Lapland has a reputation for being an expensive destination, particularly if you're looking at organised Christmas packages that can cost thousands of pounds for just a few nights. But does a trip to Lapland really have to cost that much?
We've travelled to Finnish Lapland three times as a family, visiting both Levi and Rovaniemi, and every trip has been booked independently rather than as a package. While I'd never describe Lapland as a cheap destination, we've found there are plenty of ways to keep the overall cost down without missing out on the experiences that make a Lapland trip so special.
In this guide, I'll break down how much you can realistically expect to spend on flights, accommodation, food, transport and activities, along with the areas where we've saved money ourselves and where I think it's actually worth spending a little more.
So, is a trip to Lapland expensive? It certainly can be, but it doesn't necessarily need to be as expensive as you might think.
From DIY itineraries and Northern Lights tips to budgeting advice, destination guides and honest reviews of the places we've visited, you'll find everything together in our Lapland Travel Guide Hub.
Just a quick note before we begin. Some of the links in this guide are affiliate links. This means we may earn a small commission if you make a purchase through them, at no extra cost to you. We only recommend products, services and experiences we've used ourselves or genuinely believe will help you plan your trip. Thanks for supporting Build a Break.
Is Lapland expensive? Yes, compared with many European destinations, Lapland can be expensive, particularly during December. However, booking independently can significantly reduce the overall cost.
Typical DIY cost: From around £200pp (extreme budget) to around £700pp+ depending on flights, accommodation and activities.
Typical Package Cost: £1,200–£2,000pp depending on dates, length of trip & accommodation type.
Biggest expenses: Flights, accommodation and organised activities are likely to take up the largest part of your budget.
Where you can save: Booking flights and accommodation separately, self-catering, using public transport and choosing which activities are really worth paying for.
Do you need a package? No. We've visited Finnish Lapland three times independently and have always arranged our own flights, accommodation, transport and activities.
Is Lapland worth the money? For us, absolutely. It's one of the few destinations we've returned to multiple times, and you don't need to book every expensive excursion to have an incredible trip.
| Trip Type | Typical Cost |
|---|---|
| Extreme Budget DIY | From around £200pp |
| Typical DIY Trip | £450–£700pp |
| Premium DIY Trip | £700–£1,200pp+ |
| Package Holiday | £1,200–£2,000pp+ |
There are a few reasons why a trip to Lapland can quickly become expensive, particularly during the peak Christmas period.
December is by far one of the most popular times to visit Finnish Lapland, with families travelling to see Santa, experience the snow and enjoy activities such as husky rides, reindeer sleighs and snowmobiling. With demand so high over a relatively short period, flights and accommodation can increase significantly in price.
Activities can also make up a large proportion of your budget. A family booking several organised excursions could easily spend hundreds of pounds over the course of a few days, especially if you're booking longer husky safaris, snowmobile tours or Northern Lights trips.
Then there's the cost of eating out, airport transfers and winter clothing to consider too. None of these necessarily need to break the budget individually, but added together they can make the overall price of a Lapland holiday look pretty daunting.
However, one of the biggest differences we've found is how you book your trip. Booking Lapland independently gives you far more control over where your money goes, and there are plenty of areas where you can cut costs without compromising on the experience.
The cost of a trip to Lapland can vary enormously depending on when you travel, how long you stay and how many activities you want to include.
A short DIY trip can cost considerably less than an organised package, particularly if you're flexible with your dates and book flights and accommodation early. At the other end of the scale, travelling in the run-up to Christmas, staying in a glass igloo and booking an activity every day can quickly push the cost into the thousands.
When working out your Lapland budget, I'd break it down into six main areas:
• Flights
• Accommodation
• Airport transfers and local transport
• Food and drink
• Activities and excursions
• Winter clothing
Below, I'll go through each of these individually, including examples of what we've actually paid on our own Lapland trips and where we've found it easiest to save money.
Flights are probably the part of a DIY Lapland trip where prices vary the most.
We've been incredibly lucky with flights on our own trips. On our first trip to Levi, we paid just £52pp return from Manchester to Kittilä. For our first Rovaniemi trip, we paid £48pp return from Liverpool, while our most recent weekend cost £88.80pp return from Manchester.
So far, we've managed to pay less than £90pp return on all three of our DIY trips to Lapland, although all three were taken outside the expensive mid-December to Christmas period.
However, these prices aren't representative of what you'll usually find in the run-up to Christmas.
For popular December dates, it's not unusual to see direct flights costing around £150-£200pp each way, particularly from mid-December through to Christmas. For a family of four, that could mean spending £1,200-£1,600 on flights alone before you've booked accommodation or a single activity.
This is why I wouldn't automatically assume that booking Lapland DIY is always cheaper. If you're tied to peak Christmas dates, it's worth comparing the total DIY price against package holidays before booking anything.
If you can travel in late November, early December or after Christmas, however, there's usually much more scope to find cheaper flights. January in particular can offer some fantastic fares while still giving you the full snowy Lapland experience.
If you're looking for flights, I've put together a complete Flights to Lapland guide, covering direct routes from airports across the UK and Ireland, which airlines fly to Finnish Lapland and when the seasonal routes operate.
Accommodation is another area where prices can vary enormously depending on when you visit.
We've managed to find some incredibly affordable accommodation on our own trips. For our first visit to Levi, we paid just £488 for a four night stay, for 4 people, while our most recent Rovaniemi trip cost £277 for one night for an apartment sleeping up to four people.
On another trip to Rovaniemi, we stayed in the Arctic Penthouse for our second night. This cost £176 for the whole apartment, or £88 each as there were two of us, but it actually slept up to six people. Filled to capacity, that would have worked out at around £30pp for the night.
Again though, timing makes a huge difference. During the peak Christmas period, you could easily be looking at around £350 per night for a standard hotel room based on two people sharing, while family accommodation can be closer to £500 per night. Stay for four nights and accommodation alone could therefore add another £1,400-£2,000 to the cost of your trip.
You'll also pay considerably more if you're looking for some of Lapland's more unusual accommodation, such as glass igloos, luxury cabins or an overnight stay in a SnowHotel.
For the best chance of keeping costs down, I'd look at apartments as well as hotels, particularly if you're travelling as a family or group. Not only can the cost be split between more people, but having your own kitchen can also help reduce what you spend on food.
Transport is another cost that's easy to overlook when budgeting for Lapland, although how much you'll spend depends heavily on where you're staying and how you plan your itinerary.
On our first trip to Levi, we paid £116 return for a private transfer between Kittilä Airport and Levi. The vehicle could seat up to six people and had plenty of room for luggage, so this worked out really well for us as a family of four.
Rovaniemi can also be relatively inexpensive to get around if you use local buses, organised activity transfers and accommodation shuttles. Many excursions include pick-up from central hotels, which can save you paying for additional transport.
However, taxis can quickly increase your overall costs. On our most recent Rovaniemi weekend, we relied heavily on taxis because we were trying to fit a lot into a very short trip. We spent around €210 on taxis between the three of us, or approximately €70pp, over just two days.
Hiring a car is another option, but make sure you include this in your overall Lapland budget. As an example, when I checked prices for this guide, the cheapest 48-hour car hire from Rovaniemi Airport was around £185 in December, compared with around £157 in January.
You'll also need to factor in fuel and potentially parking. Whether hiring a car actually saves you money will depend on your itinerary and group size.
That said, you don't necessarily need a car in Lapland. We've completed all three of our trips without one, using a combination of airport transfers, buses, taxis, shuttles and transfers included with excursions.
If you're heading to Rovaniemi, I've put together a complete Rovaniemi Without a Car guide, covering how to get from the airport, local buses, taxis and how to reach the main attractions without hiring a car.
Food is one area where we found Lapland wasn't necessarily as expensive as we'd expected.
We've always chosen self-catering accommodation on our DIY trips, which has allowed us to mix eating out with supermarket meals. On our five day trip to Levi, for example, we spent £122 in total on food for one adult and three children, including groceries and a couple of takeaway pizzas.
If you're staying in a hotel and eating every meal out, you'll naturally need to budget considerably more. Alternatively, some Lapland package holidays include half board, which can make your food costs much easier to predict.
I've broken this down in much more detail in my How Much Spending Money Do You Need for Lapland? guide, including typical restaurant prices, supermarket costs and suggested daily budgets for different types of trips.
Activities can easily become one of the most expensive parts of a Lapland trip, particularly if you want to include several of the classic experiences such as husky rides, reindeer sleighs, snowmobiling and Northern Lights tours.
Unlike flights and accommodation, activity prices don't necessarily become dramatically cheaper if you travel outside the peak Christmas period, so this is a cost you'll need to factor in regardless of when you visit.
On our 5 Day trip to Levi, we spent £223pp on activities, which included several different experiences rather than just one big excursion. On our Rovaniemi trips, we've also deliberately spent more on certain experiences, including ice karting, the Snow Sauna, SnowHotel, husky rides and snowmobiling.
However, you definitely don't need to book an expensive excursion every day. Some of our favourite experiences in Lapland have been free or relatively inexpensive, and we've always chosen the activities that appealed to us rather than trying to tick off everything on a typical Lapland itinerary.
If you're trying to keep activity costs down, take a look at my 15 Things to Do in Rovaniemi for €40 or Less guide, which includes plenty of lower-cost experiences alongside some of Rovaniemi's free attractions.
If you're booking independently, I'd recommend deciding on your must-do activities before comparing the overall cost with a package. Some packages include husky rides, reindeer experiences and other activities, but make sure you're comparing like for like. These can sometimes be short taster experiences with larger groups, rather than the longer or smaller-group excursions you might choose when booking independently.
We've always preferred building our own itinerary and choosing high-quality activities based on previous customer reviews. It means we can decide exactly which experiences are worth spending more on, how long we want them to last and which providers we feel offer the best experience, rather than simply choosing a trip based on the number of activities included.
We have lots of individual Lapland activity guides and reviews covering the experiences we've tried, along with what we paid and whether we thought they were worth the money.
If you're booking your activities through GetYourGuide you can save 5% on eligible Lapland activities with our exclusive code BUILDABREAK5.
Winter clothing is another cost to factor in, particularly if you don't already own suitable clothing for very cold temperatures.
For our first trip to Levi, we spent around £20pp on winter clothing, keeping the cost low by shopping around and buying some items second-hand. Since then, we've been able to reuse much of the same clothing on our other Lapland trips.
We've also hired winter clothing in Lapland. On our most recent Rovaniemi trip, we hired thermal overalls, winter boots and gloves from Rovaniemi Insider, which cost around €50pp for two days. This was particularly useful as we were travelling with hand luggage only and temperatures dropped to around -30°C during our stay.
Hiring can therefore be worth considering if you don't want to buy bulky outerwear that you may never use again, or if you're trying to travel with minimal luggage.
Some package holidays include thermal suits and boots in the price, while some independently booked excursions provide additional outer layers for the activity itself, so check exactly what's included before buying or hiring anything.
I also wouldn't let the cost of winter clothing put you off. Think about how many summer holidays involve buying new swimwear, dresses, sandals and other bits you'll only wear for a week or two. Winter clothing doesn't have to be any different. If you buy second-hand in the first place, you can often sell everything on again after your trip and get most, if not all, of your money back.
I've put together a complete What to Wear in Lapland guide, covering exactly what we've worn in temperatures down to -28°C, what you can hire and how we layer clothing for adults and children.
It would be right at the budget end, but yes, I think a Lapland trip from around £200pp is possible if everything lines up.
You'd need to find return flights for around £40pp, travel as a family or group so you can split the cost of accommodation, stay for just one or two nights and concentrate mainly on free activities.
This wouldn't give you the traditional package-style Lapland holiday filled with husky rides, reindeer safaris and snowmobiling, but if your aim is simply to experience the snow, visit Santa Claus Village and enjoy being in Lapland, it can be done on a very small budget.
As a rough guide, organised Lapland packages typically cost around £1,200-£2,000pp, although prices vary considerably depending on your dates, departure airport, accommodation and what's included.
A DIY trip has a much wider price range. At the extreme budget end, I think it's possible from around £200pp, while our own four-night trip to Levi cost £481pp including flights, accommodation, transfers, activities, food, clothing and insurance.
For a family of four, you could potentially put together a very short budget DIY trip from around £800 in total, although you'd need extremely cheap flights, affordable accommodation and mostly free activities to achieve that.
At the opposite end, a package costing £1,200-£2,000pp would put the total at around £4,800-£8,000 for a family of four.
They can be. Activities are one of the easiest ways for the overall cost of a Lapland trip to increase, particularly if you want to book husky safaris, snowmobiling, reindeer experiences and Northern Lights tours.
However, you don't need to pay for an activity every day. There are also plenty of free and lower-cost things to do, particularly in Rovaniemi.
Eating in restaurants can be more expensive than at home, but we found supermarket prices much closer to UK prices than we'd expected. On our Levi trip, we spent £122 on food for one adult and three children across four days, largely by self-catering and mixing this with the occasional takeaway.
For a much more detailed breakdown, see my How Much Spending Money Do You Need for Lapland? guide.
Whenever I spot great-value DIY Lapland flights and accommodation from UK airports, I share them with members of the Build a Break Travel Club. If you'd like to experience Lapland without paying package holiday prices, it's a great place to start.
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