How to get to Levi, and how much time to leave once you are here

People spend a lot of planning energy on the flights and almost none on the two hours between landing and their first booking. It is the wrong way round.

Getting to the region is a solved problem. Kittilä is the nearest airport, it exists because of this valley, and its whole purpose in winter is moving visitors to the village and back. You land, you collect a bag, you get into a transfer, and you are taken to Sirkka. We are not going to quote you a number of minutes for that leg, because no listing on this site publishes one and a figure we invented would be exactly as useful as no figure at all. Your transfer provider, your hotel or your rental company will tell you, and they will be right.

Getting to the meeting point is not always solved. This is the part that goes wrong. A listing that does not say pickup available or transport included is telling you that you are getting yourself to the start, and the start may be a kennel, a farm or a snowmobile base rather than a street in the village. In a place where it is dark early and cold throughout, ten minutes of uncertainty about where you are meant to be standing is a genuinely unpleasant ten minutes.

So read the listing for two lines. The transport line, and the notice period. Both are printed on the listing page, and between them they decide how your arrival day actually works.

We cannot tell you how long your transfer takes, but we can tell you what the operators themselves say they need, and that is enough to build a sensible first day out of.

Two hours is the shortest notice anybody here asks for. $102 states it must be booked at least two hours in advance. That is the most spontaneous thing on this site, and it is the reason it is a useful listing to keep in your back pocket for an afternoon that suddenly clears up.

Five hours is the middle. $144 asks for at least five hours’ notice. Book that in the morning for the afternoon, not on the way to the meeting point.

Ten hours is the longest. $129 and $183 both state at least ten hours. In practice that means the night before, and in high season it means further ahead than that simply because the places fill. If reindeer are the thing your family came for, book them before you travel rather than after you land.

Which leaves the arrival day itself. Our advice is plain: put nothing in it. Flights into the north in winter are subject to weather like everybody else’s, bags take as long as they take, and the first evening is better spent finding out where things are than sprinting to a meeting point. If you want something on day one anyway, make it one of the listings that collects you — $171, $240 or $287 — so that the only thing you have to get right is being at your accommodation at the stated time.