Ice Hotels

The original, and still the one every other ice hotel is measured against. Each winter the hotel is rebuilt from snow and from ice harvested out of the Torne river, with a fresh roster of invited artists carving the individual art suites — so a returning guest sleeps in a building that no longer exists in the form they remember. A year-round wing, ICEHOTEL 365, is kept frozen by solar power through the summer.

A night in a cold room is one night for most people: thermal sleeping bag, reindeer hides, everything else left in a heated locker room, hot lingonberry drink in the morning. The warm accommodation across the site is where guests actually unpack. Around it sits Jukkasjärvi village, dog sledding, and, on clear nights between autumn and spring, the aurora.

North America's only ice hotel is rebuilt each winter near Quebec City and opens for roughly two and a half months before it melts. Vaulted snow corridors lead to themed suites, an ice chapel that hosts real weddings, a bar serving into carved glasses and a slide cut through the structure. The whole thing is designed to be visited by day as much as slept in — day passes outnumber overnight guests considerably.

Overnight visitors get a briefing, a mummy bag rated well below freezing, and access to outdoor spas and saunas next door, which is the part that makes the night workable. The site sits inside a larger year-round resort, so a warm room and a hot breakfast are a short walk away. Bring less than you think; the room has nowhere to put it.

Kirkenes sits at the far north-eastern corner of Norway, close to the Russian border and well inside the Arctic Circle, and the snow hotel there is rebuilt annually on the shore of a fjord. Ice sculptures line the corridors, the temperature holds a few degrees below freezing, and the property runs a working husky yard and a small herd of reindeer alongside it.

Most guests split the stay: a night in the snow rooms, a night in one of the timber cabins or glass-roofed gamme units on the same site. King crab pulled from the fjord is the local speciality and the restaurant does not undersell it. From late November the sun does not rise at all, which is exactly why people come.

Twenty minutes outside Rovaniemi, this property runs a snow hotel, a snow restaurant and a set of glass-roofed igloos on one forested site, which lets guests take the cold night and the warm night without moving. The snow structure is rebuilt each December and includes a snow sauna — a genuinely odd thing to sit in — alongside conventional wood saunas and outdoor hot tubs.

The igloos are the draw for aurora watchers, since the roof is heated and clear and the beds turn to face it. Days are given over to snowshoeing, ice fishing and husky trips arranged on site. It is a working Finnish winter operation rather than a boutique concept, and it is priced and staffed accordingly.