A snowmobile northern lights tour in Rovaniemi

A snowmobile aurora tour sells two things in one evening: driving a machine through a forest in the dark, and standing still waiting for the sky. You cannot do the second while doing the first, so every tour divides its hours between them, and that division is what separates tours that otherwise look the same.

Who may drive, why two share a machine and what the excess is for are explained in the snowmobile safari guide. Why cloud rather than the tour decides the sky is in the northern lights guide.

The evening is a drive or a wait

Put the published figures side by side and the four tours fall into two kinds.

Two of them are drives with a stop in the middle. Lapland Royal Adventures puts around half of a four-hour evening on the machines, and Beyond Arctic covers the longest route here inside a shorter tour. If the lights do not appear, you have still had the night drive you paid for.

The other two are stops with a drive at either end. StayLapland gives about an hour to the machines inside four hours, and Snowtrail’s route to its cabin is the shorter of the two routes any operator publishes. Most of the evening is spent where the sky is watched, which suits a group whose first reason for booking is the aurora.

Neither is the better tour. The mistake is booking one kind while expecting the other.

Driving at night is colder and slower

After dark, the machine is the coldest place on the evening: moving air, no sun, and the nights clear enough for aurora are usually the coldest ones. StayLapland is the only operator to publish a limit, cancelling or rescheduling below minus thirty-five and below minus twenty-five for small children.

Dress for the stop rather than the ride. The overalls and boots are provided on all four tours, and the layer you bring underneath is what decides whether an hour of waiting at a campfire is pleasant.

The late start

Two operators publish their start times, and one of them starts late enough to finish around midnight. Snowtrail and Lapland Royal Adventures publish none. With children, or before an early flight, get the time before booking. Where children ride and what they pay follow the same rules as a daytime safari, set out in the family snowmobile safari guide.

Where Snowtrail wins and where it loses

Snowtrail supplies this site. Its tour is the one to choose when the aurora matters more than the machine: the drive is short, the destination is its own cabin away from town lights, and smaller children travel in a sleigh behind the guide. For a group with nervous drivers or young children, a short drive to a warm stop is the better evening.

It loses on everything a keen driver wants to know. The page gives no driving time, no damage excess and no start time, and the short route suggests little time on the machine, though the page does not say how little. A driver who came for the snowmobile should book one of the longer drives, and anyone choosing Snowtrail should ask for the excess before signing anything at the safari house.