Questioning the default: the story behind our NTIA win

In October 2026, 50 Degrees North was named Most Outstanding Tour Operator – Specialised at Australia's National Travel Industry Awards. For our CEO, Mari Räsänen, the win says something about patience, shared values, and a willingness to do something differently.

The National Travel Industry Awards are run each year by the Australian Travel Industry Association, and ours is one of the categories that begins with an industry vote. In 2026, that vote drew more than 21,000 entries from over 2,200 people across the Australian travel industry, among them many of the advisors we work alongside every day.

It was our fourth year as a finalist, and the first time we won. The shortlist comes from an industry vote; the winner is chosen by a judging panel. Reaching this point four years running, and taking the award this time, means a great deal to us.

"Seeing our logo on the screen when they announced the winner felt unreal," says Mari Räsänen, our CEO. "We had waited for this for so many years, and worked hard to present our company in the right way, to highlight the right things. We have been the same company for our staff and clients all along. You just have to explain it well enough that the judges understand it too."

An award like this rewards the company's work, not one person's, and Mari would be the first to say so. She has led 50 Degrees North since 2024, having come up through the company from its early days, so she knows it from the inside. What she leads is less a personal style than a way of working the whole company shares, one we have recently extended to more travellers through our Classic range.

It is how the company has always tried to work: to question the obvious way of doing things and look for a better one. 50 Degrees North's founders, Tietse and Jayde, built the business around a handful of plain commitments: to be authentic, to trust our people and be trustworthy, to keep innovating and improving how we work, and to do the right thing because it is the right thing. The belief underneath them is simple enough to sound naive, that people who are trusted and happy in their work look after clients better than people who are managed by the rulebook. Mari leads in that spirit.

Who the award belongs to

This award was not the end point of a plan. It is the sum of many people doing their part well, year after year, often without much notice.

An award like this is not won in one good year. It is earned in thousands of small moments: someone going a step further for a client, someone catching an error before it becomes a problem, someone staying late to make an itinerary better or simply to lift the room. Most of that work is never seen from outside.

Mari felt it on the night. "The burst of joy when Salla and I ran to the stage to get our trophy was unbelievable," she says. "We knew the win was for everyone in our company, and we were just there to accept it on their behalf. These are the moments when you are so proud of the whole team, what we do, and what we have created together over the years. And yes, there were tears in my eyes."

Much of it happens in Melbourne. Our sales team here knows the Nordic region first-hand, and they are the people most travellers and advisors actually deal with, the ones who turn a specialist idea into a journey that works. Day after day they solve problems, deepen what they know of the region, and help advisors and travellers make sense of it. Among them, Salla Ekman, our Head of Partnerships APAC, represents 50 Degrees North across events and agent channels and does so much to pass on our enthusiasm for the north. Kieran Healy, our Head of Sales, represented us in front of the judges, presenting the case we had built together.

The award belongs to all of them, and to the advisors who trusted us with their clients and took the time to vote. To our product, operations, 24-hour emergency team, sales administrators, our marketing, and to the guides, hosts and small businesses across the Nordic region whose knowledge gives our journeys their character.

To everyone who helped earn it, thank you. The award is yours.

Beyond the highlights

There is a reason this story belongs on a travel company's website, and not only in a trade magazine.

The same thinking shapes the journeys we design. Travel planned as a run of highlights moves fast from one famous view to the next, with little in between, and most of the pressure, and most of the spending, lands on a handful of places that are already crowded.

We would rather question that default. Our Norway journeys still take in the fjords, and our Iceland journeys still include the Golden Circle, because they are worth seeing, especially if you're a first-time visitor. But we also route people to quieter places alongside them: a few nights in a small fjord village, a region most itineraries skip, a locally run guesthouse over a chain. A Lapland Christmas away from the crowds works the same way. It is a modest thing, one trip at a time, but it spreads where travellers go and where their money lands, towards communities a highlights tour would overlook.

This is harder to sell on a brochure page than a list of sights. It asks travellers, and the advisors who know them, to trust that the quieter parts of a journey are often the ones that stay. A specialist can work this way where a larger operator finds it harder: we know our suppliers, we can change an itinerary quickly, and we can try an idea and keep it if it works. We have written more about the quiet power of specialist tour operators elsewhere. Doing the obvious thing differently, and carefully, is what we are about.