The Aurora Zone

The Aurora Zone arranged our recent holiday at Brandon Lodge in Swedish Lapland. Customer care was excellent from the outset: great local knowledge, took time over our specific arrangements, gave useful advice and inspired confidence that it would be wonderful. And it absolutely was - and then some. Travel, accommodation, activities, people all contributed to a phenomenal experience. The Aurora showed up too just to make it perfect.

A couple of friends and myself recently booked a tour and activities with Aurora Zone to Abisko in Sweden to see the Northern Lights. From my very first contact with the company I was impressed. Every staff member that I spoke to/emailed was above average in customer service. We were provided with a secure account page which was kept up to date with all the information for the trip. We stayed at the Abisko Mountain Lodge and the IceHotel in Jukkasjärvi and booked a number of activities. Every activity and transfer went like clockwork. I would highly recommend Aurora Zone as a very professional, efficient company with a personalised touch. Thank you Aurora Zone for a fantastic holiday.

Can highly recommend Aurora Zone. Our recent experience was magical, and their choice of partners, organisation and attention to details was superb.

I booked the Ultimate Arctic Aurora Holiday in February 2019 in Inari and Saariselka through Aurora Zone. Their administration was superb. They answered all my queries personally and swiftly so that I felt fully briefed before I went and they put together an excellent package of two resorts and activities. The Wilderness Hotel was particularly good.

Brochure delivered quickly after visiting the website. Exceptional quality brochure, look forward to making a booking.

We loved our holiday in Finland from start to finish. We saw the lights but the whole experience was about much more than that. Lapland is beautiful and I'd recommend it to anybody.

Just got back from 4nights in Rovaniemi Finland, booked through Aurora Zone. The whole process was so simple and the team were so helpful with any questions we had. Would definitely recommend using them to anyone and we will certainly be using them again in the future.

We enjoyed the holiday in Lapland but there are 2 items you should be made aware of.Firstly, when my wife and I arrived at Ivalo airport we expected to be met by a courier or someone to guide us to our transport to the Wilderness Hotel Inari.In fact there was no one to meet us at all and we had no idea how we were supposed to get to the hotel. Fortunately after 20mins walking around the exit from the airport we saw a man holding a sign for one of the other Wilderness Hotels who rang to Wilderness Inari and they advised us to take a taxi to the hotel (at their cost ) which came to +/- EURO 100.Secondly, the reindeer sleigh ride was clearly not part of the itinerary at the reindeer farm at Wilderness Inari and should not have been advertised as such.Visiting the farm was interesting but the reindeer sleigh ride was what we were really looking forward to and so we’re rather disappointing to find it was not to included and clearly was not part of the farm’s program for visitors since they had no facilities for the sleigh rides.The sleigh ride advertised as part of the visit to the farm is most definitely not in fact part of the visit at Inari. When we informed Aurorazone about this they told us it was cancelled “for safety and health reasons” without their knowledge.The coach to take us to the farm was full with +/- 60 people. The farm would have needed a whole herd of reindeer to accommodate so many people. Very disappointed. In any case; are n’t the snowmobile and dog sleigh rides equally unsafe. Their excuse does n’t ring true.We were offered no refund even though we paid for the rides.After further discussions with Aurorazone we eventually received a full refund for that reindeer farm activity.

We did a 4-day Inari Wilderness trip, featuring a hugely enjoyable and wide range of activities. Great stuff, loved it, aurora activity on the first two nights.But, we were a bit disappointed by Aurora's customer service. On my first encounter (via phone) I enquired about doing a Helsinki stopover as part of the package. When asking the CS rep whether he would recommend the Finnish capital, the response was he'd never been there, so couldn't really say. So, a Nordics specialist, but unable to offer any insight into the third largest city in Scandinavia? Hmmmm. .Our bigger issue was that a couple of weeks before departure, we discovered via a Finnish acquaintance that lockdown restrictions in the country meant that hotel/restaurant amenities were 'off limits' in the evenings. This was a surprise to us as we assumed (not unreasonably) that if there were these restrictions, Aurora would/might have notified us. I had a 'pointed' phone discussion with a member of the CS team after suggesting it was incumbent on them, courteous even, to keep clients briefed on this. The response was that (1) the lockdown restrictions are/were subject to change; and (2) the company didn't want to bombard clients with emails. So, on the one hand, a few weeks before departure Aurora saw fit to bombard clients with an email about winning a fifty quid John Lewis voucher, but complete radio silence about clients not being able to buy a drink after 5pm while holidaying. On this specific point we were rather patronised about the (fully understandable) no-alcohol ruling for using the snowmobiles, which kind of missed the point.As it turned out, the day we arrived, against expectations (we'd assumed curfew conditions for the first two nights), the hotel resumed 'normal' operations.

Best short break we've ever done. Dog sledding, snowmobiles, reindeer and the Northern Lights....faultless from start to finish.