The regulars at the IceHotel in Jukkasjarvi – 100 miles into Swedish Lapland and 150 miles beyond the Arctic Circle – tend to be travelling spruce salesmen needing somewhere to stay in Europe’s last wilderness.

The 1999 IceHotel (formerly the Arctic Hall Hotel and originally created as an art gallery) was the world’s first ice hotel and claims to be the largest and most luxurious.

Masochists of all nationalities pay for the privilege of seeing how long it takes for their nose to resemble a glazed strawberry and their testicles to start chattering.

The tariff includes ice chairs and a freezing cold sofa, your own ‘polar-tested’ thermal sleeping bag, a mattress in the shape of a spacious and extraordinarily uncomfortable chunk of regional ice, an itchy reindeer-hide blanket and an en-suite pickaxe. Presumably the latter is for use in emergency by panicking bed wetters.

Early morning calls are courtesy of rutting reindeer and randy huskies. There is cold running water, otherwise known as ‘drips’. To wash your face, you just stand on your bed and blow on to the roof.

All rooms are smoking, unless you hold your breath.

Every year, 100 people build the groundbreaking hotel from two-metre by one-metre blocks of ice harvested from the nearby River Torne.

The hotel opens in December and melts by mid-April. One thousand tons of ice and 3,000 of ‘snice’ – a type of frozen water between snow and ice ­– are used in the construction.

The hotel can accommodate 100 guests if they keep close together and share body heat.

There is a real hotel (Kaamos) next door that loans warm clothing and for anyone who is desperate to warm up; facilities include the Aurora Spa.

The IceHotel boasts a chapel and a Snowball Room, although the two are not connected. All drinks in the hotel’s Ice Bar are served in ice glasses and on the rocks. Or between them.

You can stay in your room and shiver, play hide-and-seek with various body parts or get outside and explore virgin forests in a snowmobile convoy. Five-day expeditions up and around the Arctic Trail are available. The nearest airport is Kiruna but if Sweden is not your ideal location, there are other snice hotels around the world that claim to offer the same ‘unique experience’.

The Kirkenes Snowhotel in northeast Norway, near the Russian border and only 150 miles from Murmansk, opened in 2006 and offers King crab fishing in the Barents Sea.

Quebec’s Hotel de Glace at Sainte-Catherine-de-la-Jacques-Cartier has deluxe jazz and hockey suites with wall carvings and snow sculptures of double bassists, trumpeters and Canadians fighting with Russians on skates. It celebrates ‘ephemeral architectural creativity’ before it thaws.

On the patio of Hotel Arctic in Ilulissat, Greenland, accommodation comes in the form of silvery, aluminium bubble igloos with solar cells, a kitchenette and complimentary shampoo to get the smell of Atlantic prawns out of your hair.

The neoprene igloos afford views of the world’s fastest moving glacier.

Most igloo bed and breakfasts have restaurants. The US$333 per night Sorrisniva Igloo Hotel has Lakseshua, which serves smoked reindeer marinated in herbal liqueur, hazelnut-coated Arctic char ‘arranged with mussels’ and Arctic berry pie of the season. Next to Norway’s best-known salmon river, the Alta, the hotel’s glass-roofed room offer ‘all sky vision’.

At the iconic Jukkasjarvi IceHotel I shared a room for one night with a Canadian gentleman.

It was rather unsettling trying to fall asleep beside someone who sounds like an old school bus with snow chains when he snores.

There’s no travel experience equivalent to being woken up by a disorientated mature North American man trying to find the en-suite WC dressed in a Davy Crocket hat, mittens and fleecy tundra-resistant long johns.

And then, when he has found the loo, starts singing The Mountie Always Finds His Man.

Guests who survive the night receive a certificate to prove their insanity.

Staying in a snow hotel is a once-in-a-lifetime experience. There is not much repeat custom.

This confirms the old adage: ‘once frost-bitten, twice shy’.