Reindeer farm visit in Rovaniemi

Two quite different things are sold under the word reindeer in Rovaniemi, and the listings are no help at all in telling them apart.

A farm visit and a sleigh ride are not the same purchase

A reindeer farm visit means going to a working herding farm, standing among the animals, feeding them lichen, and hearing how herding actually works from someone who does it. It usually ends with coffee in a kota by a fire.

A reindeer sleigh ride means sitting in a wooden sleigh while a reindeer walks a marked loop. It is often part of a farm visit, and it is often not.

Both are pleasant. They are not interchangeable, and the reviews that begin “we thought we were getting a ride” come from people who bought the first while picturing the second. Before you pay, find the words sleigh ride in the inclusions. If they are not there, it is not included, and no amount of reindeer in the tour title changes that.

What Snowtrail’s reindeer tour is, and is not

We should be plain about our own supplier here, because the name invites exactly the wrong assumption.

Snowtrail’s reindeer tour does not include a reindeer sleigh ride. Not a short one, not an optional one. What you get is a four-hour programme in which you drive an electric sled out to a farm, meet and feed real reindeer, and have hot glögi and a snack at a forest cabin. That is the whole of it, and their own inclusions list says so.

The confusing part is the name. Electric Reindeer is Snowtrail’s brand name for the vehicle you sit on, not for an animal: in their words, “our name for an electric sled (model e-Scort Comfort, made by eDream, Finland)”. So an “Electric Reindeer Safari” is a ride on a machine, and the reindeer you meet are at the other end of it. The same page notes that under-fifteens may not drive the sled and travel in a snowmobile sleigh instead — which is, again, a sleigh pulled by an engine.

The same sled is also how Snowtrail runs its cheapest visit to Santa and its evening run out to an aurora cabin: one vehicle, three destinations, which is worth knowing if you are trying to do more than one of them in a single trip.

If you want to be pulled by an animal, book Beyond Arctic or Raitola from the table below, or one of the several other Rovaniemi farms that sell it. We would rather send you elsewhere than have you arrive expecting something that is not on the itinerary.

The ride is much shorter than you think

This is the second expectation worth resetting.

Beyond Arctic publish two kilometres. Other Rovaniemi farms sell rides of around 400 metres. Raitola’s hour is the long end of the whole market, not the middle of it.

The reason is simply the animal. A reindeer walks, and it walks at the pace it feels like walking. There is no equivalent of the husky team’s gallop, no driving, and nothing that will feel fast. A sleigh ride is a slow circuit through trees in the quiet, and judged as that it is lovely. Judged as transport, or as a thrill, it disappoints everybody.

So compare the rides in metres or minutes rather than by the price of the tour that wraps around them, and treat any listing that will not say how long the ride is as a listing selling you a short one.

What a farm visit is genuinely good at

If you drop the ride from your expectations, the farm visit is one of the better things to do here with small children, and one of the few that works in summer.

The animals are calm and used to people. Feeding them takes as long as you want it to. The herding talk is the part adults remember, because reindeer husbandry is a real living, and the person telling you about it is usually doing it. Nothing needs booking weeks ahead, nobody needs a licence, and nobody gets cold standing in a queue for a turn.

It is also the cheapest way into the culture side of a Lapland trip. Several Rovaniemi farms sell a visit alone, without transport or a ride, for well under a hundred euros.

Which to book

Want to be pulled by a reindeer, and want the most of it: Raitola, an hour behind the animal for €133.

Want the ride plus photographs and a polished, well-equipped tour: Beyond Arctic, at €185.

Want a half-day outdoors with a farm at the end and do not care about the ride: Snowtrail, at €139 — as long as you have read the section above and are booking it for what it is.

Those three are picks for three different groups. Set against each other on price, ride length, pickup, clothing and summer opening, the farms sort differently again, and the best reindeer farm in Rovaniemi is that comparison. If the reindeer are meant to share the day with the dogs, what the listings blur is whether the reindeer half is a sleigh ride at all — husky and reindeer in one day is about exactly that.