The Electric Reindeer safari, and what you are actually booking

Electric Reindeer is a product name, and it is the only one in Rovaniemi that reads as an animal and turns out to be a vehicle.

That is worth clearing up before anything else, because people book it expecting to sit behind a reindeer and because the two ages on the page – three and fifteen – mean different things and get read as one.

What the machine is

Snowtrail is direct about it on its own page: Electric Reindeer is its name for an electric sled, the e-Scort Comfort made by eDream in Finland, near-silent and fume-free, which you drive yourself on guide-led trails.

So it is a small tracked vehicle with handlebars. The quiet is the point of choosing it: a snowmobile convoy is audible from a long way off and this is not, which changes what four hours in a forest sounds like more than it changes what they look like.

The reindeer on the tour are real, and they are at the far end of it. The safari finishes at a farm where you meet them, with hot glögi and a snack. If what you pictured was being pulled through snow by an animal, that is a reindeer sleigh ride, and the reindeer farm guide sets out which farms sell one and what a visit costs without a ride.

Three to come, fifteen to drive

The tour takes children from three. Nobody under fifteen may drive, and a driver under eighteen must have a responsible adult with them.

Those are two separate rules and the gap between them is where families get caught. A five-year-old is welcome and will not be driving. A fifteen-year-old can drive, which is unusual – the snowmobile safari sets its driver at eighteen with a licence, and that single difference is the reason to choose between the two tours rather than a matter of taste.

What the page does not say is how a child under fifteen travels: with an adult on the same machine, in a towed sleigh, or with the guide. That is the question to ask before booking with a small child, and it is not answered anywhere we have looked.

No licence, which is not nothing

An Electric Reindeer needs no driving licence. A snowmobile does: Finland’s transport agency sets fifteen as the minimum age to drive one and requires a tractor-class licence on official routes.¹

Snowtrail’s claim is about its own machine, and we report it as the operator’s claim rather than as a reading of the law – we have not found a Traficom page that classifies the e-Scort, and this page does not pretend one exists. What it means practically is that a party with no driving licences between them has one self-driven option in Rovaniemi and this is it.

The same machine, a different errand

There is a second Electric Reindeer tour, and it goes somewhere else: Santa’s Hidden Cabin rather than the reindeer farm, sold as a private tour at €149 rather than €139.

Ten euros is not the decision. The destination is. One afternoon ends with reindeer and the other ends with Santa, and a family doing both would be driving the same trails twice – worth knowing, because the two listings look like variants of one product and are not.

Where the private version sits among the other tours Snowtrail sells privately, and which of those publish a price at all, is on private tours in Rovaniemi.

Which of the two four-hour safaris to book

A teenager who wants to drive: this one. Fifteen against eighteen is the whole answer, and there is no other tour in the comparison where it goes the other way.

Nobody with a driving licence: this one, for the same reason in reverse.

An adult who wants to drive something with power: the snowmobile. It is the same length, the same price as the private version of this, and it publishes its trail distance, which this does not.

A small child and no interest in driving at all: neither, necessarily. The reindeer farm on its own costs less and asks nothing of anyone, and the four hours here are mostly the getting there.

What is not published

The maximum group size, beyond the words small group. How many share a sled. How under-fifteens travel. The season. The guiding language. The route length, and how much of the four hours is spent driving.

And the insurance excess, which on a tour where you drive something is the figure worth having in writing. Rovaniemi’s snowmobile operators publish self-liabilities in the hundreds and occasionally the thousands; the absence of a number here is not the absence of a liability, and the snowmobile guide sets out what those figures look like when operators do publish them.

Snowtrail supplies this site, and this is its product and its name for it.