Oslo is a beautiful city. It is also relentlessly expensive in day-to-day practical ways.
We booked Scandic Solli for the expensive Friday and Saturday nights of our stay, allowing the premium half of our Oslo split stay to slide into softer Sunday and Monday pricing.
Oslo is expensive.
Not abstractly expensive. Not merely “yes, Scandinavia costs more” expensive.
Four days there and you notice it constantly. Restaurant prices. Drinks. Groceries. Taxis. You find yourself mentally converting almost everything back into your home currency and recoiling slightly.
A beer and a wine at an ordinary pub repeatedly came out around US$35 for us.
For comparison, in London, already hardly a bargain city, that same round might run roughly £16 at a normal pub, perhaps £11–12 at Wetherspoons, which many Brits already regard as painful enough. Americans from major cities may simply classify it as the pre-tax-and-tip cost of leaving the house, but Oslo still shifts the goalposts.
After a few days, you start appreciating hotels that help soften the blow.
That was part of the logic behind Scandic Solli.
This was never intended to be the glamorous half of the trip. The booking was solving a different problem: somewhere reasonably central, workable for three people, family-conscious on layout, and not catastrophically destructive to the overall economics of visiting Oslo.
On that brief, it did rather well.
A stronger location than expected
One pleasant surprise was the location.
Scandic Solli sits slightly back from the main waterfront tourist zone but remains comfortably close to it. More importantly, the surrounding area feels like actual city Oslo rather than a visitor enclave.
Apartment buildings, restaurants, bars. Streets that feel lived in.
For this style of trip, that worked nicely.
Scandic Solli sits in a stronger neighborhood than I expected: close enough to central Oslo, but with more of a lived-in city feel than a pure tourist zone.
Family configuration was the point
The room photos tell the story fairly honestly.
This is not luxury Oslo.
The setup is practical and unapologetically family-oriented: sofa, extra bedding, space allocated to fitting people in efficiently rather than staging an aspirational design aesthetic.
That was exactly what we were looking for.
The room was solving a family logistics problem, not competing for Scandinavian design awards.
One genuinely pleasant surprise: the familiar European budget-chain move of creating a “double bed” from two pushed-together singles turned out to be much better than expected. We slept extremely well.
The bathroom, meanwhile, was basic but perfectly serviceable.
Extra bedding, practical layout, and zero pretending otherwise. For this booking, that was the objective.
Basic, functional, and entirely adequate.
Oslo Changes the Breakfast Equation
Our stay coincided with both a holiday weekend and a national hotel workers’ strike.
Services were operating at a reduced level and the Scandic Solli bar area was closed.
The staff, however, remained consistently helpful throughout. That may partly have reflected awareness that guests were receiving a diminished experience during the strike, though perhaps that is simply how the property normally operates.
The front desk nevertheless assured us that even the reduced breakfast setup would still outperform the standard European continental formula with a few symbolic hot items added for moral support.
That proved true.
Breakfast remained solid: eggs, bacon, pastries, yoghurt, fruit, coffee and the usual supporting cast.
After a day or two of Oslo pricing, however, breakfast starts carrying a different emotional weight.
Being able to feed the family properly for roughly $10 per head begins to feel less like a routine hotel inclusion and more like a small financial victory.
By day two, the internal monologue becomes something along the lines of:
“Still hungry? Get more eggs. Fill up now.”
In Oslo, that reasoning starts to feel surprisingly rational.
One of the breakfast dining rooms at Scandic Solli. Despite the hotel workers’ strike affecting some services, breakfast remained one of the stronger parts of the stay.
Even the hotel wine reinforced the lesson
The property sold wine and drinks from reception.
I did a double take at the numbers.
A fairly ordinary bottle of white wine, two bottles of beer and some paprika crisps, purchased from the front desk to take upstairs, landed around US$100.
At that point it became one of those classic “fine, whatever, this is Oslo” transactions.
Still, it was memorable.
The bar area was closed during our stay because of the strike, though the front desk remained unwaveringly helpful.
A few quirks
The property had a handful of rough edges.
The curtain in our room never fully closed. Not a major problem, and not something that materially affected our stay, but also not exactly polished finishing.
Wi-Fi was inconsistent enough that I often abandoned it entirely and used my phone connection to hotspot my laptop.
One detail that stood out was the outward-opening guest room doors. We saw the same arrangement at THE THIEF later in the stay, so this appears to be a local building or fire-safety convention rather than anything unique to the property.
Coffee downstairs produced mild confusion.
There was a lobby machine matching the breakfast setup. Some staff charged for coffee. Others appeared to regard it as included. It may simply have depended whether they interpreted the visit as breakfast continuation, lobby purchase, or a guest visibly operating on insufficient caffeine.
Lobby coffee operated in a slightly ambiguous zone between paid amenity, guest perk, and practical caffeine necessity.
Bottom line
Scandic Solli is not trying to be aspirational Oslo.
It is a practical, well-located, family-friendly city base in a famously expensive destination.
The room configuration worked for what we needed, breakfast carried far more value than it might in a cheaper city, and the surrounding neighborhood turned out to be better than I had expected.
There are quirks. There are compromises. The finishing is not immaculate.
If I found myself bringing family back through Oslo, perhaps en route to exploring more of Norway’s outdoor scenery and fjord country, I would stay here again without much hesitation.
Oslo itself is not a city I am personally rushing back to for no particular reason given the cost equation, though Norway’s wider landscapes could certainly pull us back through.
For the job this booking was designed to perform, Scandic Solli did its work rather well.