Christmas at the Original Ice Hotel, Sweden

Martin Maynard
Dec 27, 2018
2 min read

We were lucky enough to stay at the original Ice Hotel location in Jukkasjarvi in Sweden (from December 23rd to 26th), where there is now a permanent 365 day Ice Hotel as well a temporary Ice Hotel that is built and designed in unique style every year, so we stayed at the 29th Ice Hotel. We flew from London directly to the tiny nearby airport at Kiruna, which is about 200 kilometres into the Arctic Circle and, stepping out into the snow with temperatures of minus 26c, we were immediately faced with the expected freezing impact!

Incidentally, we booked our trip with the UK travel company - Discover the World - who are true experts with 30 years experience of arranging this specific holiday experience and we certainly would highly recommend them for their knowledge and experience and they provided the added benefit of an on-site Manager throughout our stay.

The actual resort provides Cold and Warm rooms with the former representing a night stay on an Ice Bed - an unbelievable experience, but one night was enough :) The other two nights were spent in a warm room where you can fully appreciate the normal hotel temperatures and facilities! We were briefed about how to get some sleep in the Ice Room and you are recommended to wear thermal clothing. Sleeping bags and a liner are provided and you sleep on animal furs on top of the ice bed - the pillows are freezing cold, so positioning the sleeping bag on top of the pillow is quite important! We actually managed quite a good nights sleep and were woken with a nice hot drink, before making our way to the adjacent building to enjoy a hot shower and toilet facilities!

Although our stay was for just 3 nights, we did enjoy some super activities, indeed Christmas Day was a little too hectic for us, as we decided to walk to the small and well looked after Reindeer Park to feed the Reindeers Christmas morning before a 90 minute Husky Sled adventure, a Christmas Carol walk and service at the local Chapel and then after dinner we were driven about 40 minutes away for a 3 hour photography experience in search of the Northern Lights, but unfortunately too much cloud and repeated snow flurries meant we were unlucky to have a good sighting on that particular evening. Other pursuits such as Snowmobiling adventures are also available.

The Ice Hotel is served by two very good restaurants and a nice warm Hotel bar as well as the amazing IceBar, named the 'Absolut Icebar'. In the Icebar you can enjoy a nice cocktail in an Ice glass and sit on Ice stalls taking in the most amazing ice sculptures that are all around you.

We took many pictures, some of which are on our instagram account @martinandviviana and there is also a 6 minute video showing some of the highlights, that can be seen on Youtube. I have shown a selection of our pictures below: -