There are probably more glamourous ways to begin a luxurious Nordic adventure than boarding a crammed Ryanair flight at London Stansted, but that’s exactly how this adventure started – a once in a lifetime tour for two weeks.
My sister Nyeema and I were fairly certain they had squeezed a few more seats onto the aircraft since either of us last flew with them. But there we were, two British sisters embarking on a girls-only holiday that would take us through Greenland, Iceland and Norway – from the decidedly and deliberately non-luxurious to the seriously expensive, with an extraordinary amount packed in between.
By the end, we decided we could describe each destination in just three words.
For Nyeema, Nuuk was “remote, dystopian and mesmerising”. Mine were “sci-fi, raw and out-of-this-world”.
Reykjavík? She chose “charming, colourful and vibrant”. I went for “fresh-fishy, stunning and commercial”.
And Norway?
“Picturesque, historic and rainy,” according to my sister.
For me: “Luxurious, fairytale and quality.”
Those words turned out to say rather more about our journey than we realised.
Greenland: Raw, beautiful and suddenly everyone is talking about it
After a quick stopover in Copenhagen, we headed for Nuuk, Greenland’s capital, arriving to a spectacular bright daytime sky after midnight and a landscape that immediately felt unlike anywhere else.
There is undoubtedly something almost otherworldly about Greenland.
The scale, silence, water and mountains, punctuated by tiny splashes of colourful buildings, can make you feel as though you have landed on a film set… or the moon.
Filmmakers have already discovered it. Borgen: Power & Glory, starring Sidse Babett Knudsen put Greenland at the heart of a story about resources, Denmark and competing global interests in the Arctic.
Watching the real Greenland, those themes suddenly don’t seem particularly fictional.
Because one man seemed to be everywhere we went.
Donald Trump.
We had travelled to Greenland expecting to talk about landscapes, ice, culture and Arctic tourism. Instead, the US President’s name followed us around Nuuk.
Restaurants. Shops. Museums. Conversations with people we met and everybody seemed to have an opinion.
Some people we spoke to believed Trump’s repeated interest in taking control of Greenland had inadvertently done the country a favour. Whatever they thought of his politics, they liked the attention he had brought – and some thought it could ultimately benefit tourism.
A few were surprisingly relaxed, even telling us they didn’t particularly care if America took over. Most of the people we encountered, however, hated the idea.
What fascinated me was that a US president thousands of kilometres away had somehow become part of the everyday experience or travelling through Greenland.
We met Alice Burton, a former Head of Press Section at the US Embassy in Vienna, in our shared accommodation, who would become our partial travel companion, who had been hearing similar things from the locals.
“Nuuk is the most quiet capital I’ve ever visited,” she told me.
There are for sure few cars, little honking, hardly any sirens and remarkably few people on the streets.
“A world in itself,” Alice reflected.
Yet politically, Greenland now feels anything but isolated.
Official tourism research estimated that just over 149,000 international tourists visited Greenland in 2024, with almost two-thirds arriving by cruise ship. Nuuk’s international airport is meanwhile transforming access to the capital.
For a destination with a population of fewer than 60,000 people, those numbers really matter.
What tourists don’t necessarily see in Greenland
It was how strongly I sensed a “them and us” relationship between Greenlanders and the Danes.
Along with Donald Trump, the divide surfaced in conversations with people we met unprompted, and in the way some Greenlanders spoke about Denmark, language, history and identity.
These individuals are not a measure of wider public opinion, but the sense of separation was striking – especially in the museums we visited.
Rather than presenting visitors with a sanitised Arctic idyll, Nuuk’s cultural institutions openly explore Greenland’s complicated relationship with Denmark.
Alice, Nyeema and I were all particularly struck by Nuna, an exhibition at Nuuk Art Museum examining land, identity and Greenland’s relationship with outside powers. At its entrance was a message requiring little explanation.
‘Greenland is not for sale’
Talk to people and another Greenland begins to emerge – a society having its own conversation about identity, autonomy and Denmark while simultaneously confronting extraordinary new interest from the outside world.
Climate change, military security, natural resources, Indigenous identity, tourism and the interests of global powers increasingly collide here.
And yet everyday life carries on around the geopolitical noise.
On the water, however, there are bright blue mini-icebergs, mountains rising directly from the waves, rocks, sky and sea stretching into the distance and an undeniable silence, exactly the Greenland one imagines.
Perhaps “out of this world” wasn’t such an exaggeration after all.
Iceland: When tourism becomes a well-oiled machine
Arriving in Reykjavík after Greenland felt like jumping several stages forward in the evolution of a tourism industry.
If Greenland feels like a destination being on the cusp of something, Iceland has had years to work out what international visitors want.
And it shows.
The statistics underline just how important tourism has become. Statistics Iceland recorded an estimated 10.16 million overnight stays in registered accommodation in 2025, up 9.1% in a year.
Tourism directly accounted for 8.8% of Iceland’s GDP in 2025, while tourism consumption by domestic and international visitors reached almost ISK 914 billion, which equates to over 6.5 billion euros.
Those are substantial numbers for a small island nation and as a traveller, you can see the sophisticated industry that has grown around them.
Reykjavik is charming and colourful but also extremely tourism-savvy.
Excursions are offered everywhere and so are restaurants, shops selling Icelandic designs, outdoor clothing galore, Viking paraphernalia and row upon row of traditional woollen jumpers.
The latter look as they are going to itch and after my sister and I tried on a very wide variety of designs, we realised that they didn’t.
They do, however, shed hair like a loveable dog.
And then there was the food.
Fish was a highlight: extraordinarily fresh cod, tasting unlike any cod that you will be served in the UK, despite it being renowned for fish and chips.
There’s also smoked salmon, shrimp and warming soup served inside a bread bowl.
For the more adventurous, menus can venture into horse, whale steak and slithers of smoked puffin.
Iceland has become extremely good at turning what makes it distinctive into an experience visitors can easily access, but there is, however, one unavoidable issue.
It is very expensive.
But again, as in Greenland, there is no ignoring the disappearing glaciers, pollution of the oceans and land and the doom of climate change and for a country so dependent on both tourism and fishing, these aspects are difficult to ignore.
And perhaps at that is the contradiction at the heart of Iceland’s success. It has become supremely good at selling the experience of Iceland. But the thing that everybody has fundamentally travelled there for is something nobody has created.
Nature.
Our own excursion beyond Reykjavik may have had us packed together liked sardines, but once the city disappeared behind us it became increasingly difficult for us to complain.
Iceland straddles the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates. Fissures cut through the landscape, geothermal activity bubbles beneath it and volcanoes, waterfalls and vast expanses of open land make it feel as though the planet is showing.
Hollywood clearly agrees.
Game of Thrones turned Icelandic landscapes into territory north of “the Wall”, while Christopher Nolan transformed parts of the country into another planet for Interstellar starring Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway. The Star Wars universe has also found a home within Iceland’s otherworldly scenery.
Norway: When expensive starts to feel worth it
Bergen greeted us with torrential rain, which cleared the following morning.
We wanted to travel from Bergen through Myrdal to Flam, but there was one problem, and that was the direct trains we wanted were all sold out, but we found an alternative router from Bergen towards Myrdal via Voss, before joining the famous Flam Railway.
Mountains stretched beyond what the eye – or an iPhone camera – could properly absorb.
Water cascading from waterfalls and wild rivers, tiny settlements beneath enormous peaks.
The Flam Railway runs for around 20 kilometres through spectacularly dramatic mountain scenery towards the fjord below and has become one of Norway’s best-known rail experiences.
Hollywood has also exploited this country with good reason. Tom Cruise has repeatedly returned with the Mission Impossible franchise. Mission Impossible: Fallout features the spectacular clifftop finale at Preikestolen with Cruise and Henry Caville and in Dead Reckoning, Cruise launched a motorcycle from Helsetkopen. Daniel Craig’s final James Bond film, No Time to Die, also used Norwegian locations, as did the hit series Succession, featuring Brian Cox and Jeremy Strong.
The price of luxury
Norway is also expensive, but tourist don’t appear to be staying away.
Norwegian commercial accommodation recorded 40.6 million guest nights in 2025 up 5.2% in a year.
International visitors accounted for a record 14.2 million guest nights – an increase of 14% – and around three quarters of foreign guest nights came from European markets.
Germany was the largest overseas market, followed by Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK and Denmark.
Bergen itself is flourishing, with the wider region recording around three million commercial guest nights in 2024, 13.5% higher than in 2019.
Eirik Gjøvåg Berge, Chief Communications Officer at Visit Bergen, told Euronews that it is important to distinguish between Norway’s reputation for high prices and what visitors are actually doing.
He points out that the evidence, does not suggest high costs are driving international travellers away.
“In fact, favourable exchange rates for many international visitors, combined with Norway’s strong appeal as a nature and experience destination, have helped drive continued growth,” he says.
Does quality justify the price?
Hilde Berentsen, General Manager of Home Hotel Havnekontoret, seems to think so. “If you pay for a service then you can have a higher quality,” she told me. “If you always go for the cheapest thing, then you don’t have quality around you.”
Berentsen has watched Bergen’s tourism industry develop since the hotel opened in 2006.
One of its first celebrity guests was football legend Diego Maradona, who stayed with his team and the hotel has subsequently attracted considerable publicity for its luxury suite, which became known as Bergen’s most expensive hotel room. More famous guests have since followed suit.
“Everything cannot be for everybody,” she said, pointing to camping, caravans and cheaper accommodation as alternative ways of experiencing the country.
According to Visit Bergen, tourism supports around 13000 jobs and generates approximately more than 617 million euros (NOK 6.7 billion) in annual value creation.
Three countries, three very different versions of northern tourism.
By the time my sister and I had reached the end of our journey, that decidedly non-luxurious flight out of Stansted seemed a very long way away.
We had travelled through three countries united by extraordinary natural beauty but offering remarkably different experiences.
There were no Mediterranean beaches, no sun loungers and frankly, not a great deal of sun on this holiday.
Instead, there were fjords, mountains, volcanoes, waterfalls, tectonic plates, Viking jumpers, fresh fish, packed trains, unexpected friendships and Donald Trump.
Two sisters beginning this journey with no expectations, but the end allowing three words to describe each location, but probably, they were nearly not enough.