About this site
Svalbard Tours exists because comparing what you can actually book at 78 degrees north is unreasonably hard, and most of what is written about it is written by people selling something else.
Lars Hansen
Lars is a Norway-based tour specialist who has been planning and guiding trips around the country since 2015. By his own count he has worked with more than a thousand international travellers, mostly on itineraries that balance the well-known sights against the logistics of actually getting between them. Arctic Norway is his patch, and Svalbard sits at the far end of it.
What he brings to this site is the boring, valuable part: reading the listings properly. Whether a nine-hour boat day is really nine hours, whether the licence rule applies to passengers as well as drivers, whether the season on a winter product matches the season the operator advertises.
What he is not: a Longyearbyen resident, a Svalbard guide, or the operator of anything on this site. He has never claimed to have seen a polar bear and this site will never put words in his mouth about one. Where a page needs firsthand Svalbard experience we quote the operator, the Governor of Svalbard or the Norwegian Polar Institute, and we say which.
How the 61 listings were verified
Every product on this site was read on its live GetYourGuide or Viator page, one at a time, on 7 August 2026. Nothing was taken from another aggregator, and no listing appears here unless its product ID was read off a real page.
| Ratings and review counts | Copied exactly as the platform displayed them. Where a listing showed no reviews we write "new listing" rather than leaving it blank or implying a rating. |
|---|---|
| Prices | The from-price shown at the time of reading, in USD. These move with your date and your country, so every price on this site is framed as a starting point and the live listing is the authority. |
| Durations, group sizes, operators | Straight from the listing's own fields. |
| Rules and regulations | The Governor of Svalbard (sysselmesteren.no), Visit Svalbard, the Norwegian Polar Institute and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. Never from another travel site. |
| The season table | Visit Svalbard's own published season definitions for Longyearbyen at 78.22 degrees north, cross-checked against which listings actually sell in which months. |
Three things we will not do
How the site makes money
Links to GetYourGuide and Viator listings are affiliate links. If you book through one, the platform pays us a commission and you pay exactly the same price you would have paid going direct. We do not take payment from operators to be featured, and the ordering on every category page is by review count, not by what pays best.
The full statement is on the affiliate disclosure page. If you would rather not use our links, every operator on this site can be found by name on the platform directly, and we would still rather you took the trip.