We’re Scandi Travel, a premium Nordic tour operator based in Helsinki. We live up here all year — we don’t fly in for the season with a brochure — and our team has spent more than a decade building trips across seven countries in the region.
What follows isn’t a sales pitch. It’s an honest look at who we are, what we run, what “premium” actually means when we use the word, and why a good operator matters more in the North than almost anywhere else.
Who We Are
Scandi Travel is a premium tour operator, not a reseller. We don’t repackage someone else’s itineraries — we build journeys across Northern Europe ourselves, from your first email to the airport transfer on the day you fly home.
“Premium” here isn’t gold lettering on a website. It means that when you ask where you can actually meet reindeer near Rovaniemi in December — the real thing, not a staged photo stop — we have a specific answer, with the herder’s name and the time of day. Sisu is a Finnish word that resists translation: a stubborn, quiet kind of grit. We take it seriously. The North doesn’t forgive vagueness, and neither do we.
Over more than ten years we’ve guided couples into glass igloos, families to the home of Joulupukki (the Finnish Father Christmas), photographers chasing the aurora, and travelers in their fifties and sixties along the fjords and the Baltic. Different people, one approach: you get a trip built around you, not an off-the-shelf package.
Where We Take You 🧭
Northern Europe isn’t one country or one season. This is the map we work every day.
- 🇫🇮 Finland — our flagship. Lapland, Rovaniemi, Saariselkä, Helsinki, Turku, Porvoo, Inari. Here we know the hotels and the people who run them.
- 🇸🇪 Sweden — Stockholm and Swedish Lapland, with its ice hotel in the far north.
- 🇳🇴 Norway — Oslo, Bergen, Flåm, and the fjords that don’t go dark until past midnight in June.
- 🇩🇰 Denmark — Copenhagen and the countryside castles, where hygge is a way of living rather than a hashtag.
- 🇮🇸 Iceland — Reykjavík, volcanoes, geysers, waterfalls.
- 🇪🇪🇱🇻 Estonia and Latvia — Tallinn and Riga, perfect anchors for a Baltic cruise out of Helsinki.
The interesting part starts when these countries link into one route. Finland and Norway in nine days. The Baltic capitals by sea in six. A grand tour across several countries in two weeks. The borders sit close together — but the logistics between them are exactly where independent trips tend to fall apart.
What We Do: From a Day Trip to the Grand Tour
Our range is wide on purpose. Some people want one free day in Rovaniemi; others want fourteen days with a private guide. Here’s how it breaks down.
- 🛷 Winter Lapland tours — huskies, reindeer, snowmobiles, sauna, warm cabins. The heart of our winter season.
- 🌌 Northern Lights tours — a dedicated program for travelers who come above all for the aurora, with guides who read the forecast and know the dark-sky spots.
- 🚢 Baltic cruises — Copenhagen-Stockholm–Helsinki–Tallinn by sea.
- 🎄 Family vacations — Rovaniemi and Santa Claus Village, with a schedule that works for kids and parents at the same time.
- 🌅 Spring, summer and autumn tours — the midnight sun, ruska (the fierce autumn colors), hiking, and wild berries.
- 🗺️ Multi-country Nordic tours — for when you want to see the whole North in one trip.
Almost every one of these is a starting point, not a final answer. We build tailor-made packages according to your wishes — dates, pace, budget, the size of your group. If there’s no ready-made tour for your idea, we design one from scratch.
If you’d rather start from something concrete, three of our most-booked routes are the 6-day Finnish Fairy Tale in Rovaniemi, the 8-day Lapland Northern Lights tour, and the 14-day Nordic Grand Tour.
How We Work
There are two ways in. You can buy a ready-made, carefully designed tour package straight from our website. Or you can build a route around yourself — and then the process is simple, with no pressure.
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- Get in touch. Tell us what you want to see, your dates, and who’s traveling.
- A personal offer within 24 hours. Not a template — a concrete itinerary with hotels, activities, and a price.
- Refine it. We adjust the pace, add days, shift the emphasis, until the trip is genuinely yours.
- Travel with support. Transfers, guides, help on the ground. If the weather breaks the plan, we rebuild it on the fly.
We choose only the best, proven services for our clients, and we put real time into it. We work directly with hotels, and only with trusted groups: Strawberry, Clarion, Lapland Hotels, Scandic, Sokos, Santa’s Hotels, and Thon. That means a known standard of service at every point on the route — from a glass dome above the Arctic Circle to a city hotel in central Stockholm.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do you guarantee the Northern Lights?
No — and don’t trust anyone who does. The aurora depends on solar activity and cloud cover, and nobody controls either. What we can do is sharply improve your odds: the right season, dark locations, several nights of hunting, and guides who read the forecast. In good years, trips of 4–5 nights see the lights very often.
Can we bring a young child to Lapland?
Yes, with a sensible schedule. We build family programs with breaks, warm-up stops, and age-appropriate activities. Santa Claus Village, the huskies, and the reindeer farm tend to work best of all for families.
How far ahead should we book?
For winter Lapland and Christmas, 6–12 months. For summer and city breaks, 3–6. The earlier you book, the more choice you have in hotels and dates — especially for a glass igloo.
Ready to Plan Your Trip North?
A trip across Northern Europe isn’t a line on a to-do list — it’s a handful of days that come back to you on winter evenings later. The aurora, the silence of a frozen lake, the smell of birch smoke drifting out of a sauna: these are hard to assemble from someone else’s reviews online. If you’d rather not piece the logistics together alone, the team at Scandi Travel has been doing exactly that for over a decade. We handle the details so you can do the one thing that matters — be there. 🤝
