More and more coach tourists from central Europe are using Oulu as a stop off point on their journey to Nordkapp (northern Norway) bringing increasing levels of tourist revenue to the city.

According to Oulu’s Kaleva, Nordkapp (the famous northernmost point in Europe in Norwegian Lapland) attracts large numbers of central European tourists every year many of whom travel around northern Europe as part of coach tours. Part of this is benefiting Oulu. Tourists, especially from Germany, arrive in coaches and stay overnight in hotels in the city. They tend to only stay for one night which only gives them enough time to eat and one of the city’s restaurants and look around the town centre. They tend to leave very early the next morning in order to make the best of Nordkapp, where they usually stay a few days. Recently, four central European coaches departed from outside the Radisson Hotel (near the city’s central library) early in the morning containing passengers from Germany, Austria and Switzerland. 
  
The Swiss were on a seventeen day tour which included Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, staying for three nights in each of these capitals. Some of the Swiss tourists commented to a Kaleva interviewer that they rather liked Oulu from the limited time they had spent there. However, none of them claimed – unprompted - that they wished to come back to Oulu some day and stay longer.