The Swedish Travel and Tourist Industry Federation (Rese- och turistnäringen i Sverige – RTS) on Thursday unveiled the eight destinations up for consideration for the this year’s TRIP Global Award.

The prize is given to recognize the travel operator in Sweden which offers foreign visitors the best travel experience during their visits to Sweden.

The winner will be announced in October.

Outdoor experiences feature heavily in the eight Swedish travel destinations nominated for RTS’s “Best Experience in Sweden” award.

Click here for the photo gallery of the eight “best” travel experiences in Sweden

Experiences involving Swedish nature were popular in this year’s competition, which has left RTS’s head Jan Lundin beaming about 2012’s unique nominations.

“It’s exciting that the northern lights and the tree hotels are widely sought after experiences by our foreign visitors,” he said in a statement.

But it’s not just high-tech architecture and arctic brilliance that gets a nod – the majority of the nominations this year feature the great outdoors.

“What attracts foreign visitors to Sweden are the experiences which are strongly connected to our unique nature, culture, design and history,” Lundin said.

The award was established by RTS in 2008, and the winner will be decided by tourists from eight key international markets for Sweden: Norway, Finland, Denmark, Germany, Italy, France, the UK and Russia.

Previous winners of the award include Astrid Lindgren’s World – a theatre and theme park for fans of Lindgren’s children’s stories; The Göta Canal – a stunning waterway stretching between Söderköping and Gothenburg; The Vasa Museum, a Stockholm museum with a preserved ship from the 1600s; and Kiruna’s Ice Hotel, the world’s largest hotel made of snow and ice.

Salomon Rogberg