What a visitor's money does in Finland: every guide rated from very cheap to very expensive, cheapest first, then the things that cost travellers money without buying anything — the ATM, the taxi, the SIM.
Euro (EUR) · 1 EUR = 1.13 USD · 1 EUR = 0.85 GBP
Euro, and cards everywhere, the husky farms and the reindeer rides at Santa Claus Village included. You will not need cash.
Avoid: any machine that offers to charge you in your own currency
Use: Otto, Nosto
Cash is barely used, safaris and souvenir shops included. Both networks charge foreign cards a fee and show it first.
From the airport: Rovaniemi airport to the centre around €20–40 by app, where one is available
Usually under the meter, though the apps price dynamically and a busy night can turn that round.
Sautéed reindeer, poronkäristys, with mash and lingonberries is everyday food here rather than a novelty. Salmon pinned to a board and cooked beside an open fire, leipäjuusto — a squeaky baked cheese — with cloudberry jam, and the weekday lunch buffets for the cheap meal.
Salmon soup at the Old Market Hall, Karelian pies with egg butter, and rye bread with everything. Weekday lunch, lounas, is a fixed-price buffet in most restaurants and is how the city eats out without paying dinner prices; keep the new Nordic tasting menus for one evening.
Reindeer, whitefish and cloudberries. A few hotel restaurants and a handful of independent places in Äkäslompolo, fewer in Ylläsjärvi, and the cafés out on the trails that sell soup, pancakes and coffee to skiers.
Reindeer, Arctic char and lake whitefish, with cloudberries and lingonberries. The choice is a few hotel restaurants and a few independents; a cabin with a kitchen and the village supermarket is how most people eat.
Reindeer, lake fish, and wild mushrooms and berries in late summer and autumn. Restaurants in the village charge resort prices; Kuusamo town has the large supermarkets.
Lake Inari whitefish and Arctic char, reindeer in every form, and leipäjuusto with cloudberry jam. The choice is a handful of places in a village of a few hundred people, and some shut between seasons, so check before relying on one.
Reindeer, Arctic char and whitefish, with lingonberries beside almost everything. Restaurants charge resort prices; the supermarkets in the centre and a cabin kitchen are how most people keep a week affordable.
The cost rating is this site's own, for a visitor, from the guides' authors and the corrections readers send in. The general rules — the conversion prompt, shoulder season, the airport taxi — are in budget travel tips.
RovaniemiFinlandThe capital of Lapland, eight kilometres from the Arctic Circle, with the airport ten minutes out and Santa Claus a bus ride away
HelsinkiFinlandA granite capital on the Baltic, built around the sauna and the sea, and where most Lapland trips change planes
LeviFinlandFinland’s biggest ski resort, built around one fell, with the liveliest evenings in Lapland and an airport twenty minutes away
YlläsFinlandTwo quiet villages either side of Finland’s biggest ski fell, at the edge of a national park, with 330 km of cross-country tracks
SaariselkäFinlandA small fell village two hundred kilometres inside the Arctic Circle, where Urho Kekkonen National Park starts at the last cabin
RukaFinlandA ski fell just south of the Arctic Circle with the longest season in Finland, and the Bear’s Ring trail ending at the bottom of the lifts
InariFinlandThe centre of Sámi life in Finland, on a lake with three thousand islands and five weeks without a sunrise