1
Icehotel
Jukkasjärvi, Sweden
The original of the type. Every winter the hotel is rebuilt from ice harvested out of the river that runs past the village, carved by invited artists into rooms that will not exist by summer, and every spring most of it melts back into the same water.
A separate, refrigerated wing now keeps a portion of the hotel standing year-round for guests arriving outside the season. Warm accommodation stands a few steps away, which is how most people actually structure a stay: one night on ice, the rest indoors. Sleeping bags, reindeer hides and a morning hot drink are part of the arrangement.
2
Hôtel de Glace
Quebec, Canada
North America's ice hotel is put up fresh each winter just outside Quebec City and opens for a season measured in weeks rather than months. The interior changes theme from year to year, with carved suites, vaulted corridors and a slide running down through the main hall.
Day visitors are welcome to walk through, which means the hotel functions partly as an exhibition. Guests who stay the night get a briefing on how to sleep warm, access to a heated pavilion, and a building that will be gone by spring.
3
Kirkenes Snowhotel
Kirkenes, Norway
Built at the edge of a fjord in the far north-east, the Kirkenes Snowhotel rebuilds its snow rooms every winter and keeps a kennel of huskies on the same site year-round. The two things are connected: most guests come for a combination of the rooms and what happens outside them.
Heated cabins along the shore handle the nights when people would rather not sleep at freezing point, and the property leans on its latitude — this is dark-sky territory for much of the winter, with the aurora a regular rather than remarkable event.
4
Arctic SnowHotel & Glass Igloos
Rovaniemi, Finland
Arctic SnowHotel runs two kinds of room on one site: carved snow chambers, and glass-roofed igloos built for lying in bed and watching the sky. Guests frequently book both, a night apiece, which the property plainly expects.
There is a snow sauna — an unusual thing to build out of the same material as the walls — and a restaurant carved in ice. The whole complex comes down and goes back up with the season, so no two winters produce quite the same layout.