About This Site

An aurora tour is a strange thing to buy. You are paying for a night that may not deliver anything, in a place you have never been, in a season you cannot judge from home. The sky decides, and the sky is not part of the transaction.

We built this because almost everything written about the northern lights is written by someone selling a seat. Operators describe their own tours. The large booking sites list whatever their feed hands them, in whatever order suits them. Neither will tell you that December, the month with the most darkness and the highest prices, has the worst sky of the entire season in Tromso — usable on 16.8% of nights against 34.0% in September.

Those are the things we try to put in writing.

We publish the numbers nobody publishes. How often the sky is actually clear, month by month and place by place, from eleven seasons of ERA5 reanalysis. How much real darkness a night gives you. Which nights the moon takes away. Every figure here carries its source and says what it does not tell you.

We also describe tours. How long you are out, how many people are in the vehicle, what the price covers, whether the guide can drive far enough to leave the cloud behind, and where the tour really starts from, which is not always the town in the title.

When a tour has a drawback we say so. A two-hour cruise and a ten-hour chase are sold under the same words and are not the same product: that goes in the description, not the small print. A page that only tells you the good parts is an advertisement, and there are plenty of those already.

That you will see the aurora. Nobody can promise that, and an operator who does is promising the weather and the sun at once.

What an aurora guarantee usually buys you is a second attempt, not a refund, and the conditions differ from one operator to the next. We read them and write down what they actually say, because that sentence is the single most misunderstood thing in this business.

The order is not for sale. No operator can pay to appear higher, and nothing in the ranking is driven by what we earn. Worth saying plainly, because it is not the norm: one of the large booking sites publishes, in its own words, that its ranking uses "revenue including supplier commissions" as one of the inputs.

Unless a destination page says otherwise, tours within it are listed alphabetically by name. It is a dull rule. That is rather the point: it applies to everyone equally and it cannot quietly follow the money.

Some destinations read better in a different order, and where we use one — an average review score weighted by how many reviews sit behind it, or the price — the page says so. A 4.8 built on fifteen hundred nights tells you more than a 5.0 built on twelve, and any score we sort by takes that into account.

A few tours are picked out by hand because they are the ones we would book. They sit apart from the list, so you can tell them from the rest. It is our opinion, not a paid placement.

We do not compare the whole market, and it would be dishonest to imply otherwise. What you see here are aurora tours, and trips built around one, sold through the booking partners we work with: Viator and Civitatis. An operator who sells only from its own website, or through a partner we have no account with, will not appear on this site. That is not a judgement on them. We simply never saw the tour.

Within what we can see, we still leave things out. A tour with no usable photographs, or a price so far below the local market that we suspect it is not the product it claims to be, does not get a page until we understand it.

Prices, availability, star ratings and review counts all come from those same partners. We do not collect reviews, and we have never written one. The cloud, darkness and moon figures are ours, calculated from public archives that anyone can recalculate.

We earn a commission on bookings made through the tour links.

It costs you nothing extra. The price you pay is the booking partner's price, the same one you would get going there directly. We do not add a fee, we never see your card, and we are not part of the transaction.

It also does not change the order, and it does not change what we write. We are not paid more for sending you to one operator rather than another, and no partner has any say in our text. If that ever stops being true, this page will say so.

We do not run tours, employ guides, or own a minibus. We do not take bookings or payments, and we cannot change, cancel or refund one. Every tour here is run by an independent operator and sold through a booking partner, and if something goes wrong on the night, they are the ones who can fix it.

We are not a forecast either. We publish how often conditions have been good in the past, which is a different thing from what the sky will do on your Tuesday.

Prices and availability come from our partners and change constantly. Treat what you see here as an indication rather than a quote: the figure at checkout is the real one.

We will. A price goes stale. An operator stops running and it takes us a week to notice. A number gets recalculated and moves.

If you find something wrong, tell us and we will fix it. If it was wrong in a way that mattered, we will say what changed rather than quietly editing it.