If you've looked into traveling to Norway, chances are you've heard of Norway in a Nutshell. In this post, I'll talk about my experience with them, from start to finish.
In my semester abroad, there was a week long break where we could travel wherever we wanted, and our destination was Norway. I had offered to plan the trip, but had no clue where to start. Yes, I knew that I needed to find flights, hotels, and stuff to do, but I was a bit lost on the how part of it all. So I typed into Google, "How do I plan a trip to Norway", which took me to the Norway in a Nutshell website.
Norway in a Nutshell is a company that allows travelers to see multiple cities in Norway while booking accommodations, transportation, and activities. They have multiple tours you can do, but those depend on the season. In other words, it was exactly what I needed.
The first thing I noticed upon reaching the website was that it was hard to navigate. To be fair, for most travelers who would pick a tour and then a week around it, this would be fine. But for our purposes (needing to fit a tour into a specific week) it was complicated. The tours did not say what months they ran for until the very end, leading me to waste a lot of time even finding the right tour. In the end, the basic tour was the only one that we could do (no other tours ran during our week), so we chose that.
Next, as we were traveling in a group, we wanted to book a hotel room together, but pay for our individual tickets alone. While there was an option to find your own accommodations, there was nothing on the person's page who was booking the hotel room to book it for more than one person. Again, for most travelers, this would not be an issue, but for us it was.
As we went through the process of booking, the website took us through multiple days and options of things to do on those days. It compartmentalized things and helped us plan ahead rather than waiting until the last minute. Also, these tours were cheaper through Norway in a Nutshell than they would be on our own.
At the end of the booking experience, I was extremely excited: we had everything booked (besides flights) through one mostly simple to navigate site, and we got one receipt rather than 20. Norway in a Nutshell also mailed each of us a comprehensive itinerary with all of the information we needed to get around such as time tables and check in information for the hotels. Everything was a lot cheaper than I expected it to be (probably because we booked it through Norway in a Nutshell rather than from multiple vendors) and all of the important information was in one spot.
While navigating the website was a little rough at first and Norway in a Nutshell was not actively geared towards the type of travelers my friends and I were, overall Norway in a Nutshell allowed us to see multiple cities in Norway for less hassle and a fraction of the cost that it would have been otherwise. As a student traveler, what more could you hope for?
