Lapland Highlights tour: what this journey is actually like
Tom Hardisty has recommended the Lapland Highlights tour to clients for years. In March 2026, he finally took it himself.
Three countries, four stays, one winter journey
Although I've travelled extensively across the Nordic region, I recently joined the Lapland Highlights small group tour, wanting to see how this particular itinerary holds up against that broader experience, and whether the combination of places it visits adds up to something more than the sum of its parts. I'm happy to tell you that it does. It's become the journey I find myself talking about most when clients ask what winter travel in the north is actually like. Not the brochure version, but the thing itself: sleeping inside a sculpture made of river ice, arriving at a remote hotel at the edge of three countries and finding it felt immediately like somewhere you'd want to stay for a week.
What follows is an account of the four places this tour visits, in the order you visit them. The itinerary runs for 10 days, from Kiruna in Swedish Lapland through Arctic Norway and into Finnish Lapland. Each place is genuinely different. That variety is, I think, the point.
Jukkasjärvi: the hotel that returns to the river every spring
In 1990, a group of 15 tourists on a winter retreat in Swedish Lapland found themselves without beds. Someone suggested the igloo art exhibition on the banks of the Torne River. They spent the night inside it, wrapped in reindeer pelts, and in the morning one of them said it was almost like sleeping in a hotel. The idea was born.
The Lapland Highlights premium small group tour begins in that same place, on the same river, in a hotel that has been rebuilt from scratch every autumn for more than three decades and has never once repeated a room.
Each year, artists from around the world compete for the chance to carve a room at the ICEHOTEL. The ice comes from the Torne River, which the ICEHOTEL describes as one of Europe's cleanest, harvested in winter when it reaches the right thickness and clarity. The rooms, the beds, the arched ceilings, the bar where drinks are served in glasses made of ice: all of it is built anew, all of it is original, and all of it melts by April and returns to the river it came from.
Arne Bergh, the hotel's creative director, has described this as borrowing from nature and returning it in the springtime. The village of Jukkasjärvi itself takes its name from the Sami word for "crossing place" or "meeting place", which feels right for somewhere that draws artists and travellers from across the world to sleep in a sculpture between -5°C and -8°C.
The first night is spent in an ice room. The temperature holds between -5°C and -8°C regardless of what is happening outside, and guests sleep in thermal sleeping bags laid over reindeer skins on beds carved from the same river ice as the walls. The face stays cold. Everything else does not. It is a strange and particular kind of sleep, inside something that will not exist by April, and most people find it stays with them longer than they expect. The second night is in a warm room, which, after the ice room, feels like a considerable luxury.
One note from the group in March: some guests slept poorly in the ice rooms, which affected energy levels the following day. It's worth being honest about this. The experience is worth it, but it's not the same as sleeping in a bed. If you are a light sleeper or have concerns about the cold, the warm room option and the Deluxe Ice Suite upgrade are both worth discussing when you book.
The following morning, before leaving Jukkasjärvi, there is an ice sculpting class led by local artists working with the same Torne River ice the hotel is built from. It was, for the group, the unexpected highlight of the Jukkasjärvi stay, more engaging and more personal than most structured activities tend to be.
Tromsø: a city that has always faced the extreme
From Jukkasjärvi, the group travelled by minibus west toward the Norwegian coast and boards an express boat from Harstad into Tromsø. This is a city that has always oriented itself outward, toward the extreme and the unknown. Fridtjof Nansen and Roald Amundsen both passed through here on their way to the edges of the world, and the Polar Museum holds their stories alongside those of the Arctic hunters who came before them.
Tromsø also sits at the centre of the Aurora Borealis zone. Between 6pm and midnight the city moves into the aurora belt as the planet rotates, which sounds like an abstraction until you are standing outside watching the horizon shift colour.
The group stays one night at Dock 69, a property that delivers closer to a five-star experience than its four-star rating suggests. Breakfast here was, by some distance, the best of the trip. The Vervet precinct nearby has excellent restaurants for the evening.
A guided walking tour of the city and the Polar Museum is included. Several people in the group said they'd have liked more free time to explore the city themselves, particularly around Fjellheisen, the cable car that rises above Tromsø to a viewing platform over the fjord. If you are someone who prefers to wander rather than follow a schedule, it's worth knowing that Tromsø rewards exactly that.
Kilpisjärvi: where three countries run out of land
Three hours north of Tromsø, at the point where Finland, Norway, and Sweden converge at the Three-Country Cairn, is Kilpisjärvi, Finland's northwesternmost village. The road that leads here is called Käsivarrentie, the Arm Road. It continues, eventually, to Revontulentie: the Northern Lights Road.
This is where Margit and Ville Eskonen chose to build Cahkal Hotel, opening it in the summer of 2022. They still personally make the beds and set the tables. The hotel takes its name from the mountain lake above it, and two streams descend from that lake and embrace the building, close enough that you can hear the water from the sauna window, which faces Saana fell.
With just 23 rooms, huge glass walls facing the fell, a fireplace crackling in the main lounge, and the same waiter at every meal, Cahkal operates at a scale where the details are always right. The sauna is free to use, with a well-appointed adjoining lounge supplied with drinks. It is the kind of place where sitting with a book and a glass of wine while the fire burns feels less like a choice and more like an inevitability.
Travel writer Matt Brace, visiting with 50 Degrees North and writing for Luxury Travel Mag, chose Cahkal as his best stay of an entire year of international travel. The March 2026 group agreed unanimously: Cahkal was the favourite property of the trip. That is not something I say loosely. Groups rarely agree on anything unanimously.
The group stays for three nights. Activities begin from the front door: snowshoeing through the fell landscape, a private sauna session, and evening snowmobile sleigh rides in search of the Northern Lights. The rotating dinner menu across the three nights, a Sweden menu, a Norway menu, a Finland menu, was the best food of the journey. There is also, deliberately, time that asks nothing in particular of anyone.
A practical note: standard rooms at Cahkal face the road and car park rather than the fell, so aurora viewing from the room itself is unlikely. Superior rooms offer a better outlook. Worth factoring in if that matters to you.
Levi: a dream built on a north-facing slope
In 2008, a man named Tauno built four glass igloos on the north-facing slope of Utsuvaara fell in Levi, Finnish Lapland. The slope was chosen deliberately: unobstructed views of the Northern Lights, uninterrupted sightlines across the frozen fell, and the ski resort spread out in the valley below. He had always wanted a place where people could sleep under the sky and wake up to find it had changed overnight.
There are now more than 40 igloos at Levin Iglut, but it's still family-run. The glass ceiling above the bed is heated to prevent snow from building up, which means the sky is always visible, cloud cover permitting. The motorised double bed at the centre of each room can be adjusted to follow the arc of the aurora if it appears. It is, in its way, a very simple idea: a warm room with a transparent roof, on a slope facing north.
The group spends three nights here. The days include a snowmobile safari with ice fishing on a frozen river, a reindeer sleigh ride through silent snow-covered forest, and a husky safari where guests take turns driving their own team. The snowmobiling was one of the most popular activities of the entire trip; the dog sledding was another highlight, though the group felt it ended before they were ready for it to. The ice fishing, by contrast, is a quieter, slower experience that some guests enjoy more than others.
On one evening, dinner at UTSU restaurant featured a guest chef evening with Michelin-star chef Sasu Laukkonen. It was, unsurprisingly, one of the most memorable meals of the trip.
A note on rooms: the standard igloos deliver exactly what the concept promises. If you are travelling as a family, the suite igloos are the better choice. Of the Superior options, the Forest location is preferable to the Valley.
One practical note: check-in at Levin Iglut is handled via QR code, which feels at odds with the premium nature of the stay. It is a small thing, but worth knowing if a warm arrival experience matters to you.
What the igloos do deliver, unambiguously, is the sky. On a clear night, lying in bed watching the Northern Lights move across the glass above you is one of those experiences that is genuinely difficult to describe afterwards. You were warm. The lights were not still. That is about as close as language gets.
What ten days in Lapland is like
Ten days is long enough to feel the difference between the countries, the landscapes, and the particular quality of light in each one. The ice of the Torne River in Jukkasjärvi, the coastal darkness of Tromsø, the fell silence at Kilpisjärvi, the frozen valley spread out below the igloos at Levi: each place asks something slightly different - and by the end most travellers find they have given it.
What struck me, having spent a good deal of time in the Nordic region across different seasons, was how well this itinerary sequences its contrasts. The ICEHOTEL is theatrical in a way that Cahkal is not, and that difference matters. By the time you reach Kilpisjärvi, the scale has shifted and the pace has changed with it. People stop checking the time. The question of whether the lights will appear stops being anxious and starts being curious. That shift, from hoping for a specific outcome to being genuinely present in a place, is easier to reach when the journey has been designed to allow it. This one has.
Lapland Highlights runs for ten days each December to March, with a maximum of 12 travellers and a dedicated 50 Degrees North tour leader throughout.
View the Lapland Highlights small group tour