When you arrive to the best new boutique hotel (2018) in Europe, your expectations are naturally set pretty high, e.g at a comparable level to the best boutique hotels in Helsinki. This is not what you get at Aurora Estate, even if the hotel stands out positively from the local hotel offering. The restaurant is beautifully decorated, but the rest of the interior decoration is pretty basic, including the rooms. Have to give a plus for the beds, though. The breakfast is advertised as ”artisan” one, but it also falls short of high expectations. Only the orange juice and smoothies lived up to the promise, while the rest of the breakfast items were quite dull and basic supermarket stuff. One would expect e.g. handmade bread, but is was probably bought from the neighbouring grocery. The hotel location and concept would match perfectly with utilisation of local delicacies, like berries, mushrooms, reindeer, but none of the breakfast items were even remotely local and fresh by nature. I do understand, if the covid time has forced the hotel owners to ”cut corners” in many ways to manage through the difficult times. If so, it has happpend at at clear cost of customer experience / high expectations. This can’t be a cost issue alone. E.g. berries and mushrooms are all over the surrounding nature for free. It just takes a few hours to go and pick them up in the best fall season. Finally I have to give credit for a very pleasant and flexible service, nothing to complain about that, in fact the opposite. If the owners read this, I really hope that you get some ideas from this review to make most of your unique location and reputation (referring to the evening restaurant, which we were unfortunately not able to test) in the future. And perhaps a little ”push” too ; )
