About Us - Guide to Lofoten
… and how a van stranded in Ushuaia became a guiding company in the Arctic. We’re Radka and Ivar, a Czech-Norwegian couple living and guiding in Reine, western Lofoten.
Guide to Lofoten is a local tour operator based in Reine, western Lofoten, founded by Radka Stankova and Ivar Pande Braathen. The company grew from an information website into a guiding operation after Radka and Ivar moved to Lofoten in 2021 to manage a rorbu accommodation in Fredvang.
They now run private tours, small-group sightseeing tours, guided snowshoe hikes, and travel planning consultations with a local team including another guides.
From healthcare to a campervan
We did not plan to run a tour company. We planned to drive the Pan-American Highway from Alaska to Argentina in a self-built campervan.
Before any of this, we were not tour guides. Radka was an environmental chemist. Ivar was a biologist turned nurse. We met in Trondheim in 2015, working as personal assistants for the same disabled client, and quickly realised we had the same taste in mountains, hiking, and saying yes to things we had absolutely no training for.
A few years later we built an old van into a camper, quit our jobs in healthcare, and set off.
Stuck at the end of the road
The trip went exactly as planned, right up until it didn’t. In 2020 we made it to Ushuaia, the southernmost city on Earth, and then the world closed down around us. Covid happened. We left the van and flew back to Norway.
At that point we were a bit lost. No apartment, no jobs, and returning to hospitals felt like going backwards. So we did what you do when you’re a bit lost: we started scrolling finn.no.
There it was.
"Would you like to run an accommodation in Lofoten?" Hell yeah! Well, I said hell yeah. Ivar cautiously agreed.
A hundred-year-old fish factory in Fredvang
In April 2021 we packed everything we owned and moved to Fredvang, a small village right next to the trailhead for Ryten and Kvalvika Beach, to manage a rorbu accommodation during the pandemic.
It was not exactly a standard guesthouse. It was a hundred-year-old fishing and cod-liver-oil factory, rebuilt into a place to stay in the 1990s. Alongside being hotel managers, receptionists, and cooks, we were also electricians, plumbers, carpenters, and occasional roof repairers after the southwesterly wind decided to help itself to part of the building. We loved it anyway.
What we loved most, though, was the guests. They kept asking the same questions. Where should I go? What’s the weather going to do? Is Reinebringen safe in winter? How does the ferry actually work? And we kept answering, because we knew, and because most of the information online was written by people who had visited Lofoten for a week, not people who had been watching it rain sideways for six months.
That’s how Guide to Lofoten started. First as a small information site. Then as a travel planning resource. Then, slowly and slightly accidentally, as a guiding company.
Rather skip the planning and just experience it?
Our small group tours take you beyond the guidebook. To hidden beaches, dramatic fjords, and mountain views most visitors never find. Pick a tour and we’ll take care of the rest.
5.0 (160+ reviews)
Where we are now
We now live on one of the small islands in the middle of Reinefjorden, surrounded by the mountains, the fjord, and an occasionally alarming number of tourists in July. What started as two slightly lost people with an idea has become Guide to Lofoten: a small local company with a team we are genuinely proud of.
We run our tours with three Toyota ProAce vans, based in Reine and Svolvær. We’ll be honest about one thing: we tried running tours with an electric van. We genuinely wanted it to work. It turned out that charging infrastructure in a remote Arctic archipelago is not quite there yet, so we switched back to diesel. We’re not proud of it as an environmental statement, but we’re not going to pretend otherwise either.
We’re also adding a minibus to the fleet, which will let us handle larger groups of up to 17 people without turning it into a bus tour experience. Still small groups, just occasionally in one bigger vehicle.
Beyond the tours, we run Facebook communities and answer questions from travellers planning trips to Lofoten and northern Norway every day. At some point, we accidentally became the unofficial tourist information office for western Lofoten. We have made peace with this.
How we approach guided tours in Lofoten
We never set out to run tours at all. We built an information site because the honest local detail about western Lofoten simply wasn’t out there. Then people started writing to ask the same thing: who can take us out? A winter hike to Ryten. A day out from Reine without renting a car. We went looking for someone to recommend, and could not find anyone. So we started doing it ourselves.
The tours still work that way. They’re shaped by what people asked for, not a product we designed and then went looking for customers to fill.
Lofoten is not a destination where you can follow a script. The weather changes too fast. The light changes too fast. A viewpoint that was extraordinary an hour ago is inside a cloud now. A beach that looked empty on the map has thirty campervans on it. The plan you made yesterday may not survive contact with today.
So we don’t run fixed itineraries. We adjust. If the forecast turns, we run the route backwards, reshuffle the order of the stops, or sit out a squall in the van with the coffee. We skip things when they stop making sense and stay longer when they do. And we tell you honestly when something isn’t worth it that day, rather than driving you there and pretending it was fine.
What that means in practice
Six on a winter hike. Eight on a sightseeing day. Not “small group” as a figure of speech. Those are hard caps. Eight people in one van is also two or three fewer rental cars on the E10, which matters more here than it sounds.
You don’t need to drive. Winter roads in Lofoten (October to April) are harder than almost every visitor expects: narrow, unlit, icy, and changeable within a single kilometre. We would rather you saw the islands from the passenger seat.
You don’t need to know the mountains or read the weather. We do. We know how the forecast and weather work here, which trails hold in which conditions, and when the right call is to turn around or not set off at all. Getting you safely into the winter mountains is the whole job.
The gear is included. Snowshoes, microspikes, poles, a backpack, a sitting pad, trail food, a down jacket, rain trousers, gloves, hat and buff. Winter boots available to rent. Nobody should have to buy an Arctic wardrobe for one week.
And we will tell you the truth about the place
We talk about the good parts of Lofoten and the harder ones: the storms, the road closures, the parking, the crowding in July. Which famous viewpoints are genuinely extraordinary and which are overhyped. Where you should go instead, even when it isn’t with us.
We would rather be honest, occasionally sarcastic, and useful than tell you what you want to hear.
If you want the longer version, including how we think about overtourism, trail pressure, and the honest limits of what “sustainable tourism” can mean in a place like this, we have written it all down here.
- Based in Reine & Svolvær
- Local guides only
- Tours all year-round
Our Team
Radka
Co-founder, Guide & Content Lead
📍 Reine · 🇬🇧 🇳🇴 🇨🇿 | Radka is usually behind a camera, behind a laptop, or catching her breath halfway up a mountain while Ivar waits at the summit. She runs sightseeing tours and joins the hikes now and then, mainly to prove that slow hikers get there too.
She’s also the voice behind most of Guide to Lofoten’s content, including the sarcastic remarks about weather, ferries, and Norwegian bureaucracy. The route here was long and full of detours, by way of oil and gas technology and then environmental chemistry. It started in 2015 with an angry article in Czech about tourists misusing Norway’s DNT mountain cabins. That somehow ended with her running a guiding company in Lofoten.
Ivar
Co-founder & Guide
📍 Reine · 🇳🇴 🇬🇧 | Ivar is the engine behind everything. He does logistics, guiding, accounting, and most of the things that keep the company running and Radka from losing her mind. His favourite tours are the winter hikes to Ryten, which makes sense: he’s usually already sitting at the summit while everyone else is still on the way up. Time off has got rarer since keeping this ship afloat turned into a 24/7 job, and what’s left of it goes into hiking, climbing, skiing, or freediving around the islands.
Trained nurse. Certified climbing instructor. Licensed taxi driver. A combination that covers almost every situation Lofoten can produce.
Ondra
Sightseeing Guide
📍 Svolvær · Leknes · 🇬🇧 🇨🇿 | Nothing is ever a problem for Ondra. He describes himself as a jack of all trades and means it as a compliment: he can drive more or less anything with wheels and keep it running through the trickiest conditions Arctic Lofoten produces.
He’s also a proud member of the Svolvær Red Cross volunteer group, so if you get lost or injured in the mountains around Svolvær, you might run into him outside our tours too. He shares our weakness for board games, which would be more useful if he lived at our end of Lofoten.
Tomas
Guide
📍 Svolvær · Leknes · 🇬🇧 🇸🇰 | Tomáš keeps about five forecast apps on his phone and checks all of them constantly. That obsession makes him very good at reshaping a tour around the conditions and getting guests ahead of the rain and the cloud.
Off duty he’s either skiing in the mountains or out on a boat. He’s also an insanely good cook and knows roughly a million ways to prepare stockfish.
Marek
Sightseeing Guide
📍 Reine · Leknes · 🇬🇧 🇵🇱 | Marek has a genuine “we can manage anything” attitude, which is exactly what you want when the forecast looks terrible and the plan has changed for the third time.
He enjoys the sightseeing trips, but he’s really at home in a kayak. We’ve never met anyone more passionate about paddling, or less interested in Lofoten’s mountains. He’d paddle every day if he could, and we still haven’t talked him into a hike up Ryten.
Jitka
Sightseeing & Hiking Guide
📍 Reine · 🇬🇧 🇨🇿 | You’ll hear Jitka’s laugh before you see her, and she keeps it up all day. She has no patience for routine, so she’s lived and worked in more corners of Lofoten than we can count. Which works out well for us: she knows the tiny villages most visitors drive straight past.
She’s also an excellent photographer, shooting our guests as well as professional sessions for elopements and weddings. And she runs her own kayaking company out of Reine and Ramberg. Busy bee.
Jakub
Sightseeing & Hiking Guide
📍 Reine · 🇬🇧 🇨🇿 | Jakub is quiet, funny, occasionally sarcastic, and in the winter mountains he absolutely has your back. He looks tough, but he’s enough of a sweetheart to hold your hand on the way down from a summit if that’s what it takes. Please don’t misuse this information.
He loves skiing and prefers to take the winter trips in harder conditions, mainly so he can keep the good powder days for himself. That suits us fine. Ivar prefers to guide in nice weather and spend the difficult days at home finding excuses not to do the accounting.
Maria
Sightseeing Guide & Photographer
📍 Svolvær · 🇬🇧 🇸🇰 | Long, exhausting days where the weather refuses to cooperate don’t seem to touch Maria. She gets through them smiling, and that calm puts guests at ease straight away. She’s also an exceptional photographer, and her photos regularly end up as guests’ favourite souvenir from Lofoten.
Unfortunately for us, she’s also deeply in love with Finnish Lapland and its far more reliable winters, so we live in constant fear that she’ll move back there one day.
Maciej
Sightseeing Guide
📍 Svolvær · Leknes · 🇬🇧 🇵🇱 | Maciej is relaxed, knowledgeable, and the most organised person in the company by a considerable margin, which the rest of us appreciate more than we probably admit. He’s also the only guide here with (almost grown-up) children, so he can tell you plenty about the school system in Lofoten and what there is for kids to do here.
Outside guiding he surfs, splitboards, and bakes the best sourdough bread in Lofoten. We’re still hoping for the recipe.
FAQ about us
Do you have questions about our Private Tours? Or got a question about us that we didn’t cover? Contact us.
Who runs Guide to Lofoten?
Guide to Lofoten is run by Radka Stankova and Ivar Pande Braathen, a Czech-Norwegian couple living in Reine, western Lofoten. They founded the company after moving to Lofoten in 2021 to manage a rorbu accommodation in Fredvang. They work with a local team of guides including Marek, Maria, Maciej, Jakub, Jitka, Tomas, and Ondra.
Where is Guide to Lofoten based?
Guide to Lofoten is based in Reine, in western Lofoten, Norway. Tours depart from both Reine and Svolvær, with vans stationed in each location. The company also offers northern lights tours in Tromsø.
What tours does Guide to Lofoten offer?
Guide to Lofoten offers small-group sightseeing tours, private tours, guided snowshoe hikes, and northern lights tours. Tours run year-round, in summer and winter. The company also provides travel planning consultations and digital interactive maps for travellers who prefer to explore on their own.
Are the guides local?
Yes. Everyone who guides for Guide to Lofoten lives in or around the Lofoten islands. The team works with flexibility rather than fixed scripts, adjusting each tour to the weather, the light, and the conditions of the day.
Ready to see Lofoten the way locals do?
Our small group tours take you beyond the guidebook. To hidden beaches, dramatic fjords, and mountain views most visitors never find. Pick a tour and we’ll take care of the rest.
5.0 (160+ reviews)