Lapland hotels, cabins and glass-roofed stays

How this page is organised

Lapland has ten bases this site covers and, within each, dozens of individual places to stay. Rather than try to list every hotel for every base on one page, we compare the four kinds of stay you will end up choosing between, hotel, self-catering cabin, glass-roofed room and snow hotel, with one checked example of each. For named places within a specific town, go to that base’s own page, linked below, where we list what we have checked so far. The right kind of stay usually decides more about your trip than the exact building: a family choosing between a hotel and a self-catering cabin is really choosing between cooked breakfast and flexibility, not between two similar rooms.

The bases, at a glance

Pick the base first if you already know what the trip is for; pick the kind of stay first if you do not.

Each base’s own page has more detail and, as we check them, named places to stay: Rovaniemi, Levi, Ylläs, Pyhä-Luosto, Saariselkä, Inari, Kilpisjärvi, Ruka, Salla and Kemi.

The kinds of stay, compared

Hotel. A conventional room, usually in or near a town centre, with breakfast and a restaurant on site. Arctic City Hotel is one checked example; every base with a town centre has equivalents, and Rovaniemi’s own where to stay page names more. Not for anyone wanting to wake up under a glass roof.

Self-catering cabin. A wooden cabin, usually with a sauna and a kitchen, rented by the night or the week, from a resort’s own booking system or a private owner. Finnish cabins are priced in three different shapes and that is why a single band is misleading. Hotel groups that also own cabins quote a nightly rate: Wilderness Hotel Muotka’s 42 m² Panorama Log Cabin for four starts at 249 EUR a night. Fell-resort cottages at Ylläs are sold by the week, from about 850 EUR for a cottage sleeping four to six. Metsähallitus rents wilderness huts inside the national parks for 70 to 100 EUR a night, with no electricity and no running water, which is a different kind of night entirely. Several operators we opened, Kakslauttanen and Levi Alpine Chalets among them, publish no figure at all and send you to a booking calendar. Our cabins and lodges page has the full table, including the operators that publish nothing.

Glass-roofed room. A room with a glazed roof or wall over the bed, sold under the marketing name “glass igloo” whether or not it is dome-shaped. Kakslauttanen Arctic Resort in Saariselkä publishes winter half-board packages from 501 EUR a night, and our glass igloos guide keeps the comparison current; other operators, including some in Rovaniemi’s own Arctic Circle area, do not publish a rate at all. Not for a tight budget, and not for a trip where the aurora itself matters more than the room: a glass roof only shows you the sky when it is clear and dark, whichever bed you are in.

Snow or ice hotel. A hotel rebuilt from snow and ice each winter, with a fixed season and rooms kept at sub-zero temperatures. Our ice hotels guide covers named operators in Finland, what a night is actually like, and current price bands with their dates. Not for most trips: a single night is the usual booking, and most guests spend the rest of their stay in a normal room.

What we left out, and why

We did not name every hotel or cabin operator for every base: that is a separate, larger piece of work, done one destination at a time, and each base’s own page links to what we have checked so far. We also left snow and ice hotels out of the comparison table’s price column, because those figures already live on, and are kept current on, our ice hotels guide, and repeating them here risked the two pages drifting apart. If you already know your base, its own where-to-stay page, once published, will have more detail than this one.