Lapland on a budget:
Lulea, the perfect winter destination
Budget-Friendly Family Adventure: How to Exploring Lulea and Swedish Lapland without spending all savings?
Lapland, a popular destination
Lapland has become immensely popular in recent years, and I totally get it! It is truly beautiful. Endless forests covered by a thick layer of snow, a sun that makes ice crystals sparkle like diamonds, moose and reindeer that regularly emerge from among the trees, not to mention very low temperatures that give the whole thing a magical and challenging sauce.
But lapland's popularity has a downside, trips have become enormously expensive. Travel budget is an important issue for every traveler.
Specialized tour operators offer package tours at huge prices that an average family would have to work deep into the red for and that's a pity. Often these trips are only 4 days, with a full program that's makes you longing for some vacation after doing all these winter activities: snowshoe tour, husky ride, skiing, snowmobile tour, and in the evening you warm up by a cozy fire and can take a sauna if you're not going on a northern lights excursion.
But you can certainly visit lapland in a budget-friendly way too, even when you travel with your family! You really don't need to use a specialized lapland travel agency. This Swedish, Norwegian and Finnish region is easy to travel in the same way you carelessly book a trip to Spain. You choose one of the lesser-known airports, for example Sweden's Lulea. You can find even during school vacations cheap flights to Lulea, Sweden. To move around you book a rental car. In Lulea airport you will find all major rental companies. We booked our rental car through Rentalcars. Here you get the lowest price! No huge expensive hotels for us. We found a nice cottage through Airbnb.
Budget friendly activities in Lulea, Swedisch Lapland.
In Lulea there are many fun activities.
These are both the classic lapland activities and excursions that you do on your own.
There are three major organizations where you can book tours. Here you do pay a quite some money, but in the end it's still cheaper than when you book a full package tour.
We did these budget-friendly activities in Lulea, Lapland:
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(1) Hike on the 10-kilometer ice track around Lulea and to the island of Grasjalören.
You can do this on foot or use a kicksled. These are super fun, typical of lapland and they are free to use! You don't have to be afraid of falling through the ice. The ice rink is cleared by heavy snowplows and even cars use it. International skating competitions are held here every year because the quality of the ice is so good.
(2) We definitely wanted to do a snowshoe hike. We borrowed snowshoes from the owner of our Airbnb cottage, asked for a nice route and this way we did a fantastically beautiful walk through the snowy landscape in Sweden. We even saw reindeer! And it didn't cost us one euro.
(3) Skiing was definitely on the kids' wish list. Skiing in lapland means perfect snow, breathtakingly beautiful scenery and real old school skiing. The ski pass costs €10. Equipment can be used for free through the Fritidsbanken or rented for €20 on the spot. As it turned out, the ski slope was only open from 6pm to 9pm. So that became our first time night skiing. The only thing missing was the northern lights dancing above our heads. We'll keep that for next time.
-> more information: Skiing Måttsundsbacken
(4) Cross-country skiing on a professional biathlon track also seemed like a thing for us. For this we use the free equipment of the Fritidsbanken.
Unfortunately, we have absolutely no talent for this sport. So it was one big mess from the beginning until we threw our lats aside, slightly frustrated. The beautiful Swedish scenery made up for something, but Langlaufen we will probably not do again.
-> more information: Ormberget
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Hi! We are Bart, Kris, Lore and Ruben. We are a family of 5, yes, we also have a dog named Spike.
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Maybe we can inspire you to explore a bit more of all those beautiful corners of our planet? Go to our trips and find out!
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