be all booked up ages in advance. Plus, if you’re only there for 3 nights, and have lots you want to do, changing hotel for one of the nights is a bit of a big deal. 

So that’s still on the bucket list for another day.

These are the things I researched but we decided against:

Ranua Resort wildlife park - we wouldn’t have had many hours of day light, lots of animals would be hibernating, and it would have been quite a long bus ride (and some of our party get travel sick). The place might have ways of dealing with the dark and hibernation but we figured it was a long way away (about an hour+ on a bus each way) so we’d skip it. If we'd been there for longer this would have been more of a contender.

SantaPark - we skipped this mainly because I’d watched a review on Insta which said it wasn’t really that special and as we only had 3 days, we figured we’d fill them with experiences the adults could enjoy too rather than make the whole trip about the Bug Guy.

Snowman World - Snowman World is at Santa Claus’ village, where we spent a lot of time, so we could have done it - but it was quite a lot of money to, from what we’d read, queue for ages to go down a slide. The other main attraction, apart from the slide, is seemingly people dressed up as snowmen, and a disco which didn’t sound like the most Finnish /worthwhile holiday experience to us.

What we did in Rovenemi Finland:

So, here is what we did do - our itinerary for 5 children (aged 4 - 11) and 5 adults for 4 days and 3 nights in December:

Friday:

• Arrive
• Get to the hotel
• Pick up hire clothes
• Night time reindeer sleigh ride outside the city, in the hopes of seeing the Northern Lights, organised by Wild About Lapland.

Saturday:

• Mrs Claus visit in Santa Claus’ Village at 12pm
• Snowmobiling family session
• Evening meal at a restaurant in Rovaniemi

Sunday:

• Visit Santa Claus at Santa Claus village
• Snow Glow Winter Park
• Evening meal at a restaurant in Rovaniemi (we actually went to the same one as on Saturday as we liked it so much - details below)

Monday:

• Husky ride 
• Drop back hire clothes
• Fly home!

This plan was based on the fact that you can book Mrs Claus in advance, but you can't book Santa. So we wanted the kids to kick start their first full day with a super Christmassy visit, but we didn't want to get up at the crack of dawn to see Santa on Saturday if we'd had a late night on the Friday. BUT we didn't want to leave Santa until the Monday and find we couldn't get in in time or something, hence him being planned for Sunday. We also did the reindeer ride on the Friday because if we didn't get the see the Northern Lights with the kids, any adults who wanted to still had other nights to go out super late (spoiler alert - we didn't see the lights, but no one bothered to go out another night... but we did see them on the plane on the way home!).

Eating out in Rovaniemi

Ends up you can’t often book in advance in Rovaniemi. And with lots of little kids, we didn’t want to eat anywhere fancy - we wanted affordable and easy. So we tried Kauppayhtio because it had good reviews online - and we loved it. 

My Brother-in-law and his family got there before us and messaged to say “it looks like a bit of a dive, but it’s actually OK”. Ends up when they’d arrived their first impression wasn’t great but an Irish family were just leaving and heard them muttering amongst themselves and told them that actually, it’s great. So they went in and the rest is history!

It’s kinda 2 restaurants in 1 - there’s a burger side and a pizza side and you can go in one or the other… but once you’re in, you can order from either “side” and some of your party can have burgers whilst the others have pizza. Burgers are from 13€ to 23€ (19€ for a reindeer burger), and chips/fries are 5€. Meanwhile a margherita pizza is 15,90€. So more than I’d ideally like to pay in the UK, but I’m probably out of touch on that anyway. A kids burger with fries was 9€ which was great, and they loved the Moomin drink.

There was an “arcade” - a room at the back with lots of pin ball machines which kept the kids occupied (1€ a go but the younger kids thought they were playing when the games were doing a demo), good beer, and a really lovely guy behind the bar with terrific English who was a brilliant host.

Because it was easy, with a big long table and space and food everyone enjoyed, we just went back the next night too! When you’re travelling with kids, suddenly wanting to explore a city just becomes wanting the easy life.

Right, as this article has gotten SUPER LONG, I’m going to leave it here, but you can read about the rest of our adventures in my other posts. 

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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