Thomas Cook Lapland to see Santa

Went to Lapland with Thomas Cook 11.12.10 for the day trip with my Mum and 2 sons aged 3 and 6. We were all very disappointed.

When you arrive in Lapland, the plane is divided onto 4 coaches, and that is your group for the whole day.

When you get to the Reindeer park, there are 5 activities: seeing Santa, Reindeer ride, Lappish story in the tipee, hot Juice in a tipee, and husky dog ride. But you do each of the activities with your coach load of people - which resulted in most the day spent stood doing nothing in the freezing cold as you had to queue within your group to get on the few reindeers/huskey dogs, and had to wait until your whole group of about 50 had done the activity, or wait for the group before you to finish before you can even start queuing for the activity. My 3 year old got so cold, that he cried all day. As a result, we missed out the Huskey ride (which was our last activity) to go and wait on the coach. Seeing Santa was a very manic experience, your whole group are sqeezed into a small hut, the kids line up to see santa, while the parents are scrambling to take photo's!

THOMAS COOK DO NOT PROVIDE GLOVES LIKE SOME TOUR OPERATORS DO. By the end of the day, I think just about all the kids in our group were crying from the cold.

"lunch" is not actually at lunch time, it is at half 4/5ish, so the kids were starving as they hadn't eaten since breakfast on the plane. The food then wasn't fantastic. You then spend about an hour and a half in santa's village (shopping mall) before heading off to the airport.

Overall we are very disappointed with the day, it seems like Thomas cook or the Park are just trying to squeeze as many people in to make loads of money, and are not thinking about the magic for the kids. We feel we need to go again, with another tour operator of course, as we feel we have missed out on someting that is supposed to be so magical.

Booked with Thomas cook the service from the reps was excellent throughout , tripas was fantastic kids loved the snowmobiles, hotel perfectely situated to the town of rovenemi

all in all this was a fantastic package the trips were excellent as was the reps, we all really enjoyed it and would love to go again i a few years, don't miss santas vilage it is out of this world it will defo make u feel christmassey

I took my 33 year old daughter to see Santa (I am 56) we had one of the best girly fun days out that we have ever had together, with the magic of Santa and of course the retail therapy at Santa village. All our friends and relatives loved the cards we posted from Lapland!

I am going again this year with Thomas Cook with my 52 work colleague and we cannot wait!

The main reason to go to Lapland is to see Santa and we did see him, however due to splitting the group into four this gave very limited time for the children to speak to him.

The other events were Husky rides, Riendeer sleigh rides, and a native introduction to life in Lapland then a visit to the pretty but commersial SANTA VILLAGE. The day could have had less to do and this would have allowed for us to see more. When the guide got behind the whole day seemed very very rushed. A shame when you have been looking forward to this day for a long while we payed £680 inc VAT & Insurance for the trip (Two fun loving adults!). I would shop about for the best deal as different companies offer different events. However the man in red is most important. Would like to go again with another company.