The Snow Elf Hotel & Apartments

The hotel is in a good position, ten minutes walk to the local village but take a kick sled for a fun trip down. At -25C make sure you take ski gloves and a knock face cover, my eyes started to freeze by the time I got to the shops. The walk to the frozen lake is about 10 mins also and worth the trip. The northern lights were brilliant and apparently the best they’ve had for a while. The food was excellent, don’t believe the other reviews. There is plenty for all and the breakfast has a lot of choice the salt cured salmon was my favourite but if you like cereal, toast or cooked breakfast you’ll be happy. The rooms were clean and the sauna was great, the rooms were always warm. We went with TUI and I have to say the reps were useless. When we go back I will book everything individually as it’s easy to get around on the ski buses and you can book excursions easily. I would suggest the reindeer excursion if you’re going to book one, it was a great experience on Christmas Eve through the forest it was Magical. The Christmas Day party was ok, this was heard at Y1 ski resort, the food was fine and the bar easy to get to (you pay for the drinks but they were slightly cheaper than the hotel). The party starts at 7.30ish and with little children it’s too late, we shared a taxi back with a couple who had a baby, €20 on Christmas Day I didn’t think was too bad. This was our first trip to Finland and Lapland, we will be back. The hotel is nice and well placed, however I think we will try the Saaga hotel next, a short stop there and conversations around what it’s like convinced us that would be our next hotel.

Hmmm. This is a challenging review to write because there’s four different elements to this holiday: the hotel itself, TUI as a tour operator, the Snow Village as the “main event” and Lapland generally. I’ll break them out. The hotel; very well maintained generally, although the toilets are covered in graffiti (!). Outside areas are safely maintained. We stayed in a log cabin which was a magical setting, however the sauna didn’t work and there is absolutely zero soundproofing. If you want to feel like you’re living with your next door neighbours then this is the accommodation for you! The food is absolutely awful. Barely any choice and just French fries for children. TUI as a tour operator; not bad. The staff work hard to entertain and accommodate, but there’s practically no excursions available this year which made for some very frustrated customers (we had a husky ride pre booked through an external provider but TUI push their own excursions so much and so to let everyone down upon arrival is pretty dire. The Snow Village was pretty excellent, we loved the taster sessions and we also loved the authenticity of Santa. Lapland itself is, of course, the star of the show. It’s beauty is astonishing and I do think that more than made up for any of the hotel’s failings. Would we book the Snow Elf again? No. The food isn’t good enough and the state of the toilets really shocked me.

We stayed in the Yllas log cabins for our Lapland 3 night trip but got to use this hotel for our meals. Food actually tasted better than it looked was disappointed as not much variety for the children other than chips or hot dog sausages! Breakfast was actually really nice tho. Drinks very expensive at the bar