We travel with our bikes all the time, I’m a million miler on Delta, and we’ve done two bike trips to Norway and our third is in two weeks.

Here’s what we do:

Bike packaging:
1. We use Orucase bike cases that require some bike disassembly, but it’s at the level of what you should be able to do if you intending to travel anyhow. The Orucase is small enough that it can be easily finessed through an airline as regular baggage and it doesn’t need any special accommodations in which to be carried. It will fit in pretty much any car as well and it is compatible with most hotel’s luggage storage facilities.

2. We make a reservation at a hotel for the first and last night in which to recover from jet lag and from which to depart to the airport in the morning to fly home. Have not run into a problem yet where the hotel was not willing to store our bag for the duration of our trip. Just ask up front. Two of our trips have been based out of Bergen and we’ve found the Hotel Zander K in Bergen to be perfect. It’s right across the street from the train station and it’s also where the buses come from the airport.

3. We then assemble our bike at the hotel and depart on our trip from there.

4. We’ve rigged our Orucases up so that we can sling them over our wheelie bags and roll them through the airport. A word of caution on this – the bags we use are the same ones that aircrews (pilots) use and they are of a metal frame construction and super tough. That said, set up this way the whole thing is just incredibly easy to move through airports, on buses, and trains. All Orucase bike cases also have built in backpack straps to carry them that way too.

Orucase: https://www.orucase.com
We have the Airport Ninja and have used them for numerous international and domestic flights with zero issues. The Ninja is the smallest and lightest and has no wheels. The B2 is slightly bigger but has the advantage of folding down into a 1/3rd size package for storage. Both work well.

The other option that we had researched last year was for a trip that began in Tromso through Senja and along the Arctic Coast and down through Lofoten. We ended up in Bodo and that’s where our flight home started. So we had looked into shipping the bags from the Hurtigruten from Tromso and picking the bag up in Bodo and packing our bikes. The cost was minimal and they were more than happen to hold our bags almost 3 weeks. We ended up not having to do that, but it was available and what we would have done otherwise.

The Hurtigruten is a uniquely Norwegian institution and not having any analogs in too many other countries. They move a lot of people and a lot of freight up and down the length of Norway and have for more than a century if memory serves. Most of the people we contacted there only spoke Norwegian so it can be a little tricky to figure out but it’s an incredibly useful service.