There is a gap in the way Lapland tourism is being thought about, and it is costing the people who live and work here. The academic literature describes platform dominance, overtourism, and the loss of local control with growing precision. Municipal and regional strategies — Levi 2030, Kittilä’s sustainable tourism plan, Visit Finland’s national framing — set ambitious growth targets and reach for sustainability certifications. Online travel agencies and package operators continue to take 15–30% of every transaction they touch. And the people actually running tourism in Levi — the husky operators, family hotels, restaurants, guides, small accommodation hosts — absorb the cost of every trend the strategies announce, without anyone offering them a coherent plan for how to retain margin, build direct relationships, or stop being squeezed.

This project, The Levi Tourism Model, exists because that gap is real, it is widening, and somebody has to fill it.

What the gap actually is

Tourism research, in Finland and internationally, has done an excellent job of describing the problem. The European Parliament’s 2018 study on overtourism mapped the structural pressure of platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com on destinations. Academic literature on Arctic and Nordic tourism has examined how external capital reshapes communities and why local ownership matters for retention of economic surplus. Visit Finland’s State of Sustainable Tourism publishes data on certification adoption and seasonality.

What none of this work does — and what no destination strategy in Lapland that I can find currently does — is help an individual local provider answer the practical questions that determine whether their business survives the next decade:

The literature describes the disease. The strategies promise to grow the patient. The platforms profit from both. Nobody is writing the treatment plan.

Why the gap exists

Three structural reasons, none of them anyone’s fault individually:

Academic incentives reward description, not intervention. Tourism research is rewarded for rigour, peer review, and theoretical contribution. The University of Lapland’s Multidimensional Tourism Institute produces internationally significant work. But translating that work into operational guidance for a husky operator in Sirkka village is not what academic publishing rewards, and rightly so — that’s not what the academy is for.

Destination management organisations face a structural conflict. Visit Levi and similar bodies are tasked with marketing a destination and balancing the interests of stakeholders who include large international operators, hotel groups, and municipal authorities. The interests of small local providers are part of that balance, but small providers cannot reasonably expect a DMO to publish strategic guidance that would put it in tension with the DMO’s larger commercial relationships. Strategic guidance for the operator level is not the DMO’s job, and asking it to be is asking for honest work from the wrong source.

Platforms have no incentive to help providers leave them. Airbnb, Booking.com, GetYourGuide, Viator, and the rest do not write playbooks for direct booking, because direct booking is the existential threat to their model. A platform’s “support for local businesses” is structurally constrained to the kinds of support that increase platform engagement, not the kinds that reduce it.

The result is that nobody in the system is positioned to do the work, and so the work does not get done. Providers absorb the cost. Communities absorb the cost. The destination’s character — that hard-to-name quality that brought visitors here in the first place — absorbs the cost.

What filling the gap looks like

This project sets out to do four things:

Document the structural reality, drawing on academic literature, primary research, and direct conversations with providers and residents. Not as a critique of any individual operation, but as an honest, citable description of where Lapland tourism is going and why.

Develop practical, provider-facing tools. The Authenticity Audit is the first of these — a framework for assessing whether a tourism operation supports the long-term value of the destination, applicable equally to large platforms and small providers. Future tools will include direct-booking playbooks, money-flow templates, collective action models, and case studies of operators in comparable destinations who have successfully reduced their platform dependence.

Test the work in public, including against my own commercial operation. The companion site, levifinland.com, will be audited against this framework before it accepts its first paid direct booking, with results published in full — including any failures the framework identifies. The principle is that no recommendation made in this work should be one I am unwilling to be measured against myself.

Invite challenge. Every page on this site ends with a question. The goal is not to publish conclusions but to provoke better thinking, particularly from people who know more than I do about the specific contexts I am writing in.

Who this project is for

In priority order:

  1. Local providers in Levi and the wider Lapland region. If the work is not useful to them, it is not useful.
  2. Local residents. The people who live with the consequences of tourism decisions made elsewhere.
  3. University of Lapland researchers and the Multidimensional Tourism Institute. Whose work this draws on, and whose challenge it invites.
  4. Sámi-led tourism bodies and individuals. On whose territory this work necessarily touches, and whose review of relevant sections is non-negotiable.
  5. Visit Levi, Levi Marketing Oy, and the Kittilä municipality. Not as the audience to be persuaded, but as institutions whose strategies this project openly engages with.
  6. International visitors who care how their travel affects the places they visit.
  7. Operators in other Lapland and Arctic destinations facing similar structural pressures.

What this project is not

It is not a dissertation, although it draws on academic literature. It is not a lobby campaign, although it has a position. It is not anti-tourism, anti-platform, or anti-growth in principle — large platforms and large operators are part of how tourism works, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest. It is not a substitute for collective action by local providers themselves, which is the only thing that can ultimately change the structural balance.

It is, simply, the practical work nobody else is doing, written by someone with the operational background to do it and the willingness to be audited against it.

What I am asking of you

If you read this and have a response — agreement, disagreement, correction, addition, refusal — I would like to hear it. Specifically:

Substantive responses will be published, with your permission and credited to you, alongside the framework’s revisions. The project gets better with more hands on it. It is openly version 0.1.

Author: Colin Harrison, Levi, Finland. Contact: colin@levifinland.com This page is part of future.levifinland.com, the research project preceding the launch of levifinland.com. See Ethics and Positionality for who is writing this and on what terms.