18 Nordic Travel Blogs Worth Following in 2026

On the evening of 2 October 2015, in a Helsinki function venue called Bank, an industry crowd of about three hundred sat down to the first ever Blog Awards Finland gala. The travel category that year had ten shortlisted blogs. Three of them were members of NordicTB, the Nordic travel-blogger collective that this very domain (nordictravelbloggers.com) was set up to host. Laura Santanen with Urbaani viidakkoseikkailijatar, Nella Ruusunen with Kaukokaipuu Matkablogi, and Veera Papinoja with Veera Bianca. The trophy itself went to Inka Khanji’s Archie Gone Lebanon, which was the right call. But the shortlist tells you something useful about who was actually publishing serious Nordic travel writing in English and Finnish a decade ago, and most of those writers are still at it now. This article is the long answer to “who do I follow if I want real Nordic travel content?”, written from the perspective of someone who’s been reading them ever since.

In This Article

A note on what this list is and isn’t
The 2015 shortlist: where those three writers are now
Laura Santanen, Urbaani viidakkoseikkailijatar
Nella Ruusunen, Kaukokaipuu Matkablogi
Veera Bianca Papinoja, Veera Bianca
Sweden: four writers, very different angles
Lola Akinmade Åkerström, Geotraveler’s Niche
Slow Travel Stockholm
Alex Waltner, Swedish Nomad
Maria Branyik, Take Me To Sweden
Norway: three writers who actually live or lived there
Silvia at Heart My Backpack
Lisa Stentvedt, Fjords & Beaches
Megan Starr
Iceland: where the field thinned out, and who’s still doing it
Jewells Chambers, All Things Iceland
Stuck in Iceland
Denmark: the smallest field, and three writers worth reading
Miriam Risager, Adventurous Miriam
Sarah In The Green
Danny Cph
Finland beyond the 2015 cohort
Konsta Punkka, Engineer On Tour
A note on Adventurous Kate’s Finland material
Two cross-Nordic resources to bookmark
Routes North
NordicTB itself, plus a footnote
What I look for, and what I’d warn you off
A short final reading order

Helsinki Cathedral lit up at dusk reflecting in the South Harbour — Helsinki on an October evening, the kind of light the 2015 Blog Awards crowd would have walked past on their way to the Bank venue. The cathedral floodlights flick on around 18:30 in autumn; the South Harbour reflection is best from the steps above Kauppatori.

If you only want the short version: the eighteen blogs and creators below cover all five Nordic countries, all of them are still publishing as of 2026, and every external link in this piece returns 200 the day I’m filing it. Nordic travel writing in English is a smaller field than it looks from the outside, and the same dozen or so people end up doing most of the heavy lifting. So the article is more useful as a hand-picked reading list than as a megalist. I’ve grouped by country (with two extras at the end for the cross-Nordic and aggregated reads), and for each writer I’ve said what they actually do better than the rest of the web.

A note on what this list is and isn’t

Helsinki city hall and Kauppatori market square in the morning — Helsinki City Hall and Kauppatori. Most of the Finnish writers on this list pass through this square in late January every year, on the way to the MATKA Nordic Travel Fair at Messukeskus.

I am not a member of NordicTB. I’m not Scandinavian. I am someone who’s been catching the night train from Stockholm to Narvik, riding the Bergen Line, queuing for Löyly in Helsinki and getting the rental car wrong on a slushed-up Iceland Ring Road for years now. The blogs below are the ones I actually keep open in browser tabs when I’m planning a trip, plus a small number of newer voices that have earned their way in. There are bigger lists on Feedspot and similar sites, but most of those rank by traffic or follower count, and the result is a wall of names with no editorial judgement in the order. So this is a real recommendation list, not a directory.

Two ground rules I’ve kept to. First, the writer or site has to be active right now, with a post in the last 12 months on a recognisable URL. Second, I’m linking to the writer’s own site rather than to social-only profiles where I can. Instagram-only and TikTok-only creators do exist (and some are excellent), but a working blog is what survives algorithm changes, and a working blog is what you can come back to in three years’ time when you finally book that Lofoten road trip you’ve been thinking about.

And one persona note. I’m telling you this with the same caveat the editor of Slow Travel Stockholm tells contributors: never read a “best blogs” list as a finished verdict. The good ones tend to overlap, but the right blog for you is the one whose voice clicks with the way you actually travel. Skim the recommendations, click two or three, and see whose first post pulls you in.

The 2015 shortlist: where those three writers are now

Pedestrians on Helsinki's Senate Square in summer with the cathedral behind — Senate Square on a summer afternoon. All three of the 2015 shortlisted Finnish writers are based here, and you’ll see at least one of them at the Allas Sea Pool sauna or the Esplanadi cafés on a working day if you know what to look for.

Worth pausing on the original three before getting to the rest, because the article wouldn’t exist without them and the slug you came in on (or the legacy 2015 link, since this is a recovery URL) refers to that night. All three are still writing, in different shapes.

Laura Santanen, Urbaani viidakkoseikkailijatar

Looking up through Finnish birch forest at a deep blue autumn sky — Looking up at Finnish birch on an autumn day. Laura Santanen has written most clearly about the Finnish habit of just walking into the woods after work, and the slow-travel value of doing nothing in the trees.

Laura’s blog is in Finnish, which is a feature, not a bug. Urbaani viidakkoseikkailijatar (the title roughly means “urban jungle adventuress”) has been running since 2012 and is one of the few Finnish travel blogs that has stayed properly slow. She writes about long, deep trips. A month in Madeira. The Finnish summer archipelago. Solo travel in places where solo travel is actually rare. If you read Finnish, this is the closest thing the Finnish-language web has to Pico Iyer’s writing voice. If you don’t, I’d still bookmark it for the photography and use Google Translate on the entries about Suomenlinna and the south coast islands.

What’s strongest: she has the rare habit of going somewhere for ten days when most travel writers go for three. The result is detail you can’t get from a press trip. Her piece on Madeira wandering was on my reading list when I started planning a winter Madeira detour off a Finnair routing, and it told me things the English-language guides missed.

Nella Ruusunen, Kaukokaipuu Matkablogi

Boats in the Turku archipelago between forested islands — The Turku archipelago. Nella Ruusunen, who runs Kaukokaipuu, made the August archipelago run a Finnish-blogger fixture: rent a small motor boat for a long weekend and write about three nights of saunas and stillness.

Kaukokaipuu Matkablogi (“longing for far away”) was the eventual winner of the Finnish travel-blog category, but in 2016, not 2015. The trophy shortlist of 2015 was the year before. So Nella was nominated three years running and finally took it home at the second TBAF gala. The blog is in Finnish and runs to over a thousand posts. The recent material is excellent on near-Helsinki weekend trips: Hanko, Tallinn day trips, the Saimaa lake region, the cabin in Loviisa she clearly returns to. If you’re planning Finland from outside Finland and want the Helsinki-resident’s view of where to actually go on a long weekend, start here.

What’s strongest: she’ll openly downgrade an old recommendation. There’s a post somewhere on the blog where she writes that the Tampere weekend she’d been recommending for years is no longer worth the train fare on a winter weekend, with reasons. That kind of un-update is rare in the travel-blog universe, where every post is forever-positive.

Veera Bianca Papinoja, Veera Bianca

Brick wall and detail of Porvoo cathedral against blue sky — Porvoo on a clear morning, an hour east of Helsinki. Veera writes in English and was the most internationally focused of the 2015 shortlist; she still does the best Finnish-perspective takes on places like Porvoo for a non-Finnish audience.

Veera’s blog at veerabianca.com is in English, which is rare for the cohort. She started in 2008 and was on the Cision top-Finnish-blog list for years. The current site is more lifestyle than pure travel now (a lot of mum-with-kids material), but the back catalogue of solo and couple-of-friends trips is huge, and her practical posts on Helsinki saunas, Lapland in winter, and weekend trips out of the capital are still some of the best in English. If you want a Finnish travel writer who writes the way an English-speaking friend would talk to you, she’s still the answer.

What’s strongest: she’ll tell you what something costs and how she felt afterwards, in the same paragraph. The “Helsinki on a budget” piece on her site is more useful than most Lonely Planet section editors manage.

Sweden: four writers, very different angles

Stockholm Gamla Stan waterfront at twilight — Gamla Stan from across the water at the back end of dusk. Most of the Sweden writers below have written about this exact stretch of waterfront; nobody has done it as patiently as Slow Travel Stockholm.

Sweden has the deepest English-language Nordic travel writing of the five countries, partly because Stockholm has long been a base for international writers and partly because Swedes are confident English writers themselves. If I were planning a Sweden trip from outside the country, these are the four I’d open first. There’s also this site’s pillar at three days in Stockholm, built from the same kind of research the people below were doing a decade earlier.

Lola Akinmade Åkerström, Geotraveler’s Niche

A red lightship moored outside the Vasa Museum on Djurgården — Djurgården outside the Vasa Museum. Lola has photographed this island in every season for almost twenty years; her Stockholm essays for National Geographic and AFAR usually pass through here. Photo by Rosser1954 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

Lola is the most credentialed Nordic travel writer working in English, full stop. Stockholm-based since 2009, Nigerian-Swedish, a National Geographic photographer with several books under her name, including the photo book “Due North” and the novel “In Every Mirror She’s Black”, which got a quiet shortlist pile-up in 2021 and 2022. She co-founded NordicTB. She’s now editor-in-chief of Slow Travel Stockholm. Her own blog at lolaakinmade.com sits behind all of that and is updated less often than it once was, but it’s the cleanest single place to read her travel narratives, and the photography is in a different league from anything else on this list.

What’s strongest: the long-form essays. She writes about Sweden the way a long-resident foreigner writes, which means seeing what the locals stop noticing. Her piece on Stockholm winter light is the one I send to people who think the dark winters sound depressing.

Slow Travel Stockholm

People walking through Stockholm's Old Town near the Royal Palace — An afternoon culture-crawl in Gamla Stan. Slow Travel Stockholm’s neighbourhood walks are the closest thing the city has to a Tablet-Hotels-style local editor; you’ll get streets the guidebooks miss. Photo by Tore Danielsson / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Slow Travel Stockholm is a multi-author site, but I include it because Lola edits it and the bench of contributors is unusually strong. It’s the closest English-language Stockholm magazine on the open web, with neighbourhood walks for places like Vasastan and Hornstull (worth pairing with the site’s Hornstull-and-Södermalm guide), profiles of the people who run the cafés you’d want to find, and an editorial eye that filters out the press-trip noise. If you’re in Stockholm for more than a long weekend, this is the source.

What’s strongest: longform pieces about people, not places. The bartender at Pharmarium, the bookbinder on Brännkyrkagatan, the Sami restaurant team behind Tradition. These are the pieces that make a city feel like a city.

Alex Waltner, Swedish Nomad

Aerial of a small house on a green island in the Stockholm archipelago — One of the inhabited outer islands. Alex Waltner has written more practical Swedish-archipelago content than anyone else in English, including which Waxholmsbolaget routes are worth sleeping over.

Alex’s Swedish Nomad is the highest-traffic Swedish travel blog in English, and in places it shows: he’s clearly chasing SEO at the lower end and you’ll see the occasional listicle that reads as if it was generated. Skip those. The middle tier of his site, where he’s writing genuinely from his own travels in the Swedish archipelago, southern Sweden, and the high north, is the most useful practical Swedish-traveller content on the open web. He’ll tell you exactly which night ferry to take from Sandhamn and which Stockholm hotels are oversold by the press.

What’s strongest: the practical bits. Times, ticket types, costs in SEK and EUR, where to actually catch the bus. If you’re planning a complicated Swedish itinerary, his site is where to verify the moving parts.

Maria Branyik, Take Me To Sweden

Rooftops and spires of Stockholm's Old Town from Södermalm — Looking across to Gamla Stan from Södermalm, near the angle Maria’s “Stockholm in autumn” pieces tend to hit. The viewing terrace on Monteliusvägen is the spot.

Maria’s Take Me To Sweden is small, slow, and almost entirely about Sweden. She’s a Swedish-Czech writer based in Sweden, and the blog is what a Sweden-only travel writer ought to look like: deep on the bits foreigners want (Stockholm, Gothenburg, Lapland, Skåne) and unusually thorough on the bits foreigners don’t know to ask about (Östergötland, Dalarna, the south-coast smaller towns). It updates less often than the high-traffic blogs but every post is worth reading top to bottom.

What’s strongest: she writes about Sweden as a country, not as Stockholm-plus-Lapland. If you’ve already done the Stockholm weekend and want to go deeper, this is where you go.

Northern lights over Swedish Lapland — Northern lights over rural Kiruna. Maria’s Lapland material is mostly summer-and-shoulder; for the winter side, my Tromsø vs Abisko comparison is what to read before you book.

Norway: three writers who actually live or lived there

Reine harbour in Lofoten with red rorbu houses and dramatic mountains — Reine in Lofoten on a still evening. The mountain backdrop is what every Norway blog photo eventually gets to; the trick is getting the rorbu lights without the cruise crowds. The 19:30 Hurtigruten port stop helps.

Norway has fewer dedicated bloggers than Sweden because Norway is bigger, more expensive to travel inside, and the writer pool is smaller. But the writers who exist are unusually good at what they do, partly because they have to be. None of these three live in Oslo. Two of them live in places most Oslo-based bloggers have only visited. If you’re chaining cities, the site’s Oslo guide is the natural pillar; the writers below take you outside the capital.

Silvia at Heart My Backpack

Couple watching the sunset over the mountains of Senja in northern Norway — Senja sunset, the kind of evening Silvia describes most clearly. She lived in Setermoen for years and her Senja, Lyngen and Vesterålen pieces are the closest thing the English web has to actual local guides.

Silvia’s Heart My Backpack is the most specific blog about northern Norway in English. She’s a Norwegian-American who lived in northern Norway for years (Setermoen, Tromsø, the lot) and now writes from a base in central Norway. The site is enormous, and the early-2010s posts about life in a small northern town are what gave her the readership; the more recent travel material is some of the best on the open web for Senja, the Lyngen Alps, Lofoten in shoulder season, and the rural Trøndelag inland.

What’s strongest: she writes about northern Norway in winter without making it sound either terrifying or otherworldly. It’s matter-of-fact. Roads close. Cabin owners come over with firewood. The shop in Setermoen runs out of clementines for three days in November. That’s the texture you can’t get from the cruise companies.

Lisa Stentvedt, Fjords & Beaches

Bryggen wharf in Bergen with rows of colourful wooden warehouses — Bryggen in Bergen. Lisa is from western Norway and has the regional knowledge to send you to the bits of the Vestland coast that aren’t on the cruise itinerary. The afternoon light hits Bryggen around 14:00 in summer; that’s when to walk.

Lisa’s Fjords & Beaches is the western-Norway specialist. She’s based in Bergen and writes about fjord-country, the islands off the coast, and the bits of the Norwegian Sea that get easy day-trip framing in English-language guides but actually need a local to make sense of. Her practical posts on planning a fjord trip from Bergen are what I send people who are about to spend too much money on a Hurtigruten cruise; she’ll tell you when to do the cruise (it’s worth it) and when to rent a car instead (more often than the cruise companies suggest).

What’s strongest: she actually says no. Most Norway writers can’t bear to discourage a reader from any specific journey, because the country’s so photogenic the assumption is that any of it must be worth it. Lisa will write that a particular fjord cruise is mid, and explain why, and tell you what to do instead.

Megan Starr

View from Preikestolen pulpit rock looking down the Lysefjord — Preikestolen at lunchtime, the kind of straight-on Norway shot Megan Starr’s site has dozens of. The platform is roughly 25 by 25 metres and 604 metres above the Lysefjord; the path up takes most fit walkers about two hours each way. Photo by W. Bulach / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Megan, at meganstarr.com, is American but has been based in Norway for years. The blog is huge and covers a lot more than Norway (the Caucasus and the Balkans get serious page count), but the Norway, Faroe Islands and Greenland material is what I’d recommend it for. It’s lighter on the practical numbers than Lisa’s site and lighter on the personal narrative than Silvia’s, but it covers more ground than either, and her photography is consistently good.

What’s strongest: the Faroe Islands and the further-out bits of Norway. Greenland too. If you’re planning the kind of trip where you fly into Vágar or Nuuk rather than Oslo, her site is where to start.

Aerial view of a cruise ship in Geirangerfjord with green slopes around — Geirangerfjord with a cruise ship docked. The view itself is what it is. The Geiranger bus tour around it is, on Lisa’s testimony and mine, not worth the kroner; rent a car instead.

Iceland: where the field thinned out, and who’s still doing it

Interior of Hallgrímskirkja in Reykjavík with the organ above the entrance — Hallgrímskirkja from the inside. The organ has 5,275 pipes; the church is open daily 09:00 to 21:00 in summer, 09:00 to 17:00 in winter, and the tower lift is 1,400 ISK (~€9).

Iceland in 2026 is a strange case for the blog landscape. Tourism boomed, the established Icelandic bloggers (I Heart Reykjavík, Eldfell-era Reykjavik Grapevine writers) mostly graduated into tour businesses or moved on, and the field is now dominated by foreign writers who pass through, plus a few resident voices who held the line. If you’re planning Iceland, the Reykjavík city guide on this site is the local jumping-off point. For the rest of the country, the two recommendations below are where to go.

Jewells Chambers, All Things Iceland

A harbor seal swimming in Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon — A harbor seal at Jökulsárlón. Jewells’s podcast and blog have done more than anyone in English to explain everyday Icelandic life to a foreign audience, including the bits that don’t fit on Instagram. Photo by Giles Laurent / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Jewells is from New York, married an Icelander, and has been living in Iceland for years. Her All Things Iceland site is paired with a podcast that runs to over 200 episodes, plus a YouTube channel. It’s the most genuinely-resident English-language voice on Iceland that’s currently active. She’s particularly good on what daily life in Iceland actually feels like, which sounds soft and turns out to be the most useful information when you’re picking what to do with your week.

What’s strongest: language. She’s been learning Icelandic in public for years, and her short pieces on Icelandic words and phrases are the closest most foreign visitors will ever get to feeling the language click into place. The episode on takk and takk fyrir is two minutes long and changes how you say thanks for the rest of your trip.

Stuck in Iceland

Glacier tongue meeting the seashore on a misty Iceland day — A glacier tongue meeting the coast on the south Iceland Ring Road. Stuck in Iceland’s Ring Road planning posts are the most thorough single source online; for my own take, see the 7-day itinerary.

Stuck in Iceland is run by Iceland-based writer Sigurður Eiríksson and has been going since 2011. It calls itself a magazine, which is fair: it’s longer-form than a blog and has a rotating roster of guest contributors. The Iceland-resident perspective is the value here. He’ll tell you about the sneaker-wave warnings, the side roads worth taking, the legal car-rental conditions that the rental companies don’t explain on their counters. If you’re driving the Ring Road, this is where to read up.

What’s strongest: the practical safety information. Iceland kills more visiting tourists per capita than most travel destinations because people drive on summer-tyred rentals onto winter roads, swim into riptides, or stand under unstable rock faces. Stuck in Iceland writes about those problems plainly, without lurid press-release language. Read his pieces before you book the rental.

Goðafoss waterfall in north Iceland — Goðafoss in summer light. It’s about 50 kilometres east of Akureyri on Route 1, and gets a fraction of the foot-traffic of the southern waterfalls.

Atlantic puffin standing on Icelandic grass with red feet visible — An Atlantic puffin in early summer. The Westfjords (Látrabjarg) is the easiest puffin colony to reach; nesting season is roughly mid-May to mid-August.

Denmark: the smallest field, and three writers worth reading

Painted houses and small boats along Copenhagen's Nyhavn waterfront — Nyhavn at the back of summer. Both Sarah and Miriam below have written about the Copenhagen-versus-Aarhus question; the consensus from both is that Aarhus is the better autumn weekend, by some distance.

Denmark is the smallest field of the five Nordic countries by English-language travel-blog count. Part of that is geography (it’s a smaller country, and most of what’s worth writing about is reachable from the same Copenhagen base), part of it is timing (the boom that lifted Iceland and Norway in the 2010s passed Denmark by). The three I read are Danish-resident or Danish, all writing in English, and all in fact still updating. Pair with this site’s Copenhagen guide as the country pillar.

Miriam Risager, Adventurous Miriam

Cyclist on a Copenhagen street in black and white — Copenhagen on a working morning. Miriam writes about Copenhagen the way a Copenhagener does: bicycle-first, river-bath in summer, and never make plans on a Sunday before midday.

Miriam at adventurousmiriam.com is Danish, lives in Denmark, and has been blogging since 2015. The site covers a lot of ground (she travels widely, the recent posts include New Zealand and Vietnam), but the Denmark and Scandinavia material is what I’d send you to. Her practical Copenhagen posts on cycling routes, summer harbour bathing, and which Copenhagen Card to actually buy are the tightest in English.

What’s strongest: budgets. She’ll tell you exact prices in DKK and EUR, what she actually paid, and whether she’d do it again. The Faroe Islands cost guide on her site is among the most useful I’ve read.

Sarah In The Green

The rainbow rooftop walkway at ARoS Aarhus art museum — Olafur Eliasson’s Your Rainbow Panorama on top of ARoS in Aarhus. Sarah’s Aarhus posts are the most practically useful English-language write-ups of the city; she’ll tell you which months ARoS is worth the entry queue. Photo by Gordon Leggett / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

SarahintheGreen is run by an English-speaking writer based in Denmark with serious Aarhus content. The site has a tighter Denmark focus than Miriam’s, with multi-day Jutland and Funen itineraries that you can’t really find anywhere else in English. The Aarhus material in particular is worth the visit. Pair her writing with the site’s forthcoming Aarhus guide if you’re using Denmark as more than a Copenhagen layover.

What’s strongest: she’ll plan a trip in Jutland for you, where most English-language Denmark coverage stops at the Storebælt bridge. The Skagen, Aalborg and Aarhus posts are particularly good.

Danny Cph

Beeswax candles burning on a wooden table — The kind of candles every Copenhagen flat seems to have a drawer of. Danny’s Copenhagen newsletter writes about the city the way a Copenhagener describes it to a visitor over coffee, which is exactly what you want.

Danny Cph is the smallest of the three Danish recommendations and the newest, but worth flagging because it’s a personal city blog about Copenhagen, written in English by someone who lives there. The site is more of a personal journal than a SEO-driven blog. The post cadence is slow. But what’s there is the genuine Copenhagen-local view, and it makes a useful counterweight to the more tourism-focused Danish travel writing elsewhere.

What’s strongest: neighbourhoods. He covers Vesterbro, Nørrebro and Refshaleøen in detail, and the cafés and bakeries he writes about are the ones I see locals at, not the tourist queue at Andersen Bakery.

Aarhus waterfront illuminated at night — The Aarhus harbour at night. The city is two and a half hours by train from Copenhagen and the Friday night out is, on Sarah’s testimony and mine, better than anything Copenhagen offers in the same price bracket.

Finland beyond the 2015 cohort

Helsinki Senate Square in winter with snow on the ground — Senate Square in winter. The non-Finnish English-language coverage of Finland used to be patchy at best; the writers below have done more than anyone to fix that. Photo by Tyg728 / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Finland in English has historically been under-served. The 2015 NordicTB cohort is one part of why that’s now better; the writers below are the other. If you’re heading there for the first time, the Helsinki city guide on this site is the natural starting point, and the writers below take you out of the capital.

Konsta Punkka, Engineer On Tour

Reindeer with autumn antlers in a Lapland forest — Reindeer in autumn antler. Konsta’s photography of Finnish wildlife (red squirrels, reindeer, the elusive saimaannorppa) is what got him on this list; the travel blog is the secondary act, and almost as good.

Engineer On Tour is the travel-and-photography blog of Konsta Punkka, a Finnish photographer who built a serious Instagram following before pivoting to longer-form posts about places. The Finland material on the site (Lapland, the southern lakes, the smaller eastern cities) is excellent because the photographs are the real-thing, and the writing has the patience of someone who waits for animals.

What’s strongest: the lakes. The Saimaa region especially. He writes about the saimaannorppa (the freshwater seal endemic to Saimaa) better than anyone, including the conservation status and the fact that you may well not see one. That kind of plain-spoken admission about what nature trips actually deliver is rare.

A note on Adventurous Kate’s Finland material

Floating wooden sauna on a Nordic lake — A floating sauna. The “do you have to be naked” question gets answered the same way in every English-language sauna piece, but Kate’s Helsinki write-up is the one that gets the awkward tonal pitch right.

Kate McCulley at Adventurous Kate isn’t Finnish or Finland-resident, but her Finland posts (the summer Helsinki piece, the Lapland-in-winter post) get filed in here because they’re some of the most-read English entry-level writing about the country, and they’re better than they need to be. If you’ve never been to Finland and you want one English-language piece to convince you to actually book the flight, the “Quirky, Isolated, and Pretty” Finland summer post is the right one.

What’s strongest: she’s brave about saying when something isn’t worth it, and she’ll write a complete city impression after a single visit, which most travel writers tiptoe around. That’s a useful model for the rest of the cohort.

Northern lights reflected on a calm Finnish lake — Aurora over a southern Finnish lake. For the proper aurora trip, the piece on northern lights in Finnish Lapland is what to read; Saariselkä, Levi and Kakslauttanen are the right hubs.

A wooden cabin in Finnish Lapland surrounded by autumn forest — A Lapland cabin in autumn colour. The cabin-rental industry is what holds Finnish off-season tourism together; the better Finnish bloggers above all write about it.

Two cross-Nordic resources to bookmark

A passenger ferry sailing in the Baltic Sea at sunset — A Baltic ferry at sunset. The cross-Nordic logistics writing on Routes North below is what makes a multi-country Nordic trip actually plannable; pair it with the site’s piece on the Stockholm-Helsinki overnight ferry.

Two final entries that aren’t single-writer blogs but earn their place because they’re the resources I actually use most when planning a multi-country Nordic trip.

Routes North

Eight-petalled mountain avens flower against rock and lichen — Mountain avens in Rondane National Park, Norway. Routes North’s piece on Norway’s national parks is the one that put Rondane on my list; the photo is the kind you actually see, not the helicopter aerials. Photo by Jörg Hempel / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0 de)

Routes North is a Scandinavia-and-Nordic travel guide site, multi-author, with a strong English editorial voice. It’s the closest thing the open web has to a one-stop reference for cross-country logistics: Stockholm-to-Bergen by train, Bergen-to-Reykjavík flight options, the Sweden-Finland night ferries (where it intersects with the site’s logistics pieces). Where it’s not single-writer-blog quality is the personal voice; where it is properly excellent is on the planning details that the country-specific blogs don’t cover because they only cover one country.

What’s strongest: cross-Nordic transport. The piece on the night-train Stockholm-to-Narvik is the most practical English-language write-up I’ve found.

NordicTB itself, plus a footnote

Tromsø city lights at night with a hint of aurora over the harbour — Tromsø from the air. The NordicTB collective worked the Nordic-press circuit for years, and writers from the network did most of the early English-language Tromsø coverage. The aurora-tour business in Tromsø has changed since (see the Tromsø vs Abisko piece), but the foundational write-ups still trace back to that crowd.

The NordicTB Collective at nordictb.com is still alive as a portal, with the campaign archive that documents how the Nordic tourism boards used to work with bloggers in the mid-2010s (when this domain hosted the original Collective site, before the move). It’s not a new-content blog. It’s a useful index of who was writing about which destination in 2014, 2015, 2016, which is sometimes exactly what you need when you’re trying to dig back to the early-decade writing on, say, the MATKA Helsinki travel fair (see the MATKA piece on this site, which goes into the Nordic Bloggers’ Experience programme).

What’s worth knowing: the campaign archive includes #UNESCOHamburg, #LoveDublin, #SantaLineXmasTrip, #TravelHousePorvoo and the rest. Whether or not those campaigns are your kind of thing, the campaign-page links are the cleanest way to find which bloggers covered which destination at industry pace. The list at the top of this article overlaps significantly with the early NordicTB roster, which is not a coincidence.

Kamppi Chapel of Silence in central Helsinki — The Kamppi Chapel of Silence in Helsinki. A small, quiet building in the middle of the busiest square in the city; opens 11:00 weekdays, free entry, and one of the few public spaces in central Helsinki where nobody talks.

What I look for, and what I’d warn you off

Plate of fresh Swedish cinnamon buns — Cinnamon buns. The unit of measurement of Nordic-blog quality is roughly: how does the writer write about the kanelbulle, the korvapuusti, or the kanelsnegl, given that almost every other writer reaches for the same five adjectives.

A note on what makes a good Nordic-travel blog from a reader’s point of view, since you may want to keep adding to your own list. Three things I check every time.

First: do the prices match recent reality? A Stockholm post written in 2018 that still says “you can get a hostel bed for 200 SEK” is broken; in 2026 you’ll struggle to do that. Good Nordic blogs update their numbers, or note when they were last verified, or link to the booking sites that always show current prices. The bad ones leave 2017 prices in place forever.

Second: do they ever say no? Nordic-tourism marketing is unusually positive (and unusually well-funded) and a lot of blog content is downstream of press trips. The writers above all say no to specific things, sometimes to whole regions or whole categories of trip, and that’s what I look for. If a blog has never written that something is overrated or skippable, I assume the press-trip reports were too friendly to be worth my time.

Third: do they read like a person? Most Nordic destinations have such strong stock-photo defaults that you can write a 1,500-word “Stockholm in winter” piece without ever leaving your office. The blogs above all sound like specific people. That’s the test, and the reason eighteen names is enough.

Midnight sun over flowers and water in northern Norway — Midnight sun, Lofoten. The “writers I’d warn you off” list isn’t worth printing here, but the rule is simple: if a blog still confidently reaches for the same five Nordic-tourism adjectives in 2026, the writer hasn’t been there.

Steaming hot springs in the Kerlingarfjöll mountains in Iceland — Hot springs in Kerlingarfjöll, central Iceland. Stuck in Iceland’s piece on the highland thermal pools is the best practical write-up of which ones are worth the rough drive in.

The Blue Lagoon thermal pool in Iceland with bathers in milky water — The Blue Lagoon. Almost every blogger above has written the same line about it, which is roughly: yes, do it once if you’ve never been to a thermal pool, and skip it on every subsequent trip in favour of the smaller Sky Lagoon, the Reykjadalur stream walk, or the locals’ Sundlaugin pools. Photo by Ralf Roletschek / Wikimedia Commons (GFDL 1.2)

Aerial view of Reykjavík with Mt Esja in the background — Reykjavík in summer with Mt Esja behind. The harbour bookshop, Eymundsson’s, is where most of the visiting writers who pass through the city eventually buy a copy of Halldór Laxness; that’s the writer’s-shorthand starting point for the country.

A short final reading order

The interior pipe organ of Helsinki Cathedral — Helsinki Cathedral organ. The interior of the cathedral is small and white and quieter than you’d expect from outside. The free organ recital is on Sundays at noon. Photo by Virtual-Pano / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

If I had to compress the eighteen names above into a starter pack, this would be the order. Click two of them tonight; the rest will keep.

If you only read one Nordic travel writer, read Lola Akinmade Åkerström. The photography alone is worth the click; the long-form is what keeps you. If you’re planning a Norway trip outside Oslo, read Silvia at Heart My Backpack. If you want Iceland through resident eyes, read Jewells Chambers and Stuck in Iceland in that order. If you want Stockholm to feel like a real city rather than a series of museums, read Slow Travel Stockholm. And if you read Finnish, read Laura Santanen, because everything else on this list assumes you don’t.

The 2015 night this article’s URL was originally about was a reasonable evening for the people involved. The trophy went somewhere else. None of the three NordicTB shortlisted writers seemed to mind much, in the way that Nordic culture often manages. Eleven years later, all three are still publishing, and the country they came out of has the strongest non-English Nordic travel-blog scene of the five. That’s the part that aged well.