Three countries, two seasons. Book the right half of the year.
What an aurora chase out of Tromsø really costs. Which fjord cruise leaves from Bergen and which from Stavanger. Whether Copenhagen is a canal day or a castle day. Reviews of every tour you can book across Scandinavia.
One aurora night, one fjord morning, one canal hour, one archipelago afternoon.
The four bookings a first trip across the North hangs off, one in each place people actually land. What each costs and what the travellers who took it say.
01The night you came forAurora Borealis TourA minibus chase out of Tromsø that drives until it finds clear sky. Book two nights, not one, and let the weather lose once.
02The fjord morningThe Original Fjord Cruise to MostraumenUp the Osterfjord to the Mostraumen narrows and back, straight from the Bergen quay. No car, no transfer, no full day gone.
03The Stockholm afternoonCity Archipelago Sightseeing Cruise with GuideOut through the inner archipelago with commentary, past the summer houses the city empties into every July.
04The cheapest good hourCanal Cruise with GuideCopenhagen from the water, under bridges you have to duck for. It costs less than lunch and explains the whole city.
Pick the country first. The distances up here decide the rest.
Norway is fjords and Arctic nights and long driving days. Sweden is a capital on fourteen islands and a Lapland an overnight train away. Denmark is small, flat and quick. Three countries, then the towns most people actually fly into.
Between October and March the North sells one thing: the night.
Aurora chases, sled dogs, reindeer and snowmobiles all run on the same short season, and the good operators are small. Four kinds of Arctic night, what it costs to get on each, and which one suits a first winter trip.
Almost every good Scandinavian day starts at a quay.
A fjord is a road here, and a capital is a set of islands. Fjord cruises out of Bergen and Stavanger, RIB boats into Geiranger and the Trollfjord, canal boats in Copenhagen, and the Stockholm archipelago running all summer.
Norway: the fjord in the morning, the aurora after dinner.
Everything in Norway →
The country runs on boats and weather. Bergen and Stavanger send cruises up their own fjords before lunch; Tromsø sends minibuses out after dark; and between them sit the ledges people plan whole summers around.
A fjord cruise, straight off the quay
Bergen runs up the Osterfjord to Mostraumen; Stavanger runs into the Lysefjord under Pulpit Rock. Both leave from the city centre and hand you the landscape without a driving day.
An aurora chase that actually chases
The difference between a good night and a wasted one is a guide willing to drive two hours for a hole in the cloud. Small minibuses do it; big coaches mostly do not.
Preikestolen, on foot or from below
Four hours up and back over rock steps, or ninety minutes on a boat looking up at the same cliff. Both are honest answers; only one needs boots.
The days out more travellers book than anything else up here.
Open the whole northern catalogue →Across three countries and both seasons, these are the ones with the queue behind them, and what earns each of them the slot.
1
Canal Cruise with Guide
Cruise Copenhagen’s harbor and canals for one hour with an English or Danish guide. You’ll pass Christiansborg and Amalienborg palaces, the Opera House, the Little Mermaid, the Royal Library, and the old Stock Exchange. Guides such as Peter, Tony, Ali, and Kristian have earned praise for lively storytelling. Boats may be open, so dress for the weather.
From · $26
Read our review →
2
Aurora Borealis Tour
from $181
3
Hop-On Hop-Off Bus Tour with Boat Tour Option
from $35
4
Tromsø’s Top-Rated Fjord & Fishing Cruise – All-Inclusive
from $142
5
Private Walking Grand Tour of Copenhagen
6
Fjords and Sommarøy Islands Tour with Salmon Picnic
from $112
7
Self-Drive Husky Dog Sledding Adventure
from $328
8
Skansen Open-Air Museum Admission Ticket
from $27
Sweden is two holidays: a city on islands, and a Lapland of its own.
Stockholm spends its summer on the water and its winter underground in Gamla Stan cellars. Nine hundred miles north, Kiruna and Abisko run the clearest aurora skies in the region and an ice hotel rebuilt from the river every December.
Every Swedish day out →
Denmark is the short country. You can see a lot of it before dinner.
Copenhagen is a canal, a bicycle and a pastry, all within an hour of each other. North Zealand adds Kronborg and Frederiksborg on one coastal loop, and Malmö is thirty-five minutes away over a bridge in another country.
- 1Lund and Malmö 2-Country Tourfrom $141
- 2Copenhagen Highlights Walking Tourfrom $40
- 3Highlights 3 Hour Bike Tour with a Local Guidefrom $62
Scandinavia is expensive. Here is where the money actually goes.
Every tour on the site, grouped by price. The cheap end is bigger than the region's reputation suggests, and the expensive end is almost all winter.
City walks, canal boats, museum entries and the short harbour cruises in all three capitals.
The standards: fjord cruises, bike tours, RIB safaris, day trips out to a castle or a glacier.
Winter, mostly. Aurora chases, sled dogs, whale safaris and the small-group guides who drive all night.
- 1Reindeer Sledding & Feeding with a Sami Guidefrom $198
- 2Whale Watching Tour by Hybrid-Electric Boatfrom $195
- 3Aurora Borealis Tourfrom $181
Three things the rest of Europe cannot sell you.
Boats and old towns exist all over Europe. A herding family who will feed you in a lavvu, a hotel carved new from a river every winter, and a slab of rock hanging over a fjord do not.
The herders, and the animals they follow
The Sami have worked this coast and plateau for far longer than any of the three countries drawn across it, and reindeer herding is still a working livelihood rather than a display. Visits sit on real camps outside Tromsø and Alta: you feed the herd, you sit in the lavvu, somebody tells you how the year is divided into eight seasons instead of four.
- 1Reindeer Sledding & Feeding with a Sami Guide★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 6,417 reviews
- 2Reindeer Camp and Sami Cultural Tour with Lunch★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 3,326 reviews
- 3Tromso Husky Self-Drive Sledding with Cake and Drink in Lavvu★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 746 reviews
A hotel that melts every spring
At Jukkasjärvi, blocks are cut from the Torne river each winter and built into rooms, a bar and an art suite, then the whole thing returns to the river in May and is built again from scratch the following December. Day visits go in to look at the carving; the cold rooms hold at about minus five whatever the weather outside is doing.
- 1Guided Tour to Icehotel and Jukkasjärvi★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 28 reviews
- 2Tour of Icehotel and Jukkasjärvi★★★★★★★★★★ 4.7 · 20 reviews
- 3Explore the Icehotel★★★★★★★★★★ 4.2 · 16 reviews
Trolltunga, and the walk to reach it
A thin shelf of rock juts out seven hundred metres above Ringedalsvatnet, and the only way onto it is a full day on foot from Skjeggedal. The guided season is short and the queue for the photograph at the end is real. Odda is the base; the via ferrata route up the valley wall is the harder way to the same view.
- 1Full-Day Trolltunga Hiking, and Climbing Tour★★★★★★★★★★ 4.8 · 95 reviews
- 2Trolltunga Summer Hike★★★★★★★★★★ 4.9 · 32 reviews
- 3Trolltunga Via Ferrata, Sunset and Sunrise★★★★★★★★★★ 5.0 · 30 reviews
Four northern bookings that will not wait for you.
Most of this region can be sorted the night before from a hotel lobby. These four run on a season that opens and shuts, a timetable nobody will move, and operators small enough to sell out in a week.
- 01Guided Tour to Icehotel and JukkasjärviIt is rebuilt out of river ice every December and melts in the spring, so the season is short and the tours inside it sell long before you land.
- 02Full-Day Trolltunga Hiking, and Climbing TourGuided walks run in the summer months only. Outside them the route needs winter kit and a guide willing to take you, which is a different booking entirely.
- 03Viking Village, Nærøyfjord Cruise & Flåm RailwayThe train runs to a published timetable and the fjord boat it connects with runs to another. Miss one slot and the whole day comes apart.
- 04Self-Drive Husky Dog Sledding AdventureSled teams run on snow, which means roughly December to April, and the camps are family-sized. The self-drive slots go first and go early.
Up here the calendar, not the weather, decides what you can book.
North of the Arctic Circle the sun does not set for weeks in summer and does not rise for weeks in winter, and the catalogue moves with it. Aurora, sleds and ice are a dark-season product. Kayaks at midnight, glaciers, the high ledges and the archipelago are a light-season one. Plan the trip around which half you want.
Copenhagen, Stockholm, Oslo, the fjords, then the Arctic: the run that makes sense.
Copenhagen
Stockholm
Oslo
Bergen
SognefjordBy place — capitals, fjords and the Arctic
By kind of day — deck, sled, ledge or old town
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