Q: after spending all that time flying to the Arctic Circle, what if the aurora doesn’t appear?
A: in three parts.
The first is probability. In the core of the auroral band (the line of Tromsø, Abisko, Inari), three nights in a row, weather permitting, gives you a fairly strong chance of seeing it; at four or five nights, coming away empty becomes a small-probability event. This is why our aurora trips are never ‘two days, one night’ — that is not an itinerary, it is a raffle.
The second is design. The aurora is a game of chance, and the itinerary’s task is to raise the quality of each throw of the dice: to stay beyond the reach of light pollution rather than on a city hotel roof; to keep a guide who can read the cloud charts and, when cloud bears down on the town, drive two hours to chase a clear window; to set an ‘aurora wake-up’ each night, so that you need only sleep, and leave the watching to those on duty.
The third matters most: make the aurora the surprise, not the whole. The daytime programme is arranged to be ‘worth it even without the aurora’ — fjord cruises, reindeer farms, a sauna by a frozen lake, snowmobiles across the plains. That way, if the aurora comes it is a delight; if it does not, the journey still stands on its own. To stake every chip on a single turn of the sky is to be irresponsible with a holiday.
One last honest word: after all these years, among the aurora trips we have sent out there have indeed been those who came away empty-handed — a single-figure number. Most of them came again the following year — like a film, in their words, they had not finished watching.
And the cinema — we have kept your seat all along.