Travellers arriving in Northern Scandinavia are interested in experiencing wilderness-type nature and indigenous culture. Hence, the borders between the three countries are not important for international travellers. After years of preparation, tourism actors from the region began a common project to enhance international tourism. Visit Arctic Europe (VAE) project is conducted by the Finnish Lapland Tourist Board, the Northern Norway Tourist Board and the Swedish Lapland Visitor Board and is financed by Interreg Nord for the years 2015–2017. Both the public sector and 90 tourism companies are involved in the project.

The aim of the project is to develop Northern Scandinavia into a cross-border, high-quality tourist area that is an internationally competitive and well-known destination. The project focuses on tourism marketing, joint product development, and improvement in accessibility. To ensure the efficiency of the project in line with the established objectives, stakeholders need analyses and updated information on the following four R&D missions: relevant indicators and measurement tools for the success of the VAE project, analysis of future travel trends, digital trends in tourism and customer digital and mobile behaviour, and obstacles to cross-border cooperation in the area where VAE is represented.

In this third report, commissioned by the project, researcher from the Luleå university of technology, explore present and predicted future digital travel trends and customer digital mobile behaviour, that can be of relevance for the Visit Arctic Europe tourism industry. As digital information technologies have had a profound impact on tourism industry, and will in the future even more shape the industry and the behaviour and experiences of the traveller, staying update with digital travel trends becomes increasingly important for companies and destinations. However, predicting the future of digital technology development and its influence on people’s behaviours, becomes at the same time increasingly more difficult as the speed of technological evolution increases. We can only be humble when in looking into the future, and the horizon of the future comes quickly closer and closer.