They’re rather upset here. The Aurora Sky Station (Abisko, Sweden) might get mixed up with the newly-opened and marketed Sky Aurora Station ( Rovaniemi, Finland).
We’re not upset, obviously, but if you’re one of the people making money from the ‘sky station’ you don’t want your customers lured to another one in Finland, all the time believing they’re going to the ‘real’ one here.
Can’t help thinking that the company has been caught by it’s own trick here. Everything seems to be called the arctic adventure aurora trip. If it involves dogs you add ‘sled dogs’ – ditto snowmobiles. Our guests don’t know which company they’re with because it might be the aurora arctic adventure, or the arctic adventure aurora, or even the aurora adventure in the arctic. Something like that anyway. Involves guaranteed (almost) northern lights, tales around the campfire, and the most exciting adventure under the magical northern sky.
When you market things to tourists in a way which ignores the real landscape and environment, and focuses instead on selling a Disney version of the north, then what you’re selling is easily reproduced anywhere.
Take the ice hotel for instance. Now it’s here year round we can all ignore the (interesting) fact that ice melts here in the summer. It’s no longer something special for the arctic and the cold regions of the world. Opening near you soon, an Ice Hotel in Rome, Paris, or in Rio de Janeiro.
And you know what? I have the feeling that an awful lot of tourists really wouldn’t care where in the world it was.
And it’s a fact, that if tourists this year end up at a ‘sky station’ in Finland, when they were really expecting to be in Sweden, they wouldn’t care about that either. What they should perhaps care about, though, is that they never needed to go to a ‘sky station’ at all -it’s an invention for making money out of tourists who haven’t understood that aurora are visible anywhere it’s dark.
