Hurtigruten’s North Cape Express: 7 Things You Should Know

Travel Market Report recently returned from a wintertime cruise with Hurtigruten along the Norwegian coastline. Referred to as the North Cape Express, the specific itinerary we sailed is one that Hurtigruten only operates between December and April.

Here’s what we learned about this unique product from Hurtigruten, including what type of client is best suited for it.

First, the facts
Cruisers can choose to do the entire 14-day sailing from Oslo to Bergen (or vice versa), or only half of it from Tromso to Bergen (or vice versa). We did the half-cruise option that began in Tromso.

The North Cape Express is only available onboard the MS Trollfjord, a 500-passenger ship that was refurbished in 2023 to appeal to an international audience.

MS Trollfjord can hold up to 500 passengers in 264 cabins, with the vast majority designed for two people. However, there are 44 cabins that can hold up to three. Cabins comprise inside, outside, mini-suite, and suite categories. The smallest (Polar Inside) are a snug 97 square feet. 

There are 15 suites of which two are 463-square-foot Owner’s Suites; all were completely refurbished during the 2023 overhaul of the ship. Five suite, all aft-facing or aft corner, have private balconies; the rest have bay windows. Guests staying in suites can eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner at Røst for no additional charge, and also receive a complimentary Hurtigruten jacket, Norwegian-style sweater, and Hurtigruten-branded wool hat.

Guests will find three restaurants, a small shop, a sauna and fitness room, and several lounges onboard.

The onboard mix of passengers is mostly European (Norwegian, German, French, and British), though there were a fair number of Australians on our voyage. Of the 360 guests on our sailing, only 60 were from the United States, and three were from Canada. Because of the international nature of the guests, announcements are always made in four languages: Norwegian, English, German, and French.

The vast majority of the guests did the entire two-week trip.  

Fares for the North Cape Express are fairly inclusive with most drinks (except top shelf liquors), gratuities, and Wi-Fi included, as well as a pre-cruise night in either Oslo, Tromso, or Bergen (if booked 90+ days from departure). Excursions cost extra and, like everything in Norway, can be quite pricey.

A bit of a hybrid
Hurtigruten’s North Cape Express (and its sister itinerary, the Svalbard Express) is a bit of a hybrid product. It falls under the Hurtigruten product line (versus the more expedition oriented HX product line) but it’s also completely separate.

Where the Hurtigruten fleet acts as a form of mail carrier/ferry/cruise experience, with short stops in multiple ports, the North Cape and Svalbard Express are traditional cruise itineraries, more the way HX is. However, they combine the best of Hurtigruten’s rich Norwegian heritage with the expedition mindset of HX.

In keeping with the Hurtigruten experience, the crew onboard is mostly Scandinavian, the food is Norwegian through and through, announcements are in multiple languages, and most of the cabins (suites are an exception) have a utilitarian feel to them that makes hanging out in the lounges quite appealing.

From an HX perspective, immersing oneself into the destination is at the forefront of everything, from the occasional onboard educational lectures to the late afternoon roundups (there’s one just for English speakers) that discuss the next day’s port of call and provide a brief Norwegian word of the day language lesson.

Norwegian cuisine
Menus are Norwegian. North Americans will find some dishes that are familiar – there’s scrambled eggs for breakfast and cold cuts for lunch – but there’s a lot of fish, as well as game meats – like reindeer and elk – that we’re not as used to. One night’s menu featured dishes such as Norwegian sardines, a Jerusalem artichoke soup with shrimp, beef roast, dried fish, and a Norwegian-style risotto called byggotto. Clients will need to be adventurous. There are no everyday options – like grilled chicken or a simple steak – for picky eaters. Clients traveling with kids, however, can ask for a children’s menu.

Flora, the main dining room is open seating, buffet-style for breakfast and lunch. Dinner is seated and you must choose a 6 p.m., 7 p.m., or 8 p.m. seating. Dinners usually comprised four starter choices, three main courses, and four desserts. (The menu mentioned above was from Flora.) At least one item in each section is vegan, and a number of allergens are marked including gluten, nuts, peanuts, shellfish, and more.

There are two additional specialty dining venues on Trollfjord.

Arran, is complimentary to all passengers, and was created specifically to showcase the culture and cuisine of the indigenous Sámi people. It’s open every day from noon to 7 p.m., and is first come, first served. The menu is heavy on meat, though our favorite meal on the entire ship – a plant-based burger – was here.

Items on the menu here include pickled herring, coastal brown crab cakes, roasted bone marrow, reindeer meat soup, reindeer sausage or shank steak, whole grilled arctic char on the bone, and white wine-steamed blue mussels. For a surcharge, diners can upgrade to three types of steak, a dry-aged whole roasted kid goat leg, or a dry-aged halibut cutlet.

The third restaurant on board is Røst, which is complimentary for suite passengers and an extra fee for everyone else. It is a five-course, small plate, chef’s choice “surprise” meal. You don’t know what you will be served until the waiter places it in front of you. The restaurant manager does ask about any dietary restrictions ahead of time and the chef will provide five courses that conform to your needs.

The independent traveler
A North Cape Express sailing – and presumably most of Hurtigruten’s lineup – is best suited for the most independent-minded travelers. No transfers are offered from the airport to the pre-cruise hotel and no transfers are available when the cruise is over. Guests can either take a taxi (if there’s one available) or better yet, advisors can pre-arrange private transfers for their clients. There are no excursion tickets so it’s up to each guest to keep track of what excursions they’ve booked, when they need to be at the meeting point, and what time they need to be back onboard.

Speaking of excursions, many guests prefer to do their own thing ashore rather than the organized excursions. (Only a handful of excursions ever sold out and those were ones that had to be kept small in number.) In some towns, shuttles run between the ship and the downtown and many guests availed themselves of this service.

There are few services onboard. For instance, there’s no room service and no laundry service, but there is a DIY launderette. It’s free to use but costs about $4 U.S. for detergent for the washer. The machines are not particularly intuitive and there was lots of collaboration between guests as everyone tried to figure out the best settings to use.

There’s also no printed daily program (honestly, not much of a need for one), so it’s up to each guest to determine what the day’s activities are. There are virtually no social activities onboard and most people keep to themselves, so your clients should be prepared to occupy their own time when not ashore.

Two women from the U.S. we stopped to chat with told us they specifically enjoy traveling with Hurtigruten because they don’t want to be around “needy” Americans.

There’s little to do in the evening besides sit in one of the lounges. Some nights a piano player will “entertain” in the two-deck 1893 Bar. There is also occasionally an evening documentary shown in the Lecture Hall, but each night it will be in a different language (ie one night Norwegian, the next German, the next English, etc.).

Service is a highlight
Service onboard – made up mostly of Scandinavians – is friendly and helpful. In the restaurants, waiters will work with you to ensure any dietary needs are met and in some cases, word is passed from restaurant to restaurant. When we went to Arran for lunch the day after we’d had dinner at Røst, the waitress already knew one of us was both gluten and dairy free.

Two new-to-Hurtigruten cruisers from the States that we met during an excursion said they felt the service was just as good as they’ve experienced on their regular cruise line – Seabourn. (The couple were staying in a suite and ate all of their meals in Røst.)

Expect darkness, little wildlife, and rough seas
Keeping in mind that the North Cape Express only sails during Norway’s long winter, North Americans should be prepared for short days and a lot of darkness. On our mid-January sailing, the sun typically rose around 10:30 a.m. and set around 12:30, with another hour or so of dusky blue skies. (When you’re a little further south, like Oslo or even Bergen, that’s extended by another two to three hours.)

Because much of the day is spent in darkness, there’s little opportunity for wildlife viewing – or even scenic sailing. That’s a summer activity in Norway, so make sure clients know they likely won’t be seeing whales or reindeer, and, most definitely, no polar bears. (That’s much further north, in Svalbard, during the summer months.)

Clients should also expect to experience the motion of the ocean a few times throughout the journey. Through the ship hugs the coast pretty closely, there are times when the route necessitates heading out into the open ocean. In the winter, those waters are rough, though these stretches often don’t last more than three or four hours at a time. Our final night of sailing, the waters were round enough that the grand finale dinner and cocktails was canceled, and guests were asked to pick a spot and stay there for two to three hours in the late evening.

Northern Lights
The primary reason most guests choose to sail the wintertime North Cape Express is to see the Northern Lights. With about half the itinerary (if you do the full sailing) above the Arctic Circle, the chances are high the Lights will make an appearance at least once. (Cruisers who did the full sailing we were on saw the Lights on three separate nights. Those who did the half-sailing, like we did, saw them once.)

To help ensure guests do see the Lights if they make an appearance, the onboard Coastal Experience team will make in-cabin announcements – up to 10 p.m. – if the Aurora has been spotted. If they’re up to it, your clients might want to spend time in one of the lounges later into the night for an even greater chance of seeing them as prime viewing time continues until about 2 a.m. (It’s also helpful to remind clients to use their phones or camera to actually view the Northern Lights, which generally look like wispy gray clouds to the naked eye.)

Hurtigruten is so sure the Aurora will be spotted at least once that it offers a Northern Lights Guarantee on full sailings of the North Cape Express from the start of the season (December) through the end of March.