Kittilä Airport: Transfers to Levi, Ylläs and Olos

Updated 1 October 2026.

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Kittilä is the airport that puts you closest to a ski resort in Finnish Lapland. Levi is 15 km up the road, the bus that meets your flight costs 15€ and takes about twenty minutes, and if you land at 22:55 there is still a bus. That transfer is the easiest in Lapland. Ylläs, the other resort this airport serves, is the one you have to plan.

Kittilä Airport (IATA code KTT) is run by Finavia and handled 445,911 passengers in 2025, up 8.3 per cent on the year before, which makes it the second busiest airport in Lapland behind Rovaniemi’s 1.1 million. Finavia named it Airport of the Year 2025 for that growth combined with punctuality and customer satisfaction. It is still one small terminal with one café-bar, and in December it fills up.

Every way out of the airport, compared

Fares are one way, as published in September 2026. The bus companies set prices month by month through the winter, so check the operator’s page before you travel.

The taxi rank sits to the left of the main terminal entrance and taxis wait according to flight times. Pre-booked cars collect from the right-hand side of the doors, which matters when it is dark, snowing and everyone is looking for their name on a sign.

Getting to Levi

Tunturilinjat, Levi’s own bus company, runs a bus from the airport after every incoming scheduled flight and back to the airport before every departure. A return is two singles, so 30€ for an adult. You can buy online or just pay the driver.

The bus works its way through the resort: Taalovaara, Hotel Levi Panorama, Tunturitie, Koutamaa, the Design Hotel and Levi Hotel Spa, Hotel K5, Leviraitti for Break Sokos Hotel and Sirkantähti, and Hotel Hullu Poro. If your hotel is on that list, the transfer is solved. Buses from arriving flights leave when the plane and the luggage actually arrive rather than when the timetable says, and if the flight is cancelled the bus is cancelled with it.

A taxi makes sense for groups and for anyone staying outside the bus route. Taxi Levi charges a fixed 60€ from the airport to Levi centre for up to four people and 65€ for five to eight, skis and luggage included. For a family of four that is roughly what four bus tickets cost, door to door, with your skis in the boot. A metered taxi from the rank comes to about the same.

Getting to Ylläs

Ylläs is not one village. Ylläsjärvi is on the nearer side of the fell and Äkäslompolo on the far side, 15 km apart by the scenic road. Finavia gives the airport to Ylläs distance as around 35 km and the Ylläs tourist board calls it about a 30-minute drive, but that is the near end. Reckon on roughly 50 km and 45 minutes to Äkäslompolo. Know which village your cabin is in before you book any transfer.

Liikenne Rundgren runs the airport bus via Ylläsjärvi to Äkäslompolo, with regular services from 1 December to 30 April. Outside that window it operates on request only, for confirmed flight arrivals, and has to be ordered in advance. The fare is 26€ for an adult to Äkäslompolo and 22€ to Ylläsjärvi, half that for children under 12, and a little less if you book ahead through Matkahuolto.

The alternative is Ylläs Express, a shared door-to-door transfer to accommodation in central Äkäslompolo: 36€ per person for flights arriving between 09:00 and 20:00, and 55€ per person outside those hours. Passengers on flights landing close together share the vehicle. For one or two people arriving in daylight it is the simplest thing going. For four people landing at 22:00 it is 220€, and a taxi at roughly 140€ is the cheaper ride. Note it does not run 1 to 29 October 2026.

Ylläs is also the trip where a hire car earns its keep. Chalets are scattered across two villages and the trailheads are spread along the fell, so if you plan to ski both sides, shop in Ylläsjärvi and eat in Äkäslompolo, repeated taxi fares add up fast. In Levi, where the centre is walkable and the bus meets your flight, a car is genuinely optional. There is no regular public bus between Levi and Ylläs, so a combined trip means a car, a taxi, or backtracking via the airport.

Olos, Muonio and Pallas

The Muonio direction takes about an hour from the terminal. A connecting service links the airport with Muonio, Olos, Jeris and Pallas: a public line at weekends supported by the regional ELY Centre, and a pre-booked municipal service on weekdays running Harriniva, Muonio, Olos, Särkijärvi, Torassieppi, Jeris, Levi and the airport. Transport exists for every Finnair flight in and out of Kittilä, but only runs if at least one passenger has booked, so booking ahead is not optional. A shared-service taxi to Muonio can also be arranged if you email 24 hours ahead. Olos fell itself is 6 km from Muonio centre, and most Harriniva holiday packages include the transfer, with a bus stop 300 m from the resort.

Who flies into Kittilä in winter 2026-27

Finnair flies Helsinki to Kittilä year-round, daily, in about 1 h 20 min. That is the fallback from anywhere, and the Levi bus waits for it. Everything else is seasonal: most international routes run only from November or December to March, and the whole programme resets each year. The routes listed by Levi Ski Resort and the Ylläs tourist board for 2026-27 look like this.

Two honest caveats. First, levi.fi and yllas.fi disagree on the exact start dates and operating days of the easyJet UK routes, which is why the table gives ranges. Confirm with the airline. Second, Austrian Airlines from Vienna, KLM from Amsterdam and SAS from Copenhagen appear on the resort lists without 2026-27 dates, so treat them as possibilities rather than schedules. TUI also flies day-trip “Search for Santa” charters to Kittilä from eleven UK airports on selected dates between 5 and 23 December 2026. Flight time from London is around 3 h 30 min. If your route does not exist this season, route through Helsinki and use Omio to compare the onward legs in English.

The terminal, parking and car hire

Kittilä is a single small terminal, enlarged during Finavia’s development programme of about 25 million EUR between 2018 and 2020, which added stands, taxiways, a bigger baggage hall and roughly 2,000 m2 of terminal space. Airside there is one café-bar with a reindeer-antler crown over the counter, coffee, snacks, drinks, a stand-up pub corner with a TV, and card and dice games you can borrow. Finavia’s own pages do not describe any landside food, so if you need a proper meal before flying, plan on eating after security or before you leave the resort.

Car hire desks in the terminal cover Avis, Budget, Enterprise, Europcar, Hertz, Scandia Rent, Sixt and ArticRent. Finavia notes that some open only when there is a prior reservation, so if you land at 23:00, book the car before you fly rather than hoping to sort it on arrival. Winter tyres are compulsory from 1 November to 31 March when conditions require them, studs are permitted in that window, and Lapland hire cars have been quoted with studded tyres included, though it is worth confirming at booking.

Parking sits directly in front of the terminal at 16€ a day if you pay by app, a little more at the machine, card or app only. There are 20 heated spaces on a first come, first served basis, EV charging, and Finavia’s desk sells a car-heating service for 15€.

Winter arrivals: what actually goes wrong

Between 9 and 11 January 2026 an extreme cold snap, down to −37°C (−35°F) at the airport on the Sunday, cancelled every Kittilä flight for three days running. Finnair scrapped 23 flights on the 11th alone. Ice on the aircraft and frozen ground equipment made de-icing and refuelling impossible, and thousands of visitors were stranded. This is rare. It is also the reason not to book a same-day onward connection home on a tight margin, and a good argument for travel insurance that covers missed departures.

More routinely: flights arrive late, buses wait for the luggage rather than the clock, and both Tunturilinjat and Rundgren publish a live bus map you can check from the baggage hall. Late evening arrivals are covered by the Levi bus, which met flights at 22:10, 22:25 and 22:55 on the September timetable. Ylläs Express switches to its 55€ night rate for arrivals from 20:00.

Skis and small children need a thought. The Ylläs bus charges extra for ski bags and sleds, while Taxi Levi’s fixed fare includes ski gear. The airport buses carry no child seats and some have only lap belts, so bring your own or take a taxi and ask for a child seat when you book.

Departing: how early to arrive

On the September timetable the Levi bus leaves the resort about 75 minutes before the flight and reaches the terminal around 20 minutes later, which gives you roughly 55 minutes in the building. That is comfortable for a Finnair flight to Helsinki on a Tuesday. It is thin on a December Saturday, when charter programmes and scheduled international flights overlap and one small terminal has to process several full aircraft at once. On those days take the earlier bus or the taxi, and check in online before you leave your hotel. Departures on Ylläs Express are collected from your accommodation two to two and a half hours before the flight, which tells you what the operator thinks of the margins.

How I researched this

I built this guide in September 2026 from Finavia’s Kittilä airport, parking, taxi, car hire and café pages and its 2025 traffic statistics, the Levi and Ylläs tourism sites’ arrival and flight lists, the bus operators’ own timetables and fares (Tunturilinjat, Liikenne Rundgren, Ylläs Express), the Muonio area transport pages, the taxi companies’ published price lists (the Ylläs taxi fares are my estimates from those tariffs, not quoted fares), Traficom’s tyre rules and news coverage of the January 2026 cold snap. Nobody from Lapland Trip Planner has flown into Kittilä or ridden these buses for this page; it is a researched comparison, not a trip report. Fares are those published in September 2026 and change month by month, and flight dates are as the airlines and resorts listed them, so check both before booking.

Common questions

Written by Ville Laukkanen

Ville is a Finn who runs Lapland Trip Planner. The site is a researched planning guide: hotel rates come from Booking.com listings and activity prices from the operators' own pages, each dated, and nothing is presented as a personal stay or trip unless it was one.