Visit Tromsø — Attraction in Tromsø

Buyer beware! VisitTromso.no sells tickets for some poor-quality experiences. Save your money (and precious vacation time) by trying alternative booking sites that actually include user reviews of the activities!

We used VisitTromso.no to book a few activities for our vacation. One of those was the “Aurora Sky Camps” operated by “We Travel North”.

To be quite frank, the tour was not what was advertised on the VisitTromso.no website, to the point that it was misleading at best and borderline-fraudulent at worst.

The tour description contained a number of claims, including:

Shelters/Toilets: “We have… warm shelters, toilet facilities, …”

Change-of-location: “If the weather changes, we will be finishing our meals and leave to try to find another spot with a clear sky along the roads”

Guide: “Included: knowledgeable… guide”

Soup: “Included:... hot meal - with either a meat soup or a potato soup (the pottatosoup [sic] must be pre-booked…)”

Pickup: “The bus will be marked ‘We Travel North.’”

The experience we received simply did not meet the experience that was promised:

Shelters/Toilets: The “toilet facilities” consisted of a smelly, freezing cold outhouse with no heating, no lights, and no running water. Given that food was also served at this event, I believe the lack of running water for handwashing is a health code violation.

Change-of-location: There was no attempt to find a spot with clear skies. During the event, the group was seated indoors and instead of watching the sky to monitor the weather (as every other Northern Lights tour operator would do), the tour guide was also seated inside, making no attempt to check for visibility of the northern lights. We asked if there was an option to drive the bus to another location, but there were no such plans. While we understand that seeing the Northern Lights is never guaranteed, no attempt was even made. There were other tours on this night that did see the Northern Lights.

Guide: Our guide was simply not knowledgeable. He claimed to be an expert on whales, but he knew very little about spotting the Northern Lights. We went on two other northern lights tours in Tromso, both of which had expert guides, so it was embarrassing to have paid for service this bad.

Soup: No meat soup was provided, only a thin potato soup that looked like a cheap mixture of powdered potato and water. Given that the advertisement listed a “meat soup”, this is simply fraud.

Pickup: The bus was incorrectly marked “NLC” instead of “We Travel North”, making it very difficult to find the pickup location.

Given that this was also one of our most expensive activities in Tromso, this was simply a borderline-fraudulent tourist trap and should be avoided.

I recommend that VisitTromso actually vet its partners and/or support user reviews on its website to prevent these kinds of low-quality tourist-trap vendors from scamming tourists.

Edit: VisitTromso has replied to my review claiming that the vendor responded to me over email. However, the vendor has made no attempt to contact me, and I have received...

I am very disappointed with this aurora viewing trip. Firstly, we had agreed to depart at 6:30, but the tour guide arrived late in freezing conditions. To make matters worse, when the guide finally arrived, they informed us that we had to wait an additional 30 minutes for the tour bus. We were left waiting outdoors in subzero temperatures.

Secondly, throughout the entire journey, the tour guide's explanations were unprofessional and their speech was not fluent. It felt like they lacked expertise in delivering the information.

Thirdly, due to the delay, we couldn't go to the prime location for observing the Northern Lights. Instead, we ended up traveling for an hour and a half to a place with severe light pollution, and in the end, we couldn't see anything at all.

I understand that weather conditions cannot be predicted, but I believe it is the responsibility of the tour guide to do their best to take us to the best possible location for viewing the Northern Lights. However, this guide completely failed to do so.

In conclusion, I cannot recommend this company and I am completely disgusted with...

Why this town is so tourists/visitors unfriendly? We were here 9 days (also visiting sourroundings and nearby towns) and we got an impression, that what is counting - is to come (somehow), pay for service (we might even not use) and get lost to make space for next loosers... Compering to other popular cities like Copenhagen, Amsterdam or even Budapest - Tromso has a lot of to learn and improove! And organisation of your public transport is so disastres and unfriendly for visitors that this need a book-wide explanations/comparisons (also to a/m cities, but not only to them). We've seen auroras, sledd with reindeers and this fulfilled our expextations. Planned visit to Oslo was canceled. We're going to...