It is a 170-room hotel at Korkalonkatu 29, in the middle of Rovaniemi, and it is about eight kilometres from Santa Claus Village. The rooms are unusually tall – the hotel publishes a ceiling height of three and a half metres – and all of them have a bath, which is rare this far north. There is a restaurant, a café and bar, thirteen meeting rooms and a ballroom, and the airport is roughly ten kilometres away with the railway station about one and a half. If what you want is a city hotel with a lot of space, it is a good one. If you wanted to wake up at the Arctic Circle, it is the wrong building.
Some pages exist to answer a question people are asking for the wrong reason,
and this is one of them.
Santa’s Hotel Santa Claus collects a great deal of search traffic from people
who have put together the words Santa, Claus and Rovaniemi and assumed the
result would be accommodation at Santa Claus Village. It is not. It is a large
hotel in the middle of the city, eight kilometres away from the village, and
the sooner that is clear the better the rest of the decision gets.
What it is
A 170-room hotel at Korkalonkatu 29, in the centre of
Rovaniemi.1 The hotel’s own pages
put the airport at roughly ten kilometres and the railway station at about one
and a half, and describe everything in town as being within walking
distance, which in Rovaniemi is
accurate.2
Two details are worth repeating because they are unusual rather than standard.
The rooms have a ceiling height of three and a half metres. And every room has
a bath – not a given in Finland, where
the sauna does the job the bathtub does
elsewhere.1
Beyond that it is a full-service city hotel: restaurant Gaissa, Café & Bar
Zoomit, thirteen meeting rooms and a ballroom, sauna facilities, open all
year.1
Who it genuinely suits
Anyone who wants a town around them. This is the argument for Rovaniemi
over a fell resort in the first place, and it is set out at length in
Rovaniemi or somewhere else in Lapland.
A hotel in the centre means the museum, restaurants that are open in April, a
supermarket and a bus network are all on foot from the door, and on the
afternoon a tour is cancelled that matters more than anything else about a
hotel.
Parties doing one Santa day and several other things. If the Santa
element of the trip is one morning rather than the whole point, sleeping in
town and taking the bus out is the more sensible arrangement.
Anyone who is cold at the end of the day. The bath is not a small thing
after six hours outdoors, and it is the rare feature here that is genuinely
hard to find elsewhere in the city.
Tripadvisor ratings, 18 Rovaniemi operators
Highest first
Snowtrail Safaris 5.0
Nordic Odyssey 5.0
Nordic Adventures 4.9
Arctic GM 4.9
Book Lapland 4.9
Bearhill Husky 4.9
Arctic Attitude 4.9
StayLapland 4.8
Wild About Lapland 4.7
Wild Nordic 4.7
Lapland Winter Park 4.6
Safartica 4.5
Nordic Unique Travels 4.5
Apukka Resort 4.4
Lapland Welcome 4.3
Arctic Circle Snowmobile Park 4.3
Arctic Circle Husky Park 4.2
Raitola 3.4
<44.04.55.0
Ratings read from Tripadvisor. The shaded compartment left of the divider holds any score below 4.0. We record the score only; review counts and review text are not part of our comparison.
Who has booked the wrong thing
Anyone who pictured stepping out of the door onto the Arctic Circle line.
That is a real product and it is available – there are at least six separate
hotels on the Santa Claus Village site – but this is not one of them.
Santa Claus Holiday Village and its neighbours
sets out which businesses are actually there and what each is. Read that page
if you want to be on the site, and this one if you want to be in the city; the
names will not tell you which is which, and the street address will.
It is also the wrong booking for anyone who assumed the hotel includes access
to Santa. Nothing does, because nothing needs to:
the meeting itself is free and runs all year,
and what paid Santa products sell is privacy and a journey rather than
admission.
The practical summary
Stay here if you want a large, comfortable, central hotel with more air above
your head than usual, and treat Santa Claus Village as a day trip on bus 8 –
which is how most people should treat it anyway, and
the practicalities of that day
are worth reading if it falls on your departure date.
Stay at the village if the village is the trip. Neither is better; they are
different holidays that happen to share three words.
This page is an independent guide. We have no connection to the hotel or to
its owners, and nothing here has been seen by them.
If we stay here, how do we get to Santa Claus Village?
By bus, and it is easy rather than a chore. Local bus 8 runs between the city and the village, and the airport bus stops at the village too, which is the detail worth planning around if your trip ends with a flight. The ride is short. What it is not is spontaneous: the service thins out in the evening, so an unplanned second visit after dinner is not really available, and a family that wants to drift in and out of the village all day is better off sleeping on the site.
Are the rooms actually different from a normal hotel's?
In two respects, yes. The ceilings are three and a half metres, which is unusual anywhere and very unusual in a northern hotel built to hold heat, and it makes an ordinary-sized room feel considerably larger. And every room has a bath rather than only a shower, which in Finland is rarer than visitors assume – plenty of good hotels here have saunas and no bathtubs at all. Whether either matters is personal, but they are real differences rather than marketing.
Is it the same company as Santa Claus Holiday Village?
No. They are unrelated businesses with similar names, and that is the single most common mix-up in Rovaniemi accommodation. Santa's Hotel Santa Claus belongs to a Finnish hotel group that also runs properties in other Lapland resorts; Santa Claus Holiday Village is a cottage and suite operation on the Santa Claus Village site. Booking one when you meant the other puts you eight kilometres from where you expected to be, which on a three-night trip is a real loss.
Lapland Handbook is written by its editorial staff in Rovaniemi. Every price, age limit and group size in a comparison is read from the operator's own page and marked "Not stated" when the operator does not publish it. Each guide names who should not book, and names the operator that suits each kind of group, whichever it is.
Rovaniemi's winter tours do sell out – December and the week around New Year first, and the small-group ones before the rest. Booking here goes straight to the operator at their own published price, and the code LH10 takes 10% off it.
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