When reporters ask us what Christmas tourism does to Rovaniemi, the honest answer is that it has become the town’s defining industry, and that the latest figures are larger than most people expect. A town of roughly 63,000 residents (Visit Rovaniemi, 2020) now welcomes more than a million airline passengers a year, and in December 2025 Lapland recorded more registered overnight stays than the Helsinki region.

We live in Rovaniemi and work in Lapland tourism, so we see the effects on housing, flights and the local calendar first hand. This guide collects the most quotable official figures from Finavia, Statistics Finland (via Yle) and Visit Finland, says what each number does and does not show, and flags where the data is older.

The headline numbers

The table below gathers the figures we consider safest to quote. Each comes from an official or near-official source and we give the year and the publisher, because tourism statistics are easy to mix up: “registered overnights” count hotels and similar establishments, “paid foreign overnights” add short-term rentals, and airport figures count passengers rather than visitors.

The airport tells the story fastest

Finavia, which runs Finland’s airports, said in its 2025 statistics release that passenger numbers increased most at Rovaniemi among the leisure-driven airports in Northern Finland, and that Rovaniemi Airport passed one million annual passengers for the first time, with the milestone reached on 19 December 2025. A Finavia representative described Rovaniemi as the driving force of leisure travel in Finnish Lapland. The 2024 total had narrowly missed the same mark.

Source: Finavia, statistics 2025. Note that airport passenger counts typically include both arriving and departing passengers, so the number is not the same as the number of visitors.

Where visitors stay: the rise of short-term rentals

One of the most important recent changes is invisible in hotel statistics. Visit Finland’s seasonal follow-up reports that foreign overnights in short-term rentals added up to 3.2 million in 2025, so that foreign paid overnights reached 10.4 million, 15% more than in 2024 and 17% more than in 2019. In Lapland, short-term rentals rose from a 27% share in 2023 to 40% in 2025, and in Rovaniemi they made up more than half of all paid foreign overnights. The annual growth rate of short-term-rental overnights was 32% in Lapland and in Rovaniemi.

Two practical implications follow. First, registered-overnight statistics understate the real number of guests, especially in winter. Yle made the same point when it reported the December figures. Second, the housing debate in Rovaniemi is not an invention; the tourism boom reaches the rental market as well as the hotels. We do not have a sourced figure for the effect on local rents, so we do not quote one.

Where the guests come from

The most recent nationality breakdown that Visit Rovaniemi published in its media kit refers to 2019, so treat it as historical. In 2019 the largest international markets by overnight stays were China including Hong Kong (44,000), France (41,200), the United Kingdom (37,600), Spain (25,900) and Italy (21,300). The same kit ranked Rovaniemi third in Finland for overnight stays by international visitors, after Helsinki and Vantaa, and counted 638,000 total overnight stays in 2018.

For a current picture, Visit Finland’s spring 2026 follow-up lists the main source markets for Lapland as Germany (+6%), France (−10%) and the Netherlands (−10%), with strong growth from the US (+28%), the UK (+25%) and Italy (+14%). Rovaniemi’s foreign overnights were down 7% year on year in spring 2026, a reminder that the winter peak does not mean year-round growth. For German broadcasters, it is worth knowing that Germany was the largest source market for foreign overnights in Finland as a whole in that spring data, at 161,000 overnights from March to May 2026.

Santa Claus Village: the central attraction

Santa Claus Village sits on the Arctic Circle about 8 km from the town centre. Visit Rovaniemi’s media kit counts more than 500,000 visits per year, and the Village’s own website says international visitor numbers exceeded half a million after quadrupling in a few years after the turn of the millennium. These are the two most recent public figures we could verify, and neither is dated 2025, so describe them as “more than half a million visits a year, according to the Village and Visit Rovaniemi”.

The Village is open every day of the year. The season peaks around Christmas, with Visit Rovaniemi marking 23 December as the moment Santa sets off on his journey; we describe the calendar in more detail in our guide to the Santa Claus Village tour.

The wider shape of the boom

Rovaniemi is not alone. The Visit Finland data show that Uusimaa and Lapland together accounted for nearly 7.8 million foreign paid overnights in 2025, about 75% of the national total. Statistics Finland’s national picture, relayed by Yle, is that overnights in Finland reached a record 23.1 million in 2025 and exceeded the pre-pandemic level for the first time, with Lapland driving much of the winter growth. December 2025 was also the first December in which foreign overnights nationwide exceeded domestic ones.

Rovaniemi’s role is distinctive because of the Christmas theme. Other Lapland resorts such as Levi, Ylläs and Saariselkä are known for skiing; Rovaniemi is known for Santa. That explains the airline pattern, with direct flights from many European cities, and the short-break format we see in practice, where many guests come for a few nights and what to wear matters as much as where to stay; see our guide to how cold Lapland really is.

How to use these numbers well

Three suggestions from the point of view of a local who reads these statistics every year. First, match the unit to the claim: use airport passengers for travel demand, registered overnights for hotel demand and paid foreign overnights for the full picture. Second, always state the year, because the Lapland picture changed quickly between 2019 and 2025. Third, remember that the statistics do not measure visitors in day trips or in private lodgings.

It is just as important to say what the data does not show. We could not verify a recent, official figure for total tourism revenue in Rovaniemi, for the number of local jobs that depend on tourism, or for the effect on housing costs, so this guide does not quote any. If a source gives you one of those numbers, ask who produced it, which year it covers and whether it counts the whole municipality or only the Santa Claus Village area. The Visit Rovaniemi media kit gives the municipality’s area as 8,017 km² including water, so statistics for “Rovaniemi” cover a very large territory and many villages.

We are happy to help journalists find the right source and interpret it; our press page explains how: Hungrytravelfamily press and media.

FAQ

How many people fly to Rovaniemi?

Rovaniemi Airport served about 1.1 million passengers in 2025, up 18.4%, according to Finavia. It passed one million for the first time on 19 December 2025.

How many tourists visit Rovaniemi?

There is no single official count of visitors. Registered overnights in December 2025 exceeded 166,000, and Visit Finland says more than half of paid foreign overnights in Rovaniemi in 2025 were in short-term rentals, so the real number of overnights is higher than registered statistics show.

Is Lapland more popular than Helsinki in winter?

In December 2025 Lapland recorded more registered overnights than the Uusimaa region (more than 620,000 versus a little over 550,000), according to Statistics Finland as reported by Yle.

How many people visit Santa Claus Village?

Visit Rovaniemi’s media kit counts more than 500,000 visits per year, and the Village’s own site says international visitors exceeded half a million. Neither figure is dated 2025, so describe them as recent estimates.