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How Iceland Is Rethinking Tourism for the Long Haul

By Julia Eskins

Iceland has a New Year’s resolution. After a 10-month pause in tourism due to global lockdowns, the country is preparing for a new era of outdoor adventure—one that locals are hoping is more sustainable than before.

The Nordic island nation’s meteoric rise in popularity remains a controversial topic. Once named the fastest-growing destination in Europe, its economy has become reliant on flashpackers keen to marvel at glaciers, geysers, and green-streaked skies. But environmentalists have raised concerns about the impact of overtourism on delicate ecosystems. Iceland’s answer? Encourage people to stay longer, travel slower , and make use of the country’s greatest asset in a COVID-minded world: space.

Similar to other hot-ticket destinations like Venice and Amsterdam , which celebrated reduced pollution in 2020, Iceland experienced its own silver linings in a year of fewer visitors. Thingvellir National Park director Einar Sæmundsen noticed less litter on trails that were previously trampled by hikers. Meanwhile, locals enjoyed the quietude, with domestic travelers flocking to beloved sites, as well as the Westfjords and Eastfjords—two lesser-explored regions that are finally getting the attention and financial support from the Icelandic government to thrive.

“The growth we saw in the number of visitors up to 2019 was far too rapid and we were getting close to the edge of seriously unsustainable development,” says Tryggvi Felixson, a tour guide and Chair of Landvernd, the Icelandic Environment Association. “We are fortunate that Iceland is a relatively big country. It’s possible to distribute the traffic more evenly than we have done before.”

Iceland's national parks, like Thingvellir, pictured, have seen benefits from less foot traffic during the pandemic. 

More funding for infrastructure and conservation

Unlike destinations that tightened budgets in 2020, Iceland increased its spending on tourism by 40 percent. A substantial amount of the $1.73 billion ISK ($13.6 million) budget was used to improve infrastructure at tourist sites. Many of these places, like the basalt column-flanked canyon of Stuðlagil, became famous due to social media. The government is finally playing catch-up to build necessities like restrooms, parking lots, designated trails, and wheelchair-accessible entrances.

“It’s been challenging to stay ahead of social media,” says Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson, Director General of the Icelandic Tourist Board. “Visitors like to go around wherever they want and that's how we want to keep it. But we are sometimes unprepared for the sites they're visiting. Many of these places are much more delicate during the winter and spring when the frost is leaving the soil. A lot of traffic can spoil the environment.”

Iceland’s parliament is also now debating a proposal to establish a national park in the Highlands, which will cover and protect about 30 percent of the country, says Felixson.

A push for longer stays, alternative routes, and remote accommodations

Inexpensive flights once made Iceland a magnet for weekend jaunts, but with COVID-19, longer trips that include working remotely are becoming the norm. In November, Iceland announced a new visa for international remote workers. Foreign nationals, including Americans, are now eligible to stay in Iceland for up to six months, as long as they are employed with a company or can verify self-employment. Unlike other visas aimed at digital nomads, Iceland’s program has some important fine print. Your monthly salary must be at least 1 million ISK ($7,360) or about $88,000 per year to qualify.

The quality-over-quantity strategy is simple: attract high-earning professionals that can help stimulate the local economy without leading to overcrowding. The new visa program is just one aspect of Iceland’s shift toward attracting those craving a slower style of exploration.

“Not everyone has to drive the Ring Road,” says Steinarsson. “We’re encouraging people to travel around the country but, preferably, stay longer in each region.”

Offering alternatives to Route 1, which follows the circumference of the island, Iceland opened two new circuits in late 2020. One is the Westfjords Way, a 590-mile journey around the Westfjords peninsula, which was previously closed in the winter due to avalanche risks. The second new route is the Diamond Circle in North Iceland, a 155-mile circuit replete with waterfalls and wildlife.

The Sky Lagoon, one of the biggest tourism projects in Icelandic history, is set to launch in the spring. 

Alex Erdekian

CNT Editors

Jesse Ashlock

Charlie Hobbs

But that isn’t to say the capital should be completely overlooked. This spring, new geothermal spa The Sky Lagoon is set to open in Reykjavik . The project is one of the biggest in Icelandic tourism’s history at 4 billion ISK ($31 million). With its 260-foot oceanfront infinity pool and architecture inspired by the region’s traditional turf-houses, it could be an attractive alternative to the famous Blue Lagoon.

For those who want to experience nature away from the crowds, the newly launched Bubble Hotel offers the chance to sleep under the Northern Lights in one of 18 clear dome structures located in two remote forest locations. Meanwhile, close to Europe’s largest glacier in Vatnajökull National Park, the new Six Senses Össurá Valley is set to open in 2022. With 70 rooms and private cottages sprawled across 4,000 acres and built using renewable materials, the property will usher in a new option for sustainable luxury.

Conserving the environment while continuing to grow economically remains a challenge. But perhaps the forced pause has led to more than just a rebirth of quiet and clean trails. This time—with more remote adventures and better infrastructure—the land of ice and fire will be ready.

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After years of over-tourism concerns, iceland now has the opposite problem, while the tourism industry has been hard hit, icelanders aren't overly worried about its future..

COPENHAGEN — Icelanders seem to have found the best way to keep the island free of the coronavirus while welcoming tourists at the same time.

Arrivals reaching Keflavik airport, near Reykjavik, are offered coronavirus tests on landing. Priced at only $64-79, it enables them to avoid having to undergo a 14-day quarantine.

After that’s done with, everything is as it always was before the outbreak — the hotels, the restaurants and car rentals, says Sigridur Dogg Gudmundsdottir, who runs Visit Iceland, a tourism organization.

The great thing is how sparsely populated Iceland is, she says.

“With a population of 360,000 living on an island a third of the size of Germany, it’s emptier than any other country in Europe,” she says.

“It’s the perfect place for social distancing,” she says. “It’s really easy to enjoy being out in the countryside without running into loads of people.”

[ Iceland reports fewer visitors, longer stays in 2019 ]

Nonetheless, the tourism industry is concerned about the fallout of the pandemic and is adapting to attract domestic travellers too.

Before the outbreak of the coronavirus, only one in 10 tourists came from Iceland, but this is set to increase, says Gudmundsdottir.

She now sees that domestic travel is increasing — one of the few positive effects of the coronavirus outbreak.

“We suddenly travel our own country in greater numbers than before, and at the same time we discover what tourism has brought in terms of both services and infrastructure. It is good that we appreciate our country more.”

Her concern is founded on the sobering comparison that more than 120,000 people came to Iceland in April 2019 — which fell to 924 people the same month in 2020, as the pandemic ravaged Europe.

After years of steep growth, Iceland’s tourism industry has reached almost a standstill, a loss that could run into the billions.

[ Arctic tourism businesses fear they won’t survive the coronavirus crisis ]

But Icelanders are optimistic, even if most in Reykjavik realize that it will take a while to rebuild the numbers from the last few years.

The growth all started with Eyjafjallajokull erupting in 2010, putting the country on the map. By 2018, the country was welcoming 2.3 million visitors from abroad, up from an average of 500,000.

Icelanders were happy with the numbers in 2019 — a solid 2 million that everyone felt would be fine as a standard to ensure tourism to geysers, waterfalls and hot water sources stayed sustainable.

Then came the virus, the cancellations, the restrictions — and the number of passengers landing at Keflavik shrank to almost nil.

The 924 guests in April 2020 was around the same number as arrived in 1961, according to broadcaster RUV. May 2020 saw thin pickings too, with 1,035 travellers reportedly landing at the airport, a 99.2-percent fall compared to the same month a year before.

“Things were looking pretty good for 2020,” Gudmundsdottir says. There’s no way it can look like the previous years now, she adds.

As everywhere else, for those who own restaurants, hotels or tour operators, that has meant difficulties.

Iceland’s government is trying to help, allowing people to defer their taxes and dropping taxes on overnight stays for now.

But the damage is expected to be sizeable: In 2019, tourists from abroad spent some 383 billion krona ($2.8 billion). A year later, some 250 billion to 300 billion krona less is expected.

“We don’t know how many tourists will come to Iceland,” says Iceland’s Tourism Minister Thordis Kolbrun Gylfadottir.

Icelanders used to try and assess how many tourists could go to sights that are particularly popular without overwhelming them completely. “We were concerned about possible over-tourism in certain places. Now we’re more worried about under-tourism,” she says.

There is hope, particularly given that there have barely been any new infections among Icelanders in weeks.

Plus, people are starting to come back.

“This was a shock, but we know that we will be able to get back on our feet,” says Gylfadottir. What matters is that the situation improves elsewhere too, she says, like in the United States.

Iceland welcomes more tourists from the U.S. than any other nation.

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• Iceland’s tourism becomes a hot environmental topic

Tourists drowning at sea. Tourists dying in bus accidents. Tourists driving illegally off road and getting stuck in the middle of an active geothermal area. They do serious damage to nature just to post pictures of themselves and their tyre tracks on social media.

“I did not know,” they say.

These are some of the problems which now face Iceland’s tourism industry. Icelandic nature is under threat, and there might be problems ahead. Tourism has brought new challenges to Iceland.

Rannveig Grétarsdóttir

“When our guests do not respect nature, it’s a negative thing. But it can also be good when other guests see our reactions and realise that bad behaviour will not be tolerated,” says Rannveig Grétarsdóttir, CEO of the whale safari company Elding in Reykjavik.

Iceland’s tourism boom has slowed somewhat since the Icelandic airline WOW’s bankruptcy in the spring. Last year, 2.7 million people visited the island, but that figure is expected to fall this year – partly because of Icelandic currency fluctuations, but mainly because fewer foreign airlines now fly there.   

The fall in tourism numbers allows Iceland to think, according to Rannveig Grétarsdóttir. She believes it is important to use this time to develop rules and introduce regulations around visits to Iceland’s many natural attractions. 

No future vision

Jón Björnsson, Chief Park Ranger for the Snæfellsjökull national park, says Iceland has lacked the infrastructure needed to accommodate all the guests who have been coming in recent years. He says Iceland’s natural resources have been exploited in an irresponsible way; tourist companies have only been focusing on growth and have failed to think about sustainability and the impact of tourism on the local population. 

Jón Björnsson, Chi ef Park Ranger for the Snæfellsjökull national park. Photo: private

“There is still no future vision within the tourism sector. There is still a lack of knowledge, and in certain areas the locals are about to run out of patience,” says Björnsson. 

People in general do understand how important tourism is to Iceland’s economy and to individual households, however. 

“Tourism is sometimes bad for the quality of life, but at the same time it does bring in money, and the Icelandic people understand this,” he continues.

The Icelandic Association for Search and Rescue, ICE-SAR, believes foreign guests’ behaviour has changed. Project manager Jónas Guðmundsson says the number of accidents involving tourists has fallen, with the exception of 2018. But Iceland must continue to develop its infrastructure in order to control where foreign visitors go.

“Most visitors behave in a nice and rational manner, except for a small number of social media celebrities,” he says.

As part of its drive to teach tourists to be more responsible, the tourism agency Inspired by Iceland has published a video showing how to take selfies. It has already had more than half a million views.

“We have not had good infrastructure up until now, and so it has been very important for tourism operators to warn tourists and to control the traffic to various places,” he says.

Damage compensation

The Icelandic government has been given a wake-up call. A few years ago there were not enough national park wardens, but this has changed. Tourism authorities are working hard to strengthen regulations for how to protect and control traffic to various areas and how to issue fines if rules are broken. 

Nature has suffered, but now there is at least a tool available for stopping problems from arising. Police can now demand compensation for damage resulting from illegal environmental activities.

“I expect us to handle illegal environmental activities far more strictly in future. The government has now understood how important this is,” says Jón Björnsson.

Guðmundur Ingi Guðbrandsson, the Minister for the Environment, thinks Iceland is now in control of tourism’s impact on nature. He says Iceland is investing in viewing spots, toilets and ladders in order to control the traffic and the way visitors interact with nature. The country will now make plans for how tourism and nature will coexist without having a negative impact on the environment. Then there will be a debate on whether the number of visitors to certain areas should be limited.

The climate issue is extremely important to Iceland, while air traffic remains important to Iceland’s largest industry – the tourism sector. The Minister for the Environment believes that the number of foreign visitors might fall, but that they will stay for longer periods of time. Many airlines are also offering CO2 compensation schemes. 

“Air traffic represents a large proportion of the total tourism CO2 footprint. You cannot take a train to Iceland, so we are in a special situation,” he explains.

Reorganising air traffic

The government has already developed a climate policy. Iceland will always be dependent on planes to link to the rest of the world, but the idea is to make greater use of video conferencing in order to reduce the number of flights for civil servants, until the aircraft industry starts using more environmentally friendly fuels. 

“People in general should also think about how necessary it is to travel abroad as often as they do, or whether it might be possible to combine two journeys into one,” says Guðmundur Ingi.

Rannveig at Elding whale safari thinks Icelanders have not been treating nature all that well in the past, but that people are now ready to change the way they think and act. That is why they react so strongly when foreign guests fail to treat nature with respect. She believes that Iceland still has a long list of things that must be done in order to strengthen Iceland as a tourist destination.

“Icelanders are ready to introduce sustainability into the way we treat nature, but we must act faster,” says Rannveig Grétarsdóttir. She proposes to present to the Icelandic population an overview of what the tourism industry entails, to help Icelanders better understand what tourism is all about.

We will be focusing on nature

The tourism boom became a tsunami that engulfed Iceland. There was an uncontrolled flow of tourists, and the population was not prepared for so many guests. Icelanders started feeling the tourists were in their way. Now that tourism is abating, the government and the people can focus on sustainability, waste recycling and making sure the tourism industry uses renewable energy.   

Rannveig Grétarsdóttir believes it is necessary to unite the people in the fight to save the environment, while also achieving a balanced understanding of the tourism industry’s needs.

“In the whale safari business, we always look at how we can develop for the future. We still have to use diesel-powered boats, at least for a while longer. In the meantime we can work on other ways of limiting our company’s impact on nature,” explains Rannveig.

“There are so many things we Icelanders can improve on and work with,” she says.

Icelandic tourism authorities are trying to make tourists take the Icelandic Pledge – with this humouristic list:

• Sustainable tourism in Åland – no Coca-Cola or Norwegian salmon
• Åland: many travellers, far fewer overnighters
• Is overtourism a threat to the Nordics, or can the sector become sustainable?
• Closing down the Faroes to attract more tourists

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My own private Iceland

Tourism has never been “authentic.”

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There’s a place in Iceland where you can see the northern lights any time of year, regardless of the weather. You don’t have to ride a snowmobile into the mountains or rent a glass-roofed igloo. You don’t even need a winter jacket.

Leaning back in my recliner, I gaze upward at the ethereal reds, greens, and blues arcing across the sky, wavering like alien signals, an extraterrestrial message that we don’t know how to decode. I’m struck by their closeness. The bands of color appear right above me, like I could reach out and pass my hand through them.

These northern lights are glowing at 1 p.m. on an 8K resolution screen inside a well-heated IMAX planetarium at Perlan, a natural history museum set on a hill above downtown Reykjavik. Every hour on the hour the planetarium plays Áróra , a 22-minute-long documentary with footage of the lights taken from all over Iceland. The screen’s pixel density is so high that it runs up against the limits of what the human eye can perceive. The digital image might be clearer than reality. It’s definitely more convenient. All you need is a $20 ticket.

Places like Perlan — magnets for visitors and secondary representations of the country’s natural charms — are increasingly a necessity for Iceland, which in recent years has become synonymous with the term “overtourism.” Overtourism is what happens to a place when an avalanche of tourists “changes the quality of life for people who actually live there,” says Andrew Sheivachman, an editor at the travel website Skift, whose 2016 report about Iceland established the term. In other words, Sheivachman says, “a place becomes mainstream.” Iceland has about 300,000 residents, but it received more than 2.3 million overnight visitors last year. Tourists have flooded the island, crashing their camper vans in the wilderness, pooping in the streets of Reykjavik, and eroding the scenic canyon Fjaðrárgljúfur, where Justin Bieber shot a music video in 2015, forcing it to close temporarily. No wonder the museum is safer.

Overtourism also comes with a kind of stigma signified by that word “mainstream.” A reputation for excessive crowds means the tastemaking travel elite actually start avoiding a place, like a too-popular restaurant. “The early-adopter travelers are already onto the next cool, cheap, relatively intact place,” Sheivachman says. Since the Skift article, the term has been widely applied to places like Barcelona, Venice, and Tulum to suggest that no one who’s in the know would want to go there anymore.

Such is the case with Iceland. From 2013 to 2017 the country saw tourist numbers rising more than 20 percent annually, but in 2018 and for projections into the near future, it looks more like 5 percent. There’s a sense that the tourists took all the Instagrams of waterfalls and glaciers they wanted and then left, leaving the Icelandic economy vulnerable. In 2017, 42 percent of the country’s export revenue was tourism, meaning that Iceland’s biggest product, larger than its fishing and aluminum industries, is itself. There are both too many tourists and not enough; Wow Air, one of the major conduits of Icelandic tourism, declared bankruptcy in March after an unsustainable expansion.

While traveling in Iceland this spring to talk to Icelanders about the boom and subsequent slowdown, however, I began to doubt the concept of overtourism itself. The stigma of overtourism is contingent on the sense that a place without as many tourists is more real, more authentic, than it is with them. It poses tourists as foreign entities to a place in the same way that viruses are foreign to the human body. From the visitor’s side, overtourism is also a subjective concern based on a feeling: It’s the point at which your personal narrative of unique experience is broken, the point at which there are too many people — like yourself — who don’t belong in a place.

There are more tourists now than ever before: The World Tourism Organization counted 1.4 billion international tourists in 2018 and predicts 1.8 billion by 2030. In terms of creating new tourists, developing countries are growing the fastest. Even the Icelandic “collapse,” as Bloomberg described it , seems to be more of a pause; Wow Air plans to relaunch late this year. If fully one-fifth of humanity are traveling away from home, then how foreign are tourists, after all? Tourism is not a localized phenomenon that we encounter in crowded piazzas and then leave but an omnipresent condition, like climate change or the internet, that we inhabit all the time. Maybe we need to accept it.

Watching Áróra in Perlan’s theater, I sit in the dark surrounded by empty seats while a disembodied female narrator with an Icelandic accent explains how the various colors of the northern lights come from the vibrations of different atmospheric gases hit by electrons. It strikes me that it doesn’t matter that I’m not seeing the actual northern lights; the season ended just before my arrival anyway. I am here in Iceland — surely that makes it a little more real than seeing it in New York? And besides, I’m not damaging any glaciers or emitting gas fumes. In the era of overtourism, the digital display isn’t just responsible. It’s authentic.

Iceland might be the modern symbol of overtourism, but it was hardly the first or only victim of tourists. The tradition of the Grand Tour started around the 17th century: British nobility would take a spin around the classical sites of the European continent after university, before settling down. Hordes of young men traipsed through Italy, returning with oil portraits of themselves amid castles or ruins to document the journey for their friends back home. In a journal published in 1766 , the Scottish author Tobias Smollett complained of carriages packed with travelers on the Tour route: You “run the risk of being stifled among very indifferent company.” In Rome, Smollett also observed his compatriots acting badly:

“[A] number of raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into contempt: ignorant, petulant, rash, and profligate without any knowledge or experience of their own.”

It’s an 18th-century description of overtourism that’s still applicable today. But now the scale is vast and extreme, a hyperobject of loutishness enabled by cheap flights and social media. Tourists seem to be ruining tourism everywhere. Geographical places have been reduced to disposable trends.

Over the past year, headlines have presented a litany of the absurd ways that we’re wrecking the places we attempt to appreciate. Indonesia’s Komodo Island considered closing because people keep stealing the lizards; Greece’s Santorini posted signs asking visiting Instagrammers to stop trespassing on scenic rooftops; selfie-takers ruined fields of tulips in the Netherlands as well as California’s poppy super bloom ; and Peru instituted timed tickets to Machu Picchu to stop the archaeological site from being trampled into nonexistence.

The crowds can even cause a kind of overtourism rage. Last year, two visitors beat each other up trying to take photos at Rome’s Trevi fountain and local protestors stormed a tourist bus in Barcelona, agitating against the invasion of the city by travelers. Venice, the most tragic victim of overtourism, recently instituted a new entrance tax to compensate for the damage the sinking city suffers; each visitor requires a daily fee of €3 to €10, depending on the expected traffic.

The pace of tourism fads also seems to have accelerated. One year the popular place to go is Berlin, the next it’s Iceland, then Lisbon, Bali, Mexico City, Dubrovnik, or Athens. Suddenly everyone is Instagramming from the same place, reproducing the same cliche images . In part, the speed is because of media, both print and digital. Travel and lifestyle magazines have long sold the dream of the next hot destination, from Conde Nast Traveler and Travel + Leisure to GQ , Vogue , and Monocle . The New York Times’ “ 36 Hours In… ” and “ 52 Places to Go ” series instantly become #goals. Guides published by Eater (also owned by Vox Media), Goop , and the content farm Culture Trip occupy online search results.

These tips expire quickly in the age of overtourism; you have to follow them while the spots are still semi-obscure in order to cash in your cultural capital — before they’re pictured on Tinder profiles above the words “Travel is my life.” Tourism is competitive. “The places where the magazine editors go, they’re quick to turn them into something, then quick to declare them over,” says Colin James Nagy, head of strategy at the agency Fred & Farid and a travel tastemaker himself. “In Tulum, that happened in five years.” New York magazine declared the Mexican beach town “dead” in February 2019. Nagy suggests instead Denmark’s Faroe Islands, Todos Santos in Mexico, and Dakar, Senegal, as up-and-comers. No doubt they’ll be deemed dead soon, too.

The ephemeral trendiness — travel as fast fashion — is part of a structural change in the tourism industry, according to Stanislav Ivanov, professor of tourism economics at Bulgaria’s Varna University of Management. Centuries ago, Grand Tour trips would take up to three years; you could stay in Rome for six to eight weeks alone. In the 20th century, traditional travel agents and tour operators offered pre-packaged trips that encouraged a sense of loyalty to particular places or hospitality brands, which tourists would return to repeatedly. There was less variety and more consistency. But since the 2000s, any traveler can easily use an “online travel agency,” or OTA, like Expedia or Booking.com and visit a new place every holiday. “People are collecting destinations,” Ivanov says. “Loyalty is not toward the hotels or destinations but toward the distributors.”

Plug in your travel dates and an OTA will serve you a long list of possible flights from various carriers, plus bonus car and hotel rentals and activity suggestions. OTAs were once cheaper and considerably smoother than direct booking; many companies have since upgraded their digital services, but the preference for OTAs remains. In the end, the service is less personalized and more automated.

Operating at a massive scale with call centers full of staff who may not know much about a traveler’s destination, OTAs end up serving the same itineraries over and over, according to Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson, the director-general of the Icelandic Tourism Board and a vehement critic of the digital platforms. They create what he calls a “top 10” list effect, reducing a country or city to a series of boxes to check off. OTAs “don’t give a damn about what’s really happening” in a place, Steinarsson says. “They are just shoveling out packages.”

The problem is particularly acute in Iceland because so much of its tourism is routed through packaged bus trips; charting your own route with a rental car is both more expensive and more forbidding due to the weather, terrain, and not-insignificant chance of, say, getting stuck in a river . So visitors are most likely to succumb to convenience and take a spin around the Golden Circle, a 190-mile loop through the southern uplands that features the geysers, waterfalls, and rocky cliffs that everyone posts on Instagram or Facebook — the same spots that are sustaining the most damage. “If you go to Iceland, you have to do that list. ‘Go onto our site, it’s on the front screen, just take out your credit card, pay, get it over with, and start enjoying,’” Steinarsson says. “How deep do you have to dig before you start seeing places that would really be something special?”

Where we go and how we get there are increasingly influenced by a series of digital platforms — not just big OTAs, but Airbnb, Yelp, and Instagram — that prioritize engagement over originality. Overtourism is a consequence, not a cause. The more often a particular destination or package proves successful, the more users a site’s algorithm will drive to it, intensifying the problem by pushing travelers to have the same experiences as one another on a single beaten track around the globe, updated and optimized in real time. When one spot gets too crowded and its novelty used up, the next is slotted into its place.

For my trip, I decide to take the path of least resistance, relying on OTAs and recommendation sites to tell me exactly what to do — a tourist experience as well as an experience of tourism. It is indeed frictionless. I book an apartment in downtown Reykjavik through Airbnb and day-trips through Arctic Adventures, a local OTA. I buy tickets for a tour of Game of Thrones shooting locations and a day-long Golden Circle trip that hits all the main spectacles. Every activity seems to be rated 4.5 stars out of 5 or above. Weeks before my Icelandair flight, I’m algorithmically bombarded on YouTube by hypnotic pre-roll ads for the northern lights.

On the plane, I’m forced to watch a three-minute trailer for Iceland before I can even access the entertainment system. The flight map shows me why the country is such a tourism target. The frozen ovoid island is like a period in a chain of ellipses linking North America to the United Kingdom, Europe, and Scandinavia, making it a perfect stopover point. Iceland has no native inhabitants; in a sense, everyone has been a tourist since Norwegian and Swedish Viking sailors started accidentally landing there in the ninth century and settled when they found out the summer wasn’t so bad. Anything that exists on the island is a result of its visitors, making it difficult to determine where the “real” Iceland ends and where tourism begins.

Almost every flight passes through Keflavik airport outside Reykjavik, by far the largest city, which functions like a fire hose, spitting out tourists. Icelandair has been offering free layovers through Keflavik since 1955 but only began marketing them aggressively in 1996 as it added destinations in North America, branding the country as a quick drop-in. The 2000s brought marketing campaigns including one with the euphemistic slogan “ Fancy a dirty weekend in Iceland? ” showing a photo of a couple with geothermal-bath mud on their faces.

In 2008, the financial crisis sunk Iceland’s previously expensive currency, which was terrible for Icelanders but great for tourism — the income from added visitors sped up economic recovery. “People were flocking there because it has a very high standard of living, it’s very beautiful, and now you could get it for one-third of the price,” Michael Raucheisen, Icelandair’s US-based communications manager for North America, tells me. Raucheisen, who flew Icelandair with his German father as a child, has worked at the company for two decades. “Nineteen years ago, people had no idea where Iceland was,” he says. “They thought Icelandair was an air-conditioning company.”

Iceland is also located on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, the crack between the North American and Eurasian tectonic plates, making it one of the most volcanic spots on earth. Beginning in the early 1900s, Icelanders harnessed this energy as geothermal and hydropower for heat and electricity, making it much more comfortable than in chilly centuries past. Ninety-nine percent of the primary energy use in Iceland now comes from local renewable sources. The countryside is dotted with natural hot springs and futuristic power plants, all gently leaking steam. The place is a planetary Juul. (Reykjavik’s name, given in 874, means “smoke cove.”)

A volcano was in fact the biggest spark for the tourism boom. In April 2010, Eyjafjallajökull erupted, grounding more European flights than at any time since World War II, though in Iceland its impact was limited to the evacuation of a few farms and about 800 people . The eruption put maps and videos of Iceland on primetime TV news around the world, which amounted to free advertising. “Even during the volcano, the rest of Iceland was clean and beautiful. It was like, ‘Oh, it’s there, I didn’t know that,’” says Inga Hlín Pálsdóttir, the cheerful director of the tourism initiative Visit Iceland. The eruption happened, by chance, just as Pálsdóttir was helping to launch the country’s biggest tourism marketing push yet. “It was basically crisis communication,” she says. Several weeks of her life blurred together, but the campaign succeeded.

Iceland became a year-round destination, not just the warm months. Summer had been peak season; now, more tourists come for winter and the “shoulder seasons” between peak and off-peak, thanks in part to marketing campaigns highlighting the northern lights, festivals, and outdoor activities. American tourists gradually surpassed the German and French groups that traditionally came for long hiking trips. Tourists from Asia are now the fastest-growing demographic.

My first stop after Keflavik is the Blue Lagoon, a short, sparsely filled bus ride away. It’s recognizable from photos: a luminous pool of bright-blue water, like an aqueous latte, set amid jagged black volcanic rocks. But rather than the idyllic natural hot spring it resembles on Instagram, it’s actually a kind of giant artificial bathtub filled with wastewater from a nearby geothermal power plant. The Svartsengi power plant opened in 1976 and its superheated liquid and steam bubbled up through the surrounding lava field; one psoriasis patient bathed in it and saw an improvement and thus a business began.

Blue Lagoon built a cement-bottomed pool that spreads out in a faux-organic layout and a clutch of modernist spa buildings. In 2017, the site accommodated 1.2 million visitors who buy timed entrance tickets and pay extra for bathrobes and drinks at the lagoon’s float-up bar. “Can you imagine how many people have sex in it?” the Icelandic politician Birgitta Jonsdottir later asks me. The 240°C water that gets pumped from deep underground is so mineral-heavy, however, that no bacteria can survive, even after it gets cooled down to bathing temperature for visitors to soak in.

I get a wristband for locker access and cash-free payments then make my way through the bustling locker rooms. Guards in all-black uniforms yell at guests for not showering nude and scrubbing down according to Icelandic hygiene, helpfully illustrated by explicit diagrams. The hot water is a fast cure for my jet lag but the lagoon feels like a crowded hot tub. The first thing I notice after I get a plastic goblet of prosecco and smear my face with some local silica — filtered out of seawater by precipitation and served up in a bucket — is just how international the crowd is. An Indian family snaps selfies, holding each other’s drinks. A German man asks me to take a photo of his friend and send it to him, maybe because I had followed the advice of travel blogs and squeezed my phone into a nerdy waterproof bag strung around my neck. I hear as much Chinese as English.

An American man floating by declaims to his friends, “Can you imagine if we built a concept like this in Las Vegas?” And that’s exactly what the Blue Lagoon is: a concept, a playground-Iceland that can be consumed at will, something packaged and branded as representative of the place despite its artificiality. (One Trip Advisor review deems it “ expensive and fake .”)

The rest of the resort follows the same logic. When I begin feeling like a wobbly sous-vide egg I wade out of the water, shower again, and go inside for my reservation at Lava, an upscale restaurant where one wall is polished lava-rock and two others are floor-to-ceiling glass. Guests in the same white robes as mine dot the tables like hospital patients in a waiting room. I order the $50 two-course set menu that features local lamb. It tastes transcendentally gamey and like nowhere else on Earth, literally, because Icelandic sheep were first brought to the island 1,000 years ago and left alone to evolve in uniquely delicious ways.

The condition of overtourism pressures places to become commodities in the global marketplace the same way we warp our lifestyles to attract Instagram “Likes.” “You have to compete as a brand,” Pálsdóttir tells me. Countries and cities must constantly perform their identities in order to maintain the flow of tourists.

Icelandic tourism is a paradox. Visitors might outnumber locals, but the place must take care to preserve the brand of lonely natural grandeur that has become its product, offered up like a dish of roast lamb belly. The maintenance of this image is its own kind of artificiality. Fun fact: If an Icelandic horse ever leaves the island, it isn’t allowed to come back.

My Reykjavik Airbnb was listed on the website as a penthouse, but that’s not hard to achieve when few buildings are more than three stories tall. It’s polished and pleasantly anonymous without lacking personality entirely; above the TV there’s a giant photo print of the Brooklyn Bridge. From the balcony on one side I can see the white specter of Snæfellsjökull, a glacier-capped stratovolcano, across the chilled blue of Faxa Bay. On the other is downtown Reykjavik, like an overgrown ski town, with the skeletons of new hotels and high-rise glassy condos under construction on the outskirts.

Though Airbnb initially helped the growth of Icelandic tourism by housing visitors while development was only in planning, the government instituted a new regulation in January 2017 limiting most short-term rentals to 90 days a year; more than that and the owners need special certification. My place clearly falls into the latter category, since the owner rents out the building’s two penthouse apartments full-time and lives in a unit below them. The apartment is on a quieter stretch of the main shopping strip, Laugavegur, sprinkled with storefronts selling outdoor gear, souvenir puffin dolls, and Viking kitsch. It’s easy to tell tourists apart from the locals because they wear brightly colored Gore-Tex coats despite the relative warmth, and wander aimlessly, unsure of where they’re going. When I go out I try to wear a casual jacket and carry a tote bag instead of a backpack, wanting, illogically, to be disguised.

These days, Reykjavik is full of the kinds of signifiers that mark an “authentic” travel experience, at least according to the influencer set: artisanal coffee shops like Reykjavik Roasters, locavore restaurants like Skál, and shops with names like “Nomad.store” selling minimalist coffee-table books and scented candles. None of these things are bad, necessarily, but they’re also not particularly local to Iceland in the first place. Unlike Paris, for example, where the centuries-old urban culture is what attracts visitors, Reykjavik developed in tandem with tourism.

“I grew up in the city center and I remember the streets used to be empty. It was a small fraction of the cafes and restaurants you have now,” says Karen María Jónsdóttir, at the time the director of Visit Reykjavik, the marketing office for the city. We’re sitting in The Coocoo’s Nest, a homey farm-to-table bar-slash-restaurant in the harbor neighborhood, where old fishermen’s supply sheds are being turned into boutiques and food halls in a familiar flavor of industrial gentrification. We drink two fashionably non-alcoholic lemonade cocktails at the wood bar. Icelanders used to only go out on the weekends and shop at outlet malls outside the city; now things are open all week long. “You need a certain mass of people to [sustain] a selection of good restaurants and services for everybody,” Jónsdóttir says. “We all want the services but then we complain about the people using them.”

Gunnar Jóhannesson, a professor at the University of Iceland who studies tourism, tells me about a recent survey: the closer to the center of Reykjavik, the more positive locals are in their perception of tourists. We need to “re-humanize tourists and tourism,” Johannesson says. “It’s important to stop thinking about tourism as the other and realize that we are also tourists. Tourism is part of our society.” (After all, whenever Icelanders leave their small island, they’re tourists too: According to data sent to me by Visit Iceland, 83 percent of Icelanders traveled abroad for vacation in 2018.) There’s a “standardization” that follows global travel, the professor says, a wave of generically luxurious cafes, hotels, and food halls. “Maybe it’s a bit comforting. It shows that people like the same things.”

Perhaps the problem isn’t the actual tourists but the way that some people — international entrepreneurs and developers in particular — profit from the tourism industry while others don’t. In other words, extractive capitalism is at fault, causing gentrification and displacement. “When tourism grows out of proportion, when it starts to be based on and motivated by international capital but not the community’s values, then we might have a problem,” Johannesson says. “I don’t think it has gotten to that point in Iceland, but it easily can get there.” Of course, it’s easier to say that on an island with plenty of extant empty space than at a Barcelona market so crowded with people Instagramming produce that residents can’t actually shop there.

Whether the balance has already tipped in favor of capital depends on who you ask. One evening I open Yelp and search the city for natural wine bars , which are the latest international hipster shibboleth and the 2010s update to Thomas Friedman’s Golden Arches Theory of peace-via-globalization: Instead of McDonald’s, no two countries with natural wine bars will ever go to war with each other. I head to Port 9, down the alleyway of a residential complex. It’s a faux-industrial space with raw cement walls, hanging pendant lamps, and plush green-velvet banquettes, like every other cool bar . A piece by minimalist composer Steve Reich is playing. Wine connoisseurship is itself a recent import in Iceland; the country had a form of alcohol prohibition from 1915 to 1989, and beer is far more popular.

Sitting at the bar are two young men swirling glasses with the bartender. They are both musicians and graduate students in the whimsical, long-term manner enabled by Nordic socialism. They both recently moved back from Berlin, nostalgic for the Icelandic summer and nature in general. Markus Sigur Bjornsson is wiry and wry, dressed in streetwear, while Thorsteinn Eyfjord is taller, neck-scarved and more formal in manner. We discuss the state of the country over a funky Italian red pulled from under the bar. Bjornsson says he might not have ever left his home if it weren’t for exposure to tourists showing him that an outside world existed (Iceland is 93 percent Icelandic; the second largest demographic is Polish at 3 percent). “The tourism bubble, in 20 years we can look back and think, okay, this did more positive than negative to our society,” he says. In fact, as Elvar Orri Hreinsson, a research analyst at the Bank of Iceland, tells me, Iceland is more financially secure now than it used to be, even with the slowdown: The economy is more diversified, the central bank holds a large currency reserve, and foreign investors are more interested than ever.

Eyfjord is more pessimistic. Like most millennials, he feels a looming generational burden. If the bubble bursts, “we will have to take the blame and build up society again,” he says. But he has a plan. Without tourists, there will be a lot of empty hotels and Airbnbs. “I hope there will come a wave of squatting and the young people and artists will take over.” The spaces could be turned into affordable housing, art studios, and startup offices. “Then at least I can live alone without having to have help from my parents.”

The rise of isolationist nationalism might slow it and climate change, accelerated by every plane flight, will change its targets, but as a global growth industry tourism doesn’t seem likely to stop. We can’t return to a time when overtourism didn’t exist, and the desire to do so is as problematic as the concept of overtourism itself: there’s prejudice at work when wealthy, white Westerners have been tourists, if not colonizers, for centuries, but now that the rest of the world is joining in, it’s cast as excessive. Rather, the task left to us is to imagine a post-overtourism world in which we can all participate in and benefit from the human flow.

I meet Birgitta Jónsdóttir, the 52-year-old former Icelandic Parliamentarian and onetime friend of Julian Assange, in a Fleetwood Mac-soundtracked hostel cafe that she suggests near her apartment in a quieter area east of downtown. Across the street, children bounce on a trampoline. As the former face of Iceland’s Pirate Party, a loose, global coalition of digital freedom activists that was the most popular political party in the country between 2015 and 2016, Jonsdottir is something of a celebrity. Icelandic style is usually sober; she has purple-tinged eyelashes, iridescent nails, dyed-blonde hair, and a set of chunky, biomorphic rings, a contrast to her anonymous black winter jacket.

While in Parliament, she tried to pass a bill that would tax new hotels and direct the funds toward Reykjavik itself but was stymied “because people in the countryside wanted their share of it,” she says. The funding would fight what she calls the “Disneyfication” of Reykjavik as well as help safeguard the area’s natural sites. “A lot of places I hold sacred in nature, places I would go to get some energy, there are so many people, so noisy, so disrespectful to the space they’re in, that I don’t go there anymore. I just get very upset,” she says. “You do not become sympathetic to other people’s cultures just tracking through it like a horde of oxen.”

She thinks we might need a different kind of tourism altogether. Rather than her old favorite spots that are now overrun, these days Jonsdottir prefers exploring her own backyard garden, a choice that’s both quieter and less damaging. She plants potatoes, like her family did in the village where she grew up. “I have a different experience every day because of the weather and the way the plants grow,” she says. “Look at the crisis we’re in with our planet. It’s time that people go on trips in their own area and say goodbye to the diversity that is there.”

There’s a blank-slate quality to Iceland, extending to the freshness of the air itself. The place has spun stories around itself since the Vikings wrote down their Sagas, tales of family lineages and heroic deeds, in the 12th century — some of which went on to inspire a novelist named George R.R. Martin. The landscape has had many things projected upon it. “There are different layers to the fantasy of Iceland,” the Icelandic novelist Andri Magnason tells me over dinner at Snaps, an old-school French bistro beloved by locals down the street from Hallgrímskirkja, the wave-like, expressionist church that is one of Reykjavik’s best-known symbols. “The Sagas are one layer, Game of Thrones is another layer, maybe the economy is another.”

The fantasy can be the attraction. Early one morning I climb onto a coach bus familiar from childhood field trips for an eight-hour tour of Game of Thrones shooting locations. In the front of the bus sits our bearded guide, Theo Hansson, who is wearing a Night’s Watch outfit complete with faux-fur cape, drinking horn on his belt loop (I watch him fill it with coffee), and two actual swords, his long hair tied back with a bandana. Hansson explains that he worked as an extra on the show in various seasons playing a Watchman, an undead wight, and a wildling, braving thin costumes, recalcitrant horses, and very bad weather. Hansson speaks in a deep growl that’s half Hound rumble and half Littlefinger hiss; I assume it’s a put-on until he later speaks on the phone the same way, his voice shot from a day of narration. A Reykjavik native, in Hansson’s off-time he is an academic studying Viking history at the University of Iceland.

“I really, really hate tourists,” Hansson growls with feeling. “But you guys aren’t tourists. You’re Game of Thrones enthusiasts.” The tour happens the day after the finale of the television show, which I had stayed up very late Iceland time to watch, using a proxy to access American HBO. I’m the only one in the group to have done so, and so no one else is massively disappointed yet. I’m jealous.

On the bus are two-dozen other tourists, mostly American, including John and Marsha, an older couple from Buffalo, New York. They booked a free stopover through an OTA when it popped up as an option on their flights back home from Copenhagen, following a long cruise. “We never even thought of Iceland. I couldn’t even spell Reykjavik,” Marsha tells me. But it turned out their neighbor had just visited and loved it, then a woman they met on the Copenhagen flight suggested this specific tour. Marsha says she wishes they had planned to stay for a day longer.

Hansson swears a lot, tells repeated ex-girlfriend jokes, and puns incessantly. He’s had the gig since 2016. “This used to be a normal tour, then it became an R-rated tour,” he says. His humor has offended some groups, especially Germans, but his boss has been on the tour and loved it. In between anecdotes, we make our stops, like Thingvellir, where Vikings established Iceland’s first parliamentary government, the Althing, in the 10th century, in a ravine-ridden field where the earth is actively splitting apart. It’s also where Game of Thrones shot the Bloody Gate, an elaborate tiered guardhouse outside of the Eyrie castle, in season four. Hansson holds up laminated screenshots from the show that he printed out himself so that we can see the precise camera angle and observe that reality conforms to the image, except, of course, for the missing CGI gate. We ooh and aah.

Westeros is not a real place. Even the northern parts of the show were shot between Iceland, Scotland, and Ireland then spliced together as if they were contiguous. But we are tourists of the fiction regardless. Hansson brings us to Þjóðveldisbærinn Stöng, a replica of a Viking-era farm on a hilltop, where the show shot a Wildling raid. Hansson was in the scene; his job was to chase down a 6-year-old child. “I just kept stabbing her again and again and again. It was marvelous,” he says. Then he selects a volunteer from the audience and proceeds to demonstrate the stage-stabbing technique.

I drift away from the group and lean up against the grassy sod that covers the entire structure of the farmhouse to insulate it from the weather and cold. It starts to rain, but the grass shields me just enough so that I can look out into the gray mist over the surreal landscape, which stretches and pitches into hills and valleys like a skate park for giants. I feel briefly connected to some universal sentiment: the authentic dreariness of the Vikings and the Game of Thrones villagers alike.

My Golden Circle tour is more prosaic. I climb aboard another bus, this time filled with a group of quiet Norwegians and a single American family with two rambunctious kids; I’m the only solo traveler. Emil, the tour guide, has an affectless storytelling style, like a podcast of Wikipedia entries, much less appealing than Hansson’s profane patter. Whenever we stop, he seems more interested in talking to our otherwise silent driver, whose name he says is Gummy Bear, than explaining anything. On the itinerary is Thingvellir again, sans CGI; Geysir, the much-photographed clutch of geysers on a hillside; Gullfoss, an iconic waterfall; and the Secret Lagoon, a not-so-secret geothermal spring whose ironic slogan is “We Kept It Unique for You.”

Geysir actually refers to the single Great Geyser, but that one only erupts around earthquakes. The star of the show is Strokkur (Icelandic for “churn”), which explodes every 10 minutes or so, causing a great gasp from the assembled visitors. Rings of tourists face backward and lean over the boiling-hot water in order to take possibly fatal selfies. Footprints mark a trodden path in the muddy hill that winds around each pool.

More than a natural wonder, it’s now something of a highway rest-stop, grandiose in its attempt to cater to tourists. On the other side of the road from the geysers is a sprawling visitor center, featuring a huge store selling clothing from the brand Geysir, one of Iceland’s most recognizable fashion labels, named after the place itself. The food court offers pizza as well as fish and chips readymade under heat lamps. Next door is a newly developed spa hotel, geyser-themed. Compared to the infrastructure, the waterworks themselves seem even smaller and less remarkable. I recall Markus Bjornsson, the student in the wine bar: “If you’ve seen one geyser, you’ve seen them all.”

Gullfoss — Golden Falls — is a mammoth crack in the earth through which runs 140 cubic meters of water per second. The gathered force is like a nuclear bomb but all the time. There were attempts to turn the falls into a hydroelectric power plant, but the story goes that the daughter of one of the farmers who own the land mounted a charismatic protest and saved it. Now there’s a beaten trail with staircases and handrails along the lip of the canyon where we could look down and take photos. Patches of grass that draw even closer to the edge are blocked off with signs. (“If you fall over, it’s impossible to find you, you’re just gone,” Skarphéðinn Berg Steinarsson of the ITB tells me.) We stand with our phones in front of our faces, the surging water too massive to consider as reality, as anything other than a picture that we can save to show friends later, shorn of its existential dread. I think of Don DeLillo’s description of “the most photographed barn in America” in his novel White Noise : “No one sees the barn.”

In the face of overtourism, I want to make an argument for the inauthentic. Not just the spots flooded with tourists but the simulations and the fictions, the ways that the world of tourism supersedes reality and becomes its own space. It is made up of the digital northern lights on an 8K movie screen, the manmade turquoise geothermal baths, and the computer renderings of high-budget television shows overlaid on the earth. I don’t regret any of these activities; in fact, the less authentic an experience was supposed to be in Iceland, the more fun I had and the more aware I was of the consequences of 21st-century travel.

This is not to discount the charm of hiking an empty mountain or the very real damage that tourists cause, disrupting lives and often intensifying local inequality. But maybe by reclaiming these experiences, or destigmatizing them, we can also begin regaining our agency over the rampant commodification of places and people. We can travel to see what exists instead of wishing for some mythical untouched state, the dream of a place prepared perfectly for visitors and yet empty of them. Instead of trying to “ live like a local ,” as Airbnb commands, we can just be tourists. When a destination is deemed dead might be the best time to go there, as the most accurate reflection of our impure world.

Back at my Airbnb, I call Theo Hansson to see what he thought of the end of Game of Thrones . He was, like me, dissatisfied. “I’m very glad I was not a part of the last season. It would have soured everything,” he says. He doesn’t expect his gig to last forever. In 2016, “I was doing groups of 40 or 50 people to 100 people. It’s gotten a lot less,” he tells me in a low, hoarse rumble. “I’m expecting maybe two years more of this. The engine is going to fade.” Game of Thrones will drift away like the other narratives, maybe faster than slower.

Hansson’s other sideline, making use of his academic background, is being a Viking reenactor. He’s in a group of 200 people, not just born-and-bred Icelanders, who train in sword-fighting, archery, and crafts. They camp out for a week at a time, wearing period-correct clothing and sleeping in Viking tents based on archaeological discoveries. They fight, cook food over open fires, and get very drunk.

This is what refreshes him, participating in the illusion of another life, which is the same thing that we’re always seeking when we travel: to get outside of ourselves and imagine new possibilities, however unlikely or unreal they are. Iceland remains ideal for this purpose. “It’s what fantasies are made of,” Hansson says. “This untamed wild, this alien landscape, this vastness.”

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What Worries Iceland? A World Without Ice. It Is Preparing.

As rising temperatures drastically reshape Iceland’s landscape, businesses and the government are spending millions for survival and profit.

A melting glacier in Iceland. Glaciers occupy over a tenth of this famously frigid island near the Arctic Circle. Credit... Suzie Howell for The New York Times

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By Liz Alderman

• Aug. 9, 2019

HÖFN, Iceland — From the offices of the fishing operation founded by his family two generations ago, Adalsteinn Ingólfsson has watched the massive Vatnajökull glacier shrink year after year. Rising temperatures have already winnowed the types of fish he can catch. But the wilting ice mass, Iceland’s largest, is a strange new challenge to business.

“The glacier is melting so much that the land is rising from the sea,” said Mr. Ingólfsson, the chief executive of Skinney-Thinganes , one of Iceland’s biggest fishing companies. “It’s harder to get our biggest trawlers in and out of the harbor. And if something goes wrong with the weather, the port is closed off completely.”

A warmer climate isn’t affecting just Höfn, where the waning weight of Vatnajökull on the earth’s crust is draining fjords and shifting underground sediment, twisting the town’s sewer pipes. As temperatures rise across the Arctic nearly faster than any place on the planet, all of Iceland is grappling with the prospect of a future with no ice.

[In Scandinavia, climate change is leading entrepreneurs to invest in wineries.]

Energy producers are upgrading hydroelectric power plants and experimenting with burying carbon dioxide in rock , to keep it out of the atmosphere. Proposals are being floated for a new port in Finnafjord , now a barren landscape in the east, to capitalize on potential cargo traffic as shipping companies in China, Russia and Arctic nations vie to open routes through the melting ice. The fishing industry is slashing fossil fuel use with energy-efficient ships.

Glaciers occupy over a tenth of this famously frigid island near the Arctic Circle. Every single one is melting . So are the massive, centuries-old ice sheets of Greenland and the polar regions. Where other countries face rising seas, Iceland is confronting a rise in land in its southernmost regions, and considers the changing landscape and climate a matter of national urgency.

When Europe suffered record-breaking heat in July, Iceland’s capital, Reykjavik, clocked its highest temperatures ever. Iceland’s economy is on the cusp of a recession , partly because an important export, the capelin fish, vanished this year in search of colder waters. This week, the United Nations warned that the world’s land and water resources are being exploited at an unprecedented rate.

“Climate change is no longer something to be joked about in Iceland or anywhere,” Gudni Jóhannesson, Iceland’s president, said in an interview, adding that most Icelanders believe human activity plays a role. “We realize the harmful effects of global warming,” he said. “We are taking responsibility to seek practical solutions. But we can do better.”

The country elected an environmentalist, Katrín Jakobsdóttir, as prime minister in 2017 on a platform of tackling climate change. Her government is budgeting $55 million over five years for reforestation, land conservation and carbon-free transport projects to slash greenhouse gas emissions . More will be spent by 2040, when Iceland expects businesses, organizations and individuals to be removing as much carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they put in.

Environmental activists say that still isn’t enough to make Iceland, a wealthy nation of just 350,000 people, a model. Despite generating clean geothermal energy and hydropower, major industries including aluminum and ferrosilicon production also produce a third of Iceland’s carbon dioxide. Tourism, now the engine of growth after a banking collapse in 2008, has flourished with warmer weather but added to Iceland’s climate woes as planes packing millions of visitors push per capita carbon dioxide emissions above that of every country i n Europe.

Bigger nations like Norway and Finland have cut emissions more, and over 190 other countries except the United States have pledged to combat climate change under the Paris agreement. But with the impact in Iceland more visible than in other nations, it is doing what it can — while trying to turn the warming climate into an economic advantage.

“Let’s look at practical solutions instead of being filled with despair,” Mr. Jóhannesson said.

Ólafur Eggertsson, a farmer, has been anticipating how to tame the wilds of his new environment. On a sunny day, he pointed to a sparkling glacier sprawled thinly atop the nearby Eyjafjallajökull volcano on Iceland’s southern rim. Eyjafjallajökull erupted spectacularly in 2010, snarling European air traffic and raining ash over the Thorvaldseyri farm run by his family since 1906. But even before that, the glacier had been visibly retreating, and far faster than when his father and grandfather worked the land.

That alarms him, he said, because glaciers keep volcanoes cool. Scientists predict more eruptions in the coming century as the glaciers melt. Mr. Eggertsson is working to make the farm carbon neutral to prevent more warming, by transforming it from a mainly dairy operation to an 160-acre estate with barley and rapeseed fields — crops that couldn’t grow in the cold climate 50 years ago.

He is converting the rapeseed to biofuel. And Mr. Eggertsson, who plans to ramp up his 364,000-euro investment in the crop business in coming years, is hoping that Iceland’s farmers will one day grow enough barley to avoid importing it on polluting ships and planes.

“Sometimes what I’m doing feels like a drop in the ocean,” Mr. Eggertsson said, pulling handfuls of barley from the soil. “But humans are contributing to warming. I have no choice but to act.”

Others are finding deals in the demand from companies and people eager to offset their carbon footprint. Near Mr. Eggertsson’s farm, Reynir Kristinsson this year planted 200,000 native birch trees on 700 acres of volcanic flatland that his nongovernmental organization, Kolvidur , leases from the state.

More than a million trees have been purchased by Icelandic companies and foreign ones like Ikea since 2010. Mr. Kristinsson is negotiating with Isavia, Iceland’s airport operator, in hopes of crafting a deal to plant trees for every tourist and Icelander who flies in and out of the island, and is bidding to lease 12,000 more acres, forecasting “exponential growth.”

Some companies are just trying “to green wash” their image, Mr. Kristinsson acknowledged. But as consumers demand transparency, businesses are more serious about protecting the environment and know they have to spend substantial money toward battling the changes. “If they don’t show they’re acting responsibly, they will lose clients,” he said.

Yet most of Iceland’s volcanic terrain is deforested , and it will take decades for newly planted trees to absorb carbon at a large scale. Trees are certainly not a fast fix for Iceland’s glaciers, which scientists say now can no longer recover the ice they are losing.

That includes Vatnajökull, which once stretched over more than a tenth of Iceland and now covers 8 percent of this 40,000-square mile island. Named a Unesco World Heritage site in June, it is shrinking by a length of nearly three football fields a year in some places.

In Höfn, Mr. Ingólfsson’s business has been thwarted by the change. While the land here has risen nearly 20 inches since the 1930s, in the last decade alone, it has floated four inches above sea level. It is forecast to rise as much as six feet in the coming century, according to the Icelandic Meteorological Office.

That new land is preventing Mr. Ingólfsson from acquiring bigger-capacity trawlers that his competitors use. HB Grandi, a Reykjavik-based rival that is one of Iceland’s largest fishing companies, has invested in enormous super-trawlers that use less fossil fuel and allow for a larger catch. This year, cold water capelin can’t be found. But mackerel are now swimming in the warmer currents around Iceland, and the value of the catch has risen noticeably.

Such investment — which also translates into smaller fleets — is running through Iceland’s fishing industry, and fits a national strategy to reduce carbon emissions that contribute to ocean acidification and harm fish. The transformation is important and strategic: Fish account for 39 percent of Iceland’s exports .

Mr. Ingólfsson’s trawlers can now move in and out only at high tide, and his business suffers for that. Last winter, two were stuck outside the harbor when a storm hit, he said, forcing the catch to be offloaded at another factory on the east coast, leaving scores of workers at his Höfn plant idle.

“Unless we find a solution,” he said, “things will just get worse.”

Glacial melting is also expected to oversaturate watersheds in the next century, and scientists predict that they then will dry up, forcing energy producers to adapt. Landsvirkjun , the state-run energy company, which generates three-quarters of Iceland’s power, is building room for additional water turbines at its dams. It is also building new capacity for wind turbines to operate when the glaciers die.

“From a design perspective, we’re taking into account what will happen in the next 50 to 100 years,” said Óli Grétar Blondal Sveinsson, the executive vice president for research and development. “There will be no glaciers,” he said flatly.

That prospect has jolted Icelanders — and some visitors — to a realization that they are witnessing a treasure vanish. Steinthór Arnarson, 36, quit his job as a lawyer three years ago to open a tour business at the Fjallsárlón lagoon, employing 20. He takes visitors on inflatable boats around iceberg-studded waters that barely existed two decades ago.

A native of the area, he recalled the lake’s being a fraction of its current size when he was a teenager. When he returned in 2012, the Vatnajökull outlet here had melted so much that the lagoon had grown a mile wide, and thundering rivers nearby had shifted course.

Many of the 200 tourists who visit daily want to see Vatnajökull before it disappears, Mr. Arnarson said.

“People are stunned by the glacier’s beauty and feel like me,” he said, gazing at the 130-foot-high wall of blue ice soaring from the water.

“It’s nice to see a piece of it break off,” he said. “But it’s really sad.”

Egill Bjarnason contributed reporting.

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Iceland and the Trials of 21st Century Tourism

Once, iceland’s top industry was fishing. then, heavy industry took over. now, tourism drives economic growth in iceland. what are the challenges that increased tourism creates for a unique nation like iceland.

Foreword: The Coming Perils of Overtourism

As Skift enters its fifth year , we are going wider with our coverage of the global travel industry and its effect on the world. The original promise of Skift — the first line in the first-ever business deck we created — was “Travel intersects with every sector in the world from local, national, state, and foreign policy to design, branding, marketing and more.”

As part of that promise, we are starting a series of deep dives into destinations, as a mirror to the larger changes that are happening around the world due to the democratization of global travel over the last two decades.

We are coining a new term, “ Overtourism ”, as a new construct to look at potential hazards to popular destinations worldwide, as the dynamic forces that power tourism often inflict unavoidable negative consequences if not managed well. In some countries, this can lead to a decline in tourism as a sustainable framework is never put into place for coping with the economic, environmental, and sociocultural effects of tourism. The impact on local residents cannot be understated either.

As the world moves towards two billion travelers worldwide in the next few years, are countries and their infrastructure ready for the deluge? Are the people and their cultures resilient enough to withstand the flood of overtourism?

When Skift took the team to Iceland in early summer of 2014, we wrote a story after about how “Iceland is the perfect crucible of a lot of global travel trends we cover on a daily basis on Skift, converging in the tiny country in so many ways over the last few years.”

And converging they are in a big way.

Iceland’s recovery from the depths of the 2008 financial crisis has been remarkable, and is built on the back of an explosive growth in tourism. From 2009 onwards, its tourist growth has been a hockey curve, and now a population of 350,000 residents will welcome about 1.6 million tourists this year.

In 2016, we wanted to look at Iceland as a mirror to the larger changes that happen in a destination when the democratization of global travel meets the willingness of destinations to make tourism as the growth engine of their region.

The Skift investigation explores the problems: beginning with gateway problems at its primary airport, to hotel infrastructure, to Airbnb running rampant, to too many tourists with too little understanding of the ecological fragility of the country, to climate change and tourism’s effect on it, to too few trained tourism professionals in the country, to tour operators feeling the burden, to pressure on understaffed local police, to hollowing out of Reykjavik's downtown, to early signs of locals resenting tourists, and more.

If a first-world country like Iceland is having trouble with figuring out the solutions, what hope do countries like Cuba or Burma have?

That’s the lens we are putting on this long deep dive below, with lessons for everyone in the travel and tourism industry, city and regional planners, and the larger support ecosystem.

— Rafat Ali, Founder & CEO, Skift

Introduction

In Norse culture, there is a saying: Sjaldan er ein báran stök. There is seldom a single wave.

The island nation of Iceland, which is roughly the size of Portugal and located about 1,100 miles northwest of London, is a flashpoint for the encroaching forces of tourism and globalization.

When the global financial meltdown hit Iceland in 2008, it unleashed a series of devastating consequences: an unprecedented banking crisis, a housing market collapse, and increased unemployment. Iceland’s currency plummeted in value and thousands in export-heavy jobs were put out of work.

Iceland’s natural beauty, and the character of its people, had always been attractive to travelers. Now, both bargain-seeking adventurers and wealthy vacationers looking to cross Iceland off their bucket list can visit.

Tourism in Iceland increased from 18.8 percent of the country’s foreign exchange earnings in 2010 to 31 percent in 2015. Those are some staggering hot-startup-like growth rates. Especially for a country.

Over the same period, tourism surpassed both fishing and aluminum production to become Iceland’s top industry.

In many respects, tourism has saved Iceland from economic hardship and provided the country a solid platform to regrow its economy. The influx of tourists, however, represents something ominous to some native Icelanders.

Iceland’s infrastructure, particularly the network of roads that cut across the island’s mountainous terrain, is in dire need of renovation as an increasing number of tour buses hit the roads each day.

The country’s most popular natural landmarks are under threat from the environmental impact of more tourists visiting during the winter months.

The economic focus on catering to tourists has taken a cultural toll on the country, as well.

While global travel trends have converged in Iceland, travel has also brought the country its share of unprecedented troubles.

In June, Skift went to Iceland for a week-long reporting trip and spoke to more than a dozen leaders and players in tourism, from the man who runs Iceland’s most popular tourist destination to Airbnb superhosts building businesses due to the lack of available hotel rooms in Reykjavik.

Here is our deep dive.

Before You Go

When a small country experiences a tourism boom, it always has unforeseen consequences for both the country’s residents and its natural environment.

Even if putting Iceland on everyone’s mind involved a giant volcano eruption that stopped the world for a few weeks in spring of 2010, Iceland’s growth as a tourist destination since, however, is no mistake or happy accident, according to the nation’s top travel industry stakeholders.

In late 2008, the Icelandic financial system underwent a severe contraction after all three major private banks in the country defaulted on their debt. As Iceland’s banking system collapsed and stock market plummeted, the country entered a depression that would officially end in 2010.

Iceland’s currency, the Icelandic króna, lost value against the U.S. dollar and unemployment in the country tripled to about four percent. Iceland has not had a labor or unemployment problem historically, so the emerging depression was felt deeply by average Icelanders outside the finance sector. The collapse made international news, even during the throes of a global economic meltdown.

Iceland’s economic problems at the time ranked in severity with Greece, Ireland, and Brazil.

The cheap króna began to attract budget-conscious travelers to Iceland, which had long been viewed as an expensive travel destination.

At the same time, Icelandair, the country’s biggest airline, moved away from catering to domestic flyers toward foreign travelers who were now more likely to visit Iceland on holiday. The country’s biggest airline was quietly primed for a comeback, since the vast majority of visitors to Iceland came with the intention of visiting the country’s Golden Circle of tourist destinations, located east of Reykjavik and Keflavik International Airport.

All of a sudden, tourism was becoming Iceland’s fastest growing industry, and well on its way to becoming the country’s top industry.

In April 2010 Iceland’s Eyjafjallajökull volcano erupted unexpectedly. Its ash cloud grounded flights across Europe and acted as a billboard for Iceland in all its extremes.

“Of course, all the world was focused on Iceland during the economic crash,” said Grímur Sæmundsson, CEO of Iceland’s Blue Lagoon spa , the country’s most popular man-made tourist attraction, and chair of the The Icelandic Travel Industry Association . “We had this eruption and the earthquake two years later. At the same time we made a lot of marketing efforts to try to promote Iceland as a tourist destination. It was a combination of external works and our own initiative that created this interest in the country.”

Since then, tourism in Iceland has been on a tear that many don’t expect to end any time soon. In 2015, tourism accounted for 31 percent of the Icelandic economy, according to Statistics Iceland.

Foreign tourism grew by an average of 21.6 percent per year from 2010 to 2015, with 1,289,140 total foreign tourists visiting in 2015. Overall, the tourism boom increased visitation by about 264 percent in five years.

A new tension has emerged in Iceland between those who have hitched their wagon to the ascendant force of tourism and those who have been either left behind, or simply Identify tourism as a corrosive pressure on Icelandic culture and tradition.

As a nation of about 350,000 citizens, Icelanders aren’t used to thousands of foreigners visiting their small communities each week; many destinations popular on bus tours today were once untouched natural wonders enjoyed in solitude by local families.

A new tension has emerged in Iceland between those who have hitched their wagon to the ascendant force of tourism and those who have been either left behind, or simply identify tourism as a corrosive pressure on Icelandic culture and tradition.

“When you're in a recession and you need to build something up, of course you focus on marketing,” said Ólöf Ýrr Atladóttir, director general of the Icelandic Tourist Board , the organization inside the Icelandic government responsible for handling tourist affairs. “In hindsight, you could say that we should have focused on the infrastructure at the same time. Of course, we couldn't foresee this tremendous growth in interest for Iceland. That is also coupled with the fact that, in the last five years, the world has gone out of a recession. People are traveling more and more. Growth in tourism, in general, is changing globally.”

Icelanders identified three core areas of growing pains that have affected Iceland: a shaky transportation infrastructure; social and economic impacts on native Icelanders, and concerns over environmental preservation.

Even those who have gained the most from the boom say that the Icelandic government has been slow to act and enact sensible regulations and reform. Taxes and tolls, in particular, are an interesting case; the Icelandic government neither taxes visitors for entering the country, nor charges tolls on the country’s key tourism routes.

it's a totally different industry from all others. You can go out and fish, and you go and get your fish, and then come back. There's somebody in the factory that prepares it, and then it's sold. then everybody goes home. The fish aren't bothering you out in the streets asking where the restaurants are, and aren't using your buses or utilizing a lot of the public goods. They aren't sitting in your swimming pools. The visitors are visitors, and they're not only visiting the country, they're visiting you.

Money from these taxes, some propose, could fund infrastructure revitalization projects along with environmental protection efforts. But others say that charging taxes and fees not only goes against Icelandic tradition, but could also scare off value-seeking travelers who have helped power Iceland’s economic growth.

Food and gas prices have also been creeping upward for native Icelanders, fueling concerns that money spent by tourists is raising prices across the country.

“With the amount of tourists now, we sell 10 percent more eggs, we sell 10 percent more Coca-Cola,” said Skúli Mogensen, CEO and founder of Icelandic low-cost carrier Wow Air . “Basically, it impacts the whole economy on a much, much greater scale than [traditional travel impact models would say]. The scale is so big now in terms of the numbers that it has a massive impact on all of us.”

“Should we charge for certain attractions?” asks Mogensen. “How should that be distributed? I say we should, of course. The same with the roads. You travel around the world, there are road tolls. There are airport tolls. The taxes need to be clear, they need to have a beginning and an end, so people understand the purpose.”

In many ways, the lessons that Icelandic business leaders have learned from managing the growth of both fishing and heavy industries, which powered its economy for the last century, do not apply to travel and tourism.

“We're just realizing what tourism is: it's a totally different industry from all others,” said Atladóttir. “You can go out and fish, and you go and get your fish, and then come back. There's somebody in the factory that prepares it, and then it's sold. That, of course, is a tremendous economic impact, but then everybody goes home. The fish aren't bothering you out in the streets asking where the restaurants are, and aren't using your buses or utilizing a lot of the public goods. They aren't sitting in your swimming pools. The visitors are visitors, and they're not only visiting the country, they're visiting you. They want to get to know you.”

Let’s dive deeper into the sectors of Iceland’s tourism industry to find out the opportunities — and conflicts — that have emerged during the country’s tourism boom.

Getting Here

The story of Iceland’s emergence as a preeminent global tourism destination couldn’t have happened without the presence of Keflavik International Airport on the southwest coast of the country. The country has two other international airports, located in the north of the country. These receive very little traffic: A full 98 percent of travelers who fly into Iceland do so through Keflavik, a 45-minute drive from downtown Reykjavik.

Much like the rest of the country, Iceland’s aviation industry was hard hit by the country’s financial crisis in late 2008.

“We lost 30 percent of passengers in 2009 after [the] crisis; we went down to roughly 1.8 million passengers from 2.4 million in 2007,” said Björn Ó. Hauksson, CEO of Isavia , the company which oversees Iceland’s three international airports. Hauksson was general manager of Keflavik during the time of Iceland's financial crisis. “We started pushing to rethink looking at tourism as an industry where Icelanders went abroad; 60 percent of all travelers through Keflavik were from Iceland at that time. We had to expand international travel to Iceland and we have been working on that ever since.”

Icelandair, as the nation’s top international airline, played a crucial role by seizing on traveler demand by connecting North America and greater Europe to Iceland at a time when Iceland’s overall economy was hurting. The carrier moved to a hub-and-spoke model, with the goal of turning Reykjavik into a connector for travelers headed from North America to Europe, and vice versa.

The model requires quick turnaround times for incoming aircraft, allowing passengers to seamlessly make their connection to their final destination. It also allows passengers to stopover in Iceland for hours or days, providing them with the ability to experience the country as part of a larger vacation.

Most recently, Icelandair has found success with its Stopover Buddy marketing campaign , which paired flyers with local guides [so tourists could] experience unique adventures around Iceland.

Promotional video for Icelandair's Stopover Buddies program.

The increase in Keflavik’s arrivals numbers tell the story of this rise in tourist demand. In 2009, Keflavik served 714,682 flyers; in 2015, it served 1,693,858 passengers.

In 2012, European low-cost giant Easyjet became the first foreign player to embrace Keflavik as a hub. It was followed by upstart Icelandic low-cost carrier Wow Air.

Twenty-four airlines are expected to service Iceland in Summer 2016, according to Isavia.

Arrivals are set to continue to increase at levels above 30 percent per year. Data from the European Tourism Commission shows a 35.2 percent increase in international arrivals this year from January to May 2016.

In order to keep pace with demand, Isavia commissioned a new master plan in 2015 to help plan aviation’s growth in Iceland through 2040.

“Our master plan looks very ambitious, and I must admit what shocked us a bit [recently] is that the passenger increase has been much faster than we foresaw [a few years ago],” said Hauksson. “Right now when I look at the passenger numbers this year, we are looking at numbers we thought we would see in 2021. We have to play a little bit differently than an airport would normally, and we have to be flexible with the airlines.”

Instead of focusing on expanding its terminal and creating new slots for aircraft like the master plan calls for, for instance, Keflavik has been working to tweak its existing slots to accommodate the bigger wide-body planes that Wow Air and Icelandair are beginning to favor.

When I look at the passenger numbers this year, we are looking at numbers we thought we would see in 2021.

In 2015, Icelandair flights accounted for 14.5 percent of consumer flights in the Icelandic oceanic area, according to Isavia, more than double its strongest competitor United Airlines, which operated 6.1 percent of flights.

But how exactly did Icelandair build itself up from a regional player into a bustling air hub for international tourists? By cutting service when the economic maelstrom hit Iceland, with an eye on retooling for the future.

“In 2008, we had to react very quickly to the external environment and downscale the operation in a very short time,” said Helgi Már Björgvinsson, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Icelandair. “At that time, we felt it was very important to do that to grow the company in the long term. Maybe we didn’t know it would be so quick to turn around.”

Statistics from Isavia show this strategic move. Icelandair flights to and from Iceland dropped from 12,234 in 2008 to 11,394 in 2010. By 2015, Icelandair was operating 21,133 flights annually.

Icelandair was able to nearly double its number of flights in five years, thanks to the Icelandic tourism boom.

“We saw some opportunity in the devaluation of the Icelandic króna; the key is the capacity that we have been building, and basically we have tripled our company in a very short period of time,” said Björgvinsson.

The growth of Icelandair Group, which includes nine other pillars of the Icelandic tourism industry including Icelandair Hotels and tour operator Iceland Travel, has also been the result of consolidated marketing efforts for the promotion of Iceland as a destination.

“Icelandair is very different because we have been destination marketing driven for a long time, and quite a lot of airlines are only selling airline seats; we’re selling the destination,” said Björgvinsson. “At the same time when you’re successful at promoting the destination you promote the idea of other carriers serving it. The Icelandic market is small and quite seasonal, we’ve been more focused on evening that out with a focus on the winter. We’ve been working to ease the strain on the infrastructure, by bringing more people in the winter.”

A lot of airlines are only selling airline seats. we’re selling the destination.

In many ways, Icelandair’s top national competitor is taking lessons learned in greater Europe and applying them to the Icelandic air market.

When entrepreneur Skúli Mogensen launched low-cost carrier Wow Air in November 2011, the goal was to capitalize on increased demand for cheap travel to Iceland. Over the last five years, after taking over native carrier Iceland Express, Wow Air has grown to serve 28 destinations.

Mogensen expects Wow Air’s annual capacity to reach 1.6 million passengers this year.

“I've been very vocal about the fact that I think we seriously underestimated [Wow Air’s potential],” said Mogensen. “When I say we, I mean we as a nation, we as politicians, we as the airport, primarily because everyone repeatedly said this can't be done. This is the sixth consecutive year of fantastic growth. Now, everyone is scrambling. Could we all have seen [the potential] earlier and planned better? Yes, but that's the past.”

While he isn’t surprised by his airline’s growth so far, Mogensen is concerned about the lack of government coordination when it comes to expanding Keflavik Airport and improving the rest of Iceland’s transportation infrastructure.

“I still think that we need to be more aggressive in actually making decisions,” said Mogensen. “I think we need to add serious investments on the roads; just the physical road infrastructure of Iceland is going to be an issue. We need physical investments at the airport. We need to put in place the master plan. There is a good master plan that is in place, but it's not been fully activated. That should happen immediately.”

Isavia’s Hauksson, however, disagrees with the calls to raise taxes and make air tickets to Iceland more expensive for travelers.

“The main point here is to find a way so we don’t damage what we have,” said Hauksson. “We have seen these kinds of taxes are quite risky. In Norway, they put an environmental tax on flights and the only thing they got out of it is that Ryanair started cutting down and moving their flights somewhere. It happened in Italy as well.”

The future of aviation in Iceland, according to Mogensen, is likely to be similar to the development of air hubs in the Middle East.

“What I think is interesting, when people talk about growth here, is to look at Dubai. Should we try to become Dubai of the north?” asks Mogensen. “The problem with building a new hub is the strength of connectivity. The secret, now, is that we have it down to a science finally where it's relatively easy for me to add any new destination, because I've got so many American points. We have now have de-risked our business. I quite feel pretty good about where we are today, because I can see everything is working."

Where to Stay

If it weren’t such a contentious subject for locals, the rise of Airbnb in Reykjavik could represent a major success story for the sharing economy giant.

The number of hotel rooms in Iceland has increased by 42 percent since 2010, according to data from Statistics Iceland, with 394 hotels and hostels active across the country by the end of 2015.

Downtown Reykjavik is now dotted with cranes looming above the skyline, as dozens of hotels are being built and converted from underutilized buildings across the city. But hotel growth simply hasn’t kept pace with tourism. To put things in perspective, the total number of visitors to Iceland increased by 264 percent over the same period of time.

Airbnb has helped fill the gap between available hotel rooms and hotel room demand.

Dialing down on Reykjavik itself, the effect is staggering. Iceland Tourist Board data suggests that 4,688 hotel rooms were available in or around Reykjavik by the end of 2015.

Map of Airbnb Listings in Reykjavik

The most recent breakdown of Airbnb listings in Reykjavik by technologist Tom Slee found 2,551 distinct listings in Reykjavik when he scraped the site in April 2016.

Adding up the available bedrooms put onto the market through Airbnb amounts to a minimum of 4,092 additional bedrooms available to tourists in the Reykjavik accommodations market. Combined with data on how many people each listing can accommodate, this means 9,923 additional travelers can stay in Reykjavik at any time using Airbnb.

Airbnb has effectively doubled the number of rooms available to travelers, just at a time when both Reykjavik as a city and Iceland as a tourist destination needed it most.

“The Airbnb development has two sides like everything,” said Sæmundsson. “It has the positive side. We would never have been able to receive all these tourists if it was not for Airbnb… the negative impact is that people who had been investing in hotels feel the competitive situation is very screwed up, because Airbnb has been kind of under the radar regarding paying its dues and [the hotel tax].”

For the people making a living off of the sharing economy, the proof of Airbnb’s power is in its widespread adoption.

“It’s a justified bubble,” said Georg Sankovic, a young entrepreneur and Airbnb host who owns five properties he regularly rents on the service while servicing seven other listings for clients. “The small number of people in Iceland, and the quality of life, means that it is justified.”

This growth has brought a backlash with it. Fearing rising property values , and the effects of tourists on Iceland’s singular culture, concerned citizens asked the government to regulate Airbnb.

“Iceland has a population of 350,000, which is a small community in any other country,” said Sankovic, who emigrated to Iceland in his teens from Croatia. “Tourists are opening the country up, and some people are afraid because they know how small the country really is.”

New legislation will take effect on Jan. 1, 2017 , with the goal of limiting speculation on real estate and tax evasion as a result of home sharing.

Icelanders will be able to rent out their legal residence or one other owned property intended for personal use for up to 90 days or until two million Icelandic krona (about $17,000) in gross rental income is reached. Those who want to rent their spaces must also register with the police, pay a small fee, and provide an overview of their expected rental days and income.

Hosts who violate the law will receive warnings, then fines of an undisclosed amount.

Icelanders inside Reykjavik’s sharing economy scene say that the legislation won’t do much to stop dedicated entrepreneurs from listing their properties on Airbnb through holding companies and friends. They also think the real reason for the regulation is to protect Iceland’s hotel industry during off-season periods when hotels have the weakest occupancy.

Sölvi Melax, founder of Icelandic car share startup Cario , participated in the discussions with Icelandic parliament surrounding the implementation of the law.

“They expect a 5.7 percent increase of hotel rooms in Reykjavik this year, and a more than 30 percent increase in number of tourists coming here,” said Melax. “It's a mess. There's a massive shortage of housing. There's a massive shortage of hotels. There is a housing problem, and people are going [with] short-term rentals rather than long-term rentals because you make so much money.”

In his mind, stronger regulation of the sharing economy is needed to provide real limits on property speculation without hurting the average family who wants to rent out a room on Airbnb.

“Housing tourists is a real problem in the summer, so let's allow individuals to rent out their house in the summer,” said Melax of the authorities’ logic. “In the winter, now we don't want them to, because we want hotels to be fully booked. You just want to give them the 90 days, because it takes off the peak of the hotels, so they can be fully booked all year round and not allow them to have excess inventory.”

Other sources said that the legislation is doomed to failure due to vagueness and the lack of a police force to prosecute violators. They would only speak off the record, expressing concerns about the authorities.

If you rent out one bedroom in a two-bedroom apartment for 90 days, for instance, does that mean you can later rent the second bedroom for another 90 days, since you only rented half of the property’s bedrooms? It is unclear what exactly is defined as a property, according to the restrictions.

There is a housing problem, and people are going [with] short-term rentals rather than long-term rentals because you make so much money.

How are taxes assessed if you own two properties, and your spouse owns two properties, and you rent a variety of bedrooms and shared spaces at various times throughout the year?

Smart entrepreneurs will likely keep doing what they’re doing, daring the short-staffed Icelandic police to go after them.

For average Icelanders, listing a property for more than 90 days will lead to higher taxes, since their home will be listed as a business and subject to increased commercial taxes. This will likely deter normal people from registering with the police.

There seems to be a consensus across Iceland’s travel industry that a revised version of the law will be implemented at some point that takes into account the shortcomings of the current version. This uncertainty makes it unlikely for the law as it is written to have serious effect on curbing the growth of Airbnb in Iceland and its negative aftereffects.

Still, hotel developers are ramping up efforts to open new properties in Reykjavik.

“When it comes to the site in the center of Reykjavik, we face an unusual situation due to all the building sites as a result of the crash,” said Svanhildur Konradsdottir, director of culture and tourism for the City of Reykjavik. “For almost five years after the 2008 crash nothing was built, so there is a built-up need and tension for hotels. We’ve set a quota in the center city that we will not allow any more hotel buildings, or any more conversions into hotels. By doing that we are trying to extend this axis that goes through the center of Reykjavik to the west.”

Walking around downtown Reykjavik in June, the city is in the midst of a clear shift toward becoming a bonafide international city with established hospitality brands and attractions geared toward vacationers instead of locals.

After years of wrangling to bring a prestige brand to downtown, a 205-room Marriott EDITION hotel is under construction next to the Harpa theater and convention center, which represents the centerpiece of downtown Reykjavik’s gentrification/reinvention.

Icelandair Hotels has picked up some of the slack in the hotel market by developing new properties in downtown Reykjavik.

“We have a very clear focus on quality rather than quantity,” said Hildur Ómarsdóttir, director of marketing and business development for Icelandair Hotels. “We may be building three hotels in the city, but our focus is entirely on increasing the quality of accommodations in Reykjavik. That’s why we’re aligning ourselves with international brands: to enhance our know-how and sales channels, and reach a different target market.”

Icelandair Hotels is currently developing three hotels in downtown Reykjavik, repurposing existing buildings into small hotels with diverse common area concepts.

“I think we should just face the fact that they are here to stay, and they are here to stay because people like them,” said Ómarsdóttir of Airbnb. “It wouldn’t be growing so drastically in every city if there wasn’t a demand for this type of service. We need to work with it and around it. [Airbnb] makes it even more important for us to differentiate and be pretty clear on what our service is and what we have to offer.”

Hoteliers themselves, however, are wary of the influx of established hospitality brands into Reykjavik.

“If I’m just pondering something from the [previous economic] collapse, you’re growing so much you can’t really sit down and see if what you’re doing is making sense,” said Snorri Valsson, general manager of the 24-room boutique Kvosin Downtown Hotel in downtown Reykjavik. “So you’re just focusing on growth, growth, growth. If you took a Polaroid of where you actually stand, you’d see that three of your eight properties already are losing money and are going to drag the rest down. Then, why even grow so much? That’s not very Icelandic thinking of me.”

It’s no surprise that Iceland’s tours and activities sector has expanded to meet demand.

From 2010 to 2014, total tourism-related jobs in the Icelandic economy increased 38 percent. From 2010 to 2015, Iceland has issued 789 travel agency and tour operator licenses, with most being issued to businesses around Reykjavik.

There is still a long way to go as the segment fights to reduce seasonality and attract tourists outside the high season of the Icelandic summer months. After all, you simply can’t sell the same tours to people during the winter months that you can during the summer.

“We need to think strategically about tourism, whereas until now, we're always just thinking how can I get more, and we become so schizophrenic that here in Iceland, we still look at the numbers as the baseline for the success of tourism,” said Icelandic Tourist Board’s Atladóttir. “At same time, we're really worried about how many tourists are coming.”

For Gray Line Iceland , which started as a local bus operator in 1989 and began scheduling day tours in 1997, before becoming officially Gray Line branded in 2013, tourists have helped create jobs and allowed tour guides to experiment with small and niche tours.

“In 2008, we had 55,000 passengers,” said Guðrún Þórisdóttir, managing director of sales and marketing for Gray Line Iceland. “In 2015 we had 510,000 passengers, so that’s a huge change. Just in the past year we have hired 100 people.”

Themed tours based around Game of Thrones have been some of Gray Line’s biggest sellers in recent years, in addition to Northern Lights-based programs that run in the winter, typically Icelandic tourism’s slowest period of the year. The tour operator is also seeing people becoming more comfortable with booking on the same day, even just hours before a scheduled tour.

Tourists at the Seljalandsfoss waterfall. 

“Maybe 20 years ago, you had a more educated visitor who had done research on Iceland before they arrived,” said Snorri Valsson, a tour guide with 25 years of experience who is now a specialist at the Icelandic Tourist Board. “Now with increasing tourism, I would say there are more people who have it as a bucket list item or a been-there done-that thing. Travel agencies are trying to market different tours that tap into different niches in the market.”

The flip side of increasing the number of tours is increased congestion at top tourist spots. Typically, buses in Reykjavik would depart at the same time every morning, reaching Golden Circle tourist spots at the same time.

Now, tours are generally staggered to provide a better experience and leave Reykjavik five or six times a day, instead of just once or twice in the morning.

Chinese tourists alone increased 270 percent from 2013 to 2015

“We buy new coaches every year; I think this year we are buying at least 25 new buses and selling the older models, that’s a huge part of having a modern fleet,” said Þórisdóttir. “The trend is big today to have small groups, so we have maximized some tours at 20 to 25 people, and others with a maximum of 12. We usually give tours two to three years to see if they work.”

But still, experts say the country’s infrastructure is being pushed to the limit.

“As a tour operator, it’s difficult with respect to infrastructure with 30 percent growth year over year for six or seven years,” said Hjörvar S. Högnason, former Icelandair executive and managing director of Reykjavik Sightseeing . “Many of the places we go on these day tours, the facilities there haven’t been able to cope with the influx of people; people are complaining that there aren’t enough facilities, no bathrooms or broken bathrooms.”

Another problem is catering to the diverse cultures and language abilities of visitors.

A hiking group along a glacier outside of Reykjavik. 

Top feeder countries for Icelandic tourism in 2015 were the U.S., UK, Germany, France, Norway, Denmark, and China. Chinese tourists alone increased 270 percent from 2013 to 2015, when 47,643 tourists visited, the largest increase of any country.

For Högnason’s Reykjavik Sightseeing, a relatively new tour operator, the challenge is an opportunity to use technology to reach a wider range of tourists.

“We got together with experienced tour guides and asked them to write our scripts,” said Högnason. “It gives us the same quality on each tour and give us the chance to translate it into several other languages. We have reason to believe that 30 or 40 percent of tours today are narrated in languages that tourists understand vaguely or not at all.”

It seems that tour operators are banking on the Icelandic government to get its act together and create a plan to invest strategically in the country’s infrastructure, particularly its roads.

“We definitely need more infrastructure in some of the more popular areas, and tourism is giving the Icelandic government a lot of money,” said Þórisdóttir. “They always say they are going to do something, and they need to do more. This summer they’re putting money into some areas like hiking paths, but they really should be focusing on tourism more, because this is now the biggest industry in Iceland.”

Visiting Reykjavik

The cultural impact of tourism on Iceland is perhaps underreported, but represents a real concern for many native Icelanders.

While tourists usually come to Iceland to visit nature, almost all of them end up in Reykjavik for at least a night. The shift for Reykjavik from a stopover city to a destination in its own right has happened over the last 15 years.

With nearly 125,000 residents, Reykjavik is by far the biggest city in Iceland, along with its suburbs of Kópavogur and Hafnarfjördur , which add another 50,000 residents to Iceland’s Capital Region. This represents almost two-thirds of Iceland’s total population.

“Looking at Reykjavik now compared to 10 years ago, it’s a totally different city when it comes to tourism,” said Svanhildur Konradsdottir, director of culture and tourism for the City of Reykjavik . “People do come here now particularly off-season for city breaks and 97 percent of visitors stop in Reykjavik. Our goal has been to extend the number of nights people stay in Reykjavik, particularly off season, and we have been quite successful.”

Konradsdottir, who has served as Reykjavik’s culture director since 2005, has witnessed the city’s development from a stagnant and expensive city to a dynamic destination buoyed by culture and commerce. She is also chairman of the board of Meet in Reykjavik , the city’s convention bureau.

The city itself doesn’t charge any direct tax on overnight stays, and all direct taxes go to the state.

The city’s Harpa development, which was funded as a joint city and state project, has caused friction due the cost of keeping up the lavish performance hall and conference center that opened in May 2011. The costs of maintaining the city’s downtown have also increased overall.

“In the last three years, the cost of the city to maintain the infrastructure, whether the roads or cleaning the city center, is increasing quite dramatically,” said Konradsdottir. “We feel the city needs to have more direct revenues than it already has.”

Overall, Iceland’s move away from seasonality has boosted its economy. About 30,000 extra shoppers visiting Reykjavik each week means an increased demand for shops, restaurants, bars, event spaces, and museums.

“It gives you a million extra customers for your business, whether you’re a restaurant, cultural institution or shop,” said Konradsdottir. “Reykjavik has managed to keep its authenticity and you don’t see many international brands. You don’t see Starbucks or McDonald's in the historic center of Reykjavik.”

Cultural sustainability has been a major concern as more businesses have flocked to Reykjavik’s downtown. Dozens of “ Puffin Shops ,” as they are called by locals, have sprung up downtown selling stuffed animals and knick knacks for tourists, along with bars and restaurants catering to an international clientele.

While some Icelanders bemoan the international influence in Reykjavik, most said that the average Icelander would rarely shop or eat in the city’s downtown before its recent revitalization. They shop at suburban malls and steer clear of a drive into the city.

In her research as director of culture, Konradsdottir said surveys show that Icelanders are still extremely positive towards tourism in general, with more than 95 percent of those polled being completely supportive.

“We saw there were slightly more concerns about the city center, people had reported more instances of disturbances near their homes with Airbnb,” said Konradsdottir. “The local people are still very hospitable and welcoming, but it doesn't change the fact we need to be vigilant. We’re working with the businesses in tourism to tackle the issues, like big buses going into these tiny streets in the center of the city.”

Still, not everyone in Reykjavik is a fan of increased tourism, despite the reputation of Icelanders of being welcoming to outsiders.

“The people who are living here downtown are irritated by the traffic, the noise in the night when people are dragging their luggage,” said Icelandic Tourist Board’s Valsson. “There’s a lot of positives as well, because of all the services this provides for locals as well.”

Icelanders seem to favor common-sense reform that would allow the government to better control the effects of tourism on the country.

“There is no question that if the growth could have been controlled in some way, it would have been better for us but honestly I think we can cope with it,” said Fridrik Palsson, owner of the boutique Hotel Ranga in Hella.

At his home in Reykjavik overlooking the city’s soccer stadium, he points out that he has seen the city’s iconic red and blue roofs replaced by modern buildings and homes in recent years.

A former fishing industry executive, Palsson suggests that limiting and taxing tourism could help solve the country’s problems, much like imposing fishing quotas in the 1980s helped return Iceland’s fish stock to sustainable levels.

“In Iceland, we have never thought that we need to slow down people or put a control on the number of people into any given area; this is so common abroad of course, and it costs a hell of a lot of money to build up our road system,” said Palsson. “It’s not in our nature to do so, we always like to welcome people to our homes. For example, it would be so impolite to ask people to come to our home and charge them for it. But slowly it’s getting around, and I haven’t spoken to any tourist who has been here and wouldn’t pay a fee.”

Iceland uses the Vakinn environmental quality system, which was based off the Qualmark system used by New Zealand, to label sustainable businesses and activities. Determining the sustainability of hotels and tourist hotspots, however, doesn’t make up for the aggregate effect of increased tourism over the years, according to experts .

“The environment is more fragile in the winter time and the shoulder seasons of spring and autumn, due to soil erosion and things like that,” said Icelandic Tourist Board’s Valsson. “Basically, with proper infrastructure we can still increase tourism numbers. Out in the field, I got the sense that the government was dragging its feet for quite a few years. We need catching up, and that’s what they’re doing now.”

Improved infrastructure could also allow remote communities around Iceland, which had traditionally participated in Iceland’s declining fishing industry, to gain a larger share of tourist dollars and visitation. The uneven distribution of Iceland’s tourism industry, which is primarily based out of Reykjavik and its neighboring regions, is another potential long-term problem for the country.

“Of course it’s also nice to have some remote areas, but for the people living there it’s difficult,” said Gray Line’s Þórisdóttir, whose family hails from a tiny fishing village in North Iceland. “The fishing industry has changed a lot, it’s now mostly a few people who own all the fish and get most of the money. There are places that would blossom if they had more tourism.”

As a country and tourist destination, Iceland seems uniquely positioned to harness the value of tourism to help modernize its domestic infrastructure and create a sustainable economic pillar for its citizens.

Its small population and 63-member parliament makes it possible for the country to reach a meaningful consensus on how to best harness tourism as a positive force.

But nothing is certain, as visitors continue to grow with the specter of overtourism lurking on the horizon.

A few trends emerged during talks with industry stakeholders that present a likely vision of Iceland’s development as a travel hotbed.

A group has recently formed as a public-private task force comprised of the Icelandic government and travel industry stakeholders to decide on the wave of reforms necessary to ensure that tourism becomes sustainable in Iceland.

”Now I get the feeling that, for the first time, we really feel that the authorities are coming to an understanding of really what's going on and everyone's getting on the same page,” said Blue Lagoon’s Sæmundsson, who is a member of the task force. “People are coming to terms about tourism. This is happening, this is not going away, we have to deal with it and let's do something about it.”

The task force has a five-year mandate to suggest and implement policy changes. Critics say that the group, which has just four industry players among its 10 members, will act too slowly to react to the changing landscape of tourism in Iceland. More than a year since the group was announced, it has yet to produce any tangible guidelines and policy proposals.

A bigger question looms on whether tourism should be constrained, whether by creating an entry fee to deter the most cost-conscious travelers or creating quotas for national landmarks and tourist destinations.

Experts expect around three million tourists to visit in 2017, a 30 percent increase over this year’s projected total.

“You don’t want people to buy a ticket, see the price is much higher due to a tax, and then fly to Norway or something,” said Isavia’s Hauksson. “We have still not reached the number of travelers that come through the Vatican City; Iceland is less a tourist attraction than the Vatican City.”

A trailer for Dreamland, a film about Iceland's relationship with large-scale foreign investment. 

There is a move underway to cater to a more high-spending traveler. Blue Lagoon, for instance, is building a small luxury hotel next its spa facilities, while new hotels being built in Reykjavik are looking to appeal to a more upscale vacationer rather than the scrappy millennials used to Reykjavik’s Airbnb listings and hostels.

Tour operators, similarly, are experimenting with smaller groups and more targeted itineraries. But not everyone is sold on turning to upscale travelers to increase profitability.

“If it wasn’t for those bargain hunters, we wouldn’t be where we are today,” said Högnason. “If it wasn’t for these low-cost people paving the way, people like [Sæmundsson] wouldn’t be in the position they're in today; it was hard to get the volume we’re at today.”

As the airlines continue to add destinations to their hub-and-spoke model, more and more travelers will have access to direct flights to Reykjavik.

Wow Air, for instance, just announced a direct flight from Newark, the first low-cost flight to Iceland from the New York metropolitan area. Icelandair recently added Montreal, its fifth city in Canada, and returned to Chicago for the first time in 28 years.

“I am not an advocate for unlimited visitors, I fully agree that visitors are an issue for our nature and preservation,” said Mogensen. “I have no problem with having a cap. We can handle five million travelers, without hesitation, but it will need a lot more work. I think by just doing the small plastering [over of problems] that we're doing today, we can do three million without kidding ourselves. To go much above that, we would need to rethink fundamentally things that we're doing. Otherwise, we will start shooting ourselves in the foot.”

For what it’s worth, the World Travel & Tourism Council expects travel and tourism to support 50,000 jobs in Iceland by 2025, encompassing more than a quarter of the country’s total employment.

As more foreign workers enter the country to work in tours and hospitality, there’s the potential for a backlash from Iceland’s more conservative citizens.

World Travel & Tourism Council expects travel and tourism to support 50,000 jobs in Iceland by 2025, encompassing more than a quarter of the country’s total employment.

“I think we’re as bad as other countries with xenophobia and all that,” said Kvosin Downtown Hotel’s Valsson. “I think our elections have shown that… if you’re over 60, you’re pretty much scared. Sadly we’re becoming more and more polarized, and that is very sad because we are such a one-class country.”

In the end, Icelanders are sober-minded and particularly well-suited to deal with the challenges that increased tourism has created in their unique country.

“I am always skeptical of people who say Iceland is such a hot destination,” said Konradsdottir, Reykjavik’s director of culture and tourism. “What can only happen is that you fall out of the spotlight over time.”

During our research period in Iceland, we conducted interviews with multiple leaders in the tourism industry. While much of their insight has been incorporated into our story, we thought that longer versions of their interviews could provide additional insight. They appear below and are edited for clarity.

Grímur Sæmundsson, CEO of Iceland’s Blue Lagoon

Q: Looking forward, how do you feel about the prospects of Blue Lagoon and Iceland as a whole continuing to cope with increased tourism growth?

A: I think for my business, we're quite optimistic for the prospects of being a leading brand in Iceland tourism. For the country, I'm quite optimistic. We're used to tackling the elements and living in a very harsh environment. I'm very optimistic that the nation will tackle this and I think that now we have the first signs of that. We're starting to come together to see what does the project have to deal with and how can we deal with it. In general I'm very optimistic for the future of tourism in Iceland.

I think it's healthy for the industry, and for the nation, that this huge growth year over year could kind of go down a bit. What we'll be confronted with will be a matter of debate. The decision is do we have the courage to step back and say, we're not going to be everything for everyone. I don't want to experience Iceland as some kind of a mass destination.

Q: You’re building a luxury hotel next to Blue Lagoon. How do you feel about working to turn Iceland into more of an expensive, high-class destination?

A: You know, I would like to see Iceland keep its characteristics as being very interesting place to visit. Iceland should not be cheap. It should be rather expensive, and with opportunities that are inexpensive. You're able to come to Iceland on a low budget, but the image of the country is not low budget. It is rather expensive and these are issues that we need to, from a strategic viewpoint, kind of develop together with the authorities. What kind of a destination do we want Iceland to be in 10 to 15 years?

Q: What’s your perspective on the role Airbnb has played over the last few years?

A: The Airbnb development has two sides like everything. It has the positive side. We would never have been able to receive all these number of tourists if it was not for Airbnb because the whole tourism issue in Iceland, even that we're now building hotels, we're still not kind of getting there. Airbnb in that sense has a very positive impact, but the negative impact is that people who had been investing in hotels feel that the competition situation is very screwed up because Airbnb has been kind of under the radar regarding paying dues and taxes.

The government was just getting more and more revenue from tourism and they acted like they didn't know where it came from.

Now we have a new law on Airbnb, but this leaves out the social impact. Actually I am most worried about the social impact. It is definitely positive for those who are getting revenue from their properties by having them on Airbnb. For the others, you know, the neighbors and environment, people might be pissed off. You're living in an apartment building and there are always new people on the floor above you or below you. This creates [the] kind of unrest that this is definitely something that needs to be tackled, and I have a feeling that the authorities are now looking into that, for example.

Q: You’re a member of a new board looking to create a road map for tourism in Iceland. How do you assess the government’s readiness to take a more active role in shaping the industry?

A: The foreign currency situation in the country is now very strong. This, of course, was not the case after the crash. We have been the key factor in keeping the inflation low, so the economic impact of tourism in Iceland after the crash is incredible. At last, tourism is now being recognized, because we had to fight the politicians and the authorities to get them to understand what was happening. The government was just getting more and more revenue from tourism and they acted like they didn't know where it came from.

Now I get the feeling that, for the first time this year, we really feel that the authorities are coming to an understanding of what's going on and everyone's getting on the same page. It's been quite difficult before to fight to get people to understand that this is reality, and that the public has been experiencing this on their own because of the jobs created, because a lot of people have been benefiting from tourism through Airbnb. Now people in the government are kind of getting to terms that this is happening, this is not going away, we have to deal with that and let’s do something about it.

Skúli Mogensen, CEO of Wow Air

Q: Wow Air has been growing steadily, piggybacking on the intense demand for tourism in Iceland. Do you think macroeconomic trends threaten what you’ve accomplished?

A: I certainly hope not. Actually, it's interesting now with Brexit, this whole discussion of being in the EU or not in the EU. A few years back, there was a huge movement in Iceland that we should join the EU. I have never been in favor of that. Then, that same group said, ‘You're a nationalist and you're an isolationist,’ which I think is complete BS.

I think on the contrary, Iceland's quite unique in that sense. We do not have an army. We have great alliances with pretty much everyone. We are part of NATO. We're obviously working very closely with the U.S., very closely with Europe. Whether we are in the EU or not doesn't really matter. Yes, it requires us to do slightly more independent agreements, but most of those are already in place. We have great relationships with China, with India, with Russia.

Why do we manage to get these agreements? Because we are a teeny tiny nation and for whatever reason, most people like us. We're not offending anyone. We're not going to step on anybody's toes.

Again, I see it as an opportunity to be open. I certainly think that we need to preserve and value certain things about Iceland. I think it's important to preserve our language, our culture, respect our nature, and very much like we expect Icelanders to respect those issues, so should any foreigner.

The government still has incentives to bring in more heavy industry, to bring in more aluminum plants, to bring in more silicon plants. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me because they do not really create anything of value here.

Q: Tourism has recently overtaken fishing and heavy industries as Iceland’s top industry. At the same time, tourism brings a bevy of environmental concerns with it. As the head of a rapidly growing airline, how do you think about preserving the environment?

A: I've been very hopeful about the environment. This is talking and going back to the heavy industry people, of course, who use my planes against me, because I have said as a strategy, we are now as a country, incredibly fortunate to have the luxury of actually making a strategy saying that we're going to be the cleanest country in the world. We can be 100 percent renewable. We can be the first country in the world to ban gasoline cars, or reduce all plastic, or say it's all going to be renewable glass.

At the same time, the government still has incentives to bring in more heavy industry, to bring in more aluminum plants, to bring in more silicon plants. That doesn't make any sense whatsoever to me because they do not really create anything of value here. They pollute. Both physically pollute but also just visually pollute the environment. Again, there's no value creation. These are relatively low-paying jobs they're just labor jobs. Basically, machinery.

This is what I've been trying to tell you. Even if you're not an environmentalist, you just look at the economics, the economics of the situation today, if you're Iceland as a business. This piece of the equation doesn't belong here, it's obvious, both because of the environment, but also because of business resources. I think actually again if we would brand ourselves, I'm not saying tear them down and remove them tomorrow, but they all have X number of years on their energy contracts. Simply let them run out.

Q: Overtourism is a major concern any time a country as small as Iceland experiences rapid tourism growth. Do you think the country should move to provide guidelines around tourism numbers?

A: I think again, we as Icelanders, we are just so spoiled. We are used to having no one around us. As soon as one person is there, ‘Oh, it's crowded.' Second thing we are spoiled is to drive more than 10 minutes anywhere, it's like, ‘Oh, it's so far away.’ Compare this to America, where to drive for two, three hours is no big deal.

We should market the airport, the airport peninsula, Blue Lagoon, Reykjavik, it's all one region here because they’re so close to each other anyway. We should expand our vision of what is the proximity around the airport.

Ólöf Ýrr Atladóttir, director general of the Icelandic Tourist Board

Q: What are your thoughts on overtourism, particularly with respect to the effects of tourism on native Icelanders?

A: Yes, we've experienced an enormous growth. Yes, we have challenges. In some places, there are quite a lot of people at certain times during the day. Sometimes when there are lot of cruise ships, it can have a very overwhelming experience at these traditional Golden Circle sites and something like that.

However, we've sponsored studies on carrying capacity among tourists themselves. It turns out that the group that is experiencing most congestion on these sites is Icelanders. In general, our visitors don't seem to experience the same sensation of overcrowding or congestion as we do.

You could say that that points to us being worried about our visitor experience, which is nice because it means that everybody's still on board with us providing an exceptional experience. Also, because we are traditionally very few here in Iceland. We're really not used to a lot of people. Seriously.

Q: Besides overcrowding, how do you think tourism has affected Icelandic society?

A: Tourism, of course, puts a strain on society. It puts a strain on the public goods. I'm not saying strain in a negative way. I'm saying it has an impact on society and the people and the communities, on the public goods that they're providing, on the road system, on the health system, on the police system, on the educational system, on everything.

Tourism has a tremendous possibility to change society. In the fisheries, you have to have vessels, you have to have some support from the government, you have to have the framework, and then it’s fine. With tourism, you have to have an organizational and structural change of basically everything that the public sector is doing. That's what we need to do, and that also means that it costs money. It's not as organic as we thought.

The road system is expensive. Environmental conservation is very expensive and if you want to have real environmental conservation, you need people there, and you need much more people if you're going to have a million visitors than if you're going to have 100,000.

Q: Let’s say that the government finally steps up to the plate in a real way. What kind of effect on society do you think tourism should have in Iceland?

A: People are traveling as never before, and I think that will continue. Maybe it's just a change in human nature. A large percentage of mankind, they look upon traveling as something that you do. It's a right, almost. You eat, you sleep, you go to school, you travel. I don't think that will change so easily. That means that destinations, I'm not saying they should be picky in who comes, but they can set standards besides thinking, ‘What do I need to do for tourism so more people will come?’ which is the classical way of thinking. Then, ‘How can I minimize the negative impact of that?’ which is the classical way.

I'm not saying that every destination should try to be a luxury destination, not at all. Just say, ‘If you want to come here, this is what you need to do. This is how you need to think.’

What effect do I want this industry to have on society? Beneficial. What negative effects could that incur and how can I work against that? We're not just thinking, ‘What do we need to do for tourism?’ To paraphrase Kennedy, we are thinking, ‘What can tourism do for us and what do we want that to do?’

I think destinations need to have this question at least on a side glance because, as I say, people will travel. They will travel and they will have different needs and they will have different wishes. Destinations can't specialize themselves and they can't become more picky. I'm not saying that every destination should try to be a luxury destination, not at all. Just say, ‘If you want to come here, this is what you need to do. This is how you need to think.’

Q: What about the possibility that the intense growth in tourism begins to tail off?

A: We need to get out of this somewhat schizophrenic mindset that, as I say, at the same time as the governmentally run airport is growing and growing in some sort of inevitability theory, we're not focusing as much resources into the infrastructure and we haven't even decided how much do we want to grow.

That's why we need to ask the critical questions about what do we want from tourism. We need to do that. We need to do that globally, also, because this is something that is not the private matter of individual countries, because tourists will have an environmental impact. They will have a cultural impact.

Maybe we're just realizing now the full extent of what that means. That could be a good impact. It can also breed negativity and that's what we don't want.

Björn Ó. Hauksson, CEO of Isavia

Q: Keflavik International Airport has been scrambling to keep up with passenger demand. But what do you think about the possibility of that demand tailing off sometime soon?

A: Iceland has had at least three times a sharp drop in passenger numbers. The last time in 2008, we lost 30 percent of passengers. Our main objective as a company is to ensure that Isavia, especially in Keflavik, is on a strong financial basis [so] we can take a drop in passengers if that happens. Also, that we don’t over invest.

If I just look back in 2009, we calculated the terminal could have 3.5 million passengers, we are now looking years later into getting numbers up to eight million people in a short period of time, with the same basic infrastructure by ensuring we are looking at a way to be as efficient as possible.

If it happens, I don’t think it’s the worst thing if there comes a slowdown in passenger growth or they stop coming. It’s very rare that airports and the tour industry goes down very hard. Usually it stops for a while and starts growing in a more relaxed way. I would have been very happy to have three-to-seven percent growth, now I’m figuring out what to do with 37 percent growth in a year. What we are having here is not normal. If it goes down to normal numbers, that would be fine.

Q: What’s your biggest concern when it comes to the continued growth of aviation in Iceland?

A: The only thing I sort of fear is that in general there have been discussions these last weeks about the impact of Brexit on the Brussels airport. There are a lot of international things that are shaky these days.

Internally Iceland is a very small country of 350,000. If we don’t manage to be very efficient, we may start lacking people in the not so distant future, and that could hinder the tourism industry. Not that we cannot take [more tourists], but do we have the staff, the know-how, the financial resources to continue to develop?

About This Project

Skift reporter Andrew Sheivachman traveled to Iceland in June 2016 and interviewed leaders in multiple sectors of the tourism industry. He also witnessed the country celebrate its improbable run during the Euro 2016 football competition.

Photos that appear without a credit were shot by Sheivachman or other members of the Skift team.

To produce this feature, Sheivachman was aided by members of Skift's editorial, production, and development team. That team included:

Design: Ping Chan Development: Mike Linden Johnathan Ross Edit: Rafat Ali Jason Clampet

Icelanders celebrate in central Reykjavik during the Euro 2016 competition. 

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Eco-Friendly Tourism Practices in Iceland: A Sustainable Travel Guide

Eco-friendly tourism is not just a trend but a commitment to the future, and nowhere is this more evident than in Iceland. Known for its breathtaking natural beauty from geysers to glaciers, Iceland has become a beacon for sustainable travel.

Imagine standing atop a glacier , knowing that it’s preserved for generations to come, or soaking in a geothermal spa powered by the Earth itself. This isn’t a dream but a reality in Iceland. In this blog, we’ll explore how you can be part of this remarkable journey, embracing the awe-inspiring landscapes while adhering to practices that ensure they remain untouched and unspoiled.

Join us in uncovering the essence of responsible travel in Iceland , a country that’s as committed to the planet as it is captivating to the soul.

Background on Iceland’s Eco-Friendly Tourism

From dramatic lava fields to serene fjords, Iceland’s landscapes are as diverse as they are fragile. Glaciers like Vatnajökull and Langjökull form some of Europe’s largest ice caps, but they are retreating at an alarming rate due to global warming. Iceland’s geothermal areas, while a significant source of renewable energy, can be adversely affected by irresponsible tourism.

Iceland’s unique fauna, including the Arctic fox and numerous bird species, also face threats from habitat loss. Current conservation efforts in the country range from glacier monitoring to wildlife protection , often involving local communities and travelers.

These efforts are essential to maintaining Iceland’s ecological balance and ensuring that the natural beauty remains untouched.

The Rise of Eco-Friendly Tourism in Iceland 

The explosive growth in tourism in Iceland has been both a boon and a challenge. With over two million visitors annually, the need for sustainability is clear. Government initiatives have sprung up to control the environmental impact, including restricting access to certain vulnerable areas and promoting the use of renewable energy.

Local businesses are also leading the charge in sustainable practices. Hotels are adopting energy-efficient practices, restaurants are sourcing local produce, and tour operators are educating visitors about Iceland’s delicate ecosystems.

These concerted efforts reflect a broader cultural shift towards responsible tourism, setting an example for the rest of the world.

Tips for Sustainable Travel in Iceland 

• Transportation:  Visitors are encouraged to use buses and other public transportation to minimize emissions. Carpooling with other travelers or opting for electric vehicle rentals can further reduce environmental impacts.
• Accommodation:  Look for accommodations with an “Eco-Certified” badge. These lodgings follow strict energy and water conservation practices, reducing the overall environmental footprint.
• Food Choices:  Dine in restaurants that favor local ingredients and sustainable fishing practices. This not only helps local communities but also reduces carbon emissions linked to food transportation.
• Nature Etiquette:  Stick to marked trails, avoid off-road driving, and maintain a respectful distance from wildlife to preserve the natural habitat.
• Waste Management:  Be conscious of packaging and recycle when possible. Carry reusable water bottles and shopping bags.

Highlights of Eco-Friendly Attractions and Activities 

Iceland offers numerous attractions that embody eco-friendly tourism:

• Geothermal Spas:  Enjoy the famous Blue Lagoon or lesser-known geothermal spas that use renewable energy sources.
• Eco-Friendly Whale Watching:  Opt for tours using sustainable practices and educative approaches to marine conservation.
• Sustainable Farm Visits:  Experience Icelandic culture through farm visits that practice sustainable agriculture.
• Guided Eco-Hikes:  Join guided hiking tours that emphasize conservation and provide education on local flora and fauna.

Interview with a Local Eco-Tourism Tourism Expert 

Björn Eriksson, a renowned eco-tourism expert in Reykjavik , shared his thoughts on sustainable travel in Iceland. He emphasized the collective responsibility of locals and tourists to preserve Iceland’s natural assets. From using geothermal energy to supporting local businesses that uphold eco-friendly practices, the role of each visitor is crucial.

Iceland stands as a beacon for eco-friendly tourism, demonstrating that responsible travel practices can go hand-in-hand with a thriving tourism industry. From the majestic glaciers to the rich cultural heritage, every element of Iceland calls for preservation and respect.

Iceland’s ethereal beauty, cascading waterfalls, pulsating geysers, and towering glaciers, is not just a feast for the eyes; it’s a call to action. It’s an invitation to every traveler to become a guardian of nature and to embrace travel practices that respect and nurture rather than exploit. Every step you take can be a stride toward a greener future in the land of fire and ice. From the restaurants you choose to how you admire the wildlife, your actions shape the future of this unique landscape. And the future is bright, filled with possibilities, but only if we choose to be part of the solution. So, embark on an Icelandic adventure that goes beyond the ordinary. Immerse yourself in its culture, marvel at its wonders, and leave a lasting positive imprint. Be more than a tourist; be a responsible traveler. Iceland is not just a destination; it’s a journey towards a more sustainable world. Let’s make that journey together. After all, the best way to honor a place as enchanting as Iceland is to ensure it stays that way for generations.

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Shared transfer in Iceland: Hotel in Reykjavik to Airport

Shared transfer in Iceland: Airport to Hotel in Reykjavik

Shared transfer in Iceland: BSI terminal to Airport

Shared transfer in Iceland: Airport to BSI terminal

The Great Diamond Circle: A Helicopter Tour Adventure from Modrudalur

Unveiling Vatnajokull: A Flight Over Iceland's Largest Glacier

Unlocking Iceland's Secrets: A Scenic Helicopter Ride to Modrudalur Kettle Holes

Aerial Adventure to Mount Askja: Helicopter Ride from Modrudalur

Reset password, sea kayaking, one of the most exhilarating ways to experience antarctica, the arctic and beyond..

Sea kayaking holidays in the humbling wilderness of  Antarctica ,  the Arctic , and some of the world’s most biodiverse regions, are guaranteed to stir your soul. Paddle between brash ice and icebergs of all shapes and sizes, absorbing the majestic scenery as it unfolds before you. 

In Antarctica, keep your camera on-hand for unforgettable encounters with penguins, seals and whales, and occasionally leopard seals or orcas. In the Arctic, prepare to  paddle under nesting bird colonies, past massive glaciers and around large iceberg. 

Led by  experienced guides , you and your small group of like-minded adventurers will paddle between ice floes, brash ice and icebergs of all shapes and sizes. Paddling is one of the best ways to access and intimately explore the beautiful coastlines we visit and therefore make the most of your time in the wild and remote  destinations we visit . 

‘Getting out amongst it’ is our philosophy, and that is exactly what we do. Weather permitting, the sea kayaking activity is normally available anytime the other expeditioners go out. Rather than travelling large distances, our aim is to ensure you see as much as possible. We paddle between 5 to 15 kilometres (2 to 4 hours) per outing, often taking a snack and a flask of hot chocolate to enjoy on our excursion.

Each small group of kayakers (up to 10 per guide) will have their own intimate exploration of the small hidden bays and coasts that are inaccessible to Zodiacs. Of course, we also make time for your own shore excursions and wildlife encounters.

The elements play an important role in our sea kayaking program. It is important that you have an adventurous attitude and understand that the weather can impact our kayaking time.

For all of our trips, you must be active in the outdoors and have an adventurous spirit. The level of experience differs slightly depending on the region you are visiting.

For most temperate and polar you should be an intermediate paddler. In South Georgia however, conditions can be more varied and you require solid paddling experience in ocean swell and wind.

For our tropical trips some prior paddling experience is needed. We may encounter wind on these trips, however the water is fairly protected.

You do not need to be an expert or know how to roll. However, you must be able to swim and you should have experience in a wet exit and assisted re-entry. You should also be proficient at putting on a spray skirt by yourself and be comfortable paddling on seas with up to half a metre swell. It is also important that you gain some practice getting into a kayak from a pier, wharf, or deep shoreline where you can’t step into the kayak from standing position. You can easily practice all of this at home, plus paddling in a variety of weather conditions, before your trip. 

What about beginners up to the challenge?

Our guides do not offer instructional classes for beginners. Therefore, the sea kayaking option is unsuitable for complete novices. However, there is often ample time to gain the required experience before you depart. We may be able to recommend a reputable sea kayak operator in your area for some tuition prior to the trip.

Your guide will assess your ability on the initial paddle, and if you have insufficient experience, he or she reserves the right to restrict your participation in rougher conditions.

You should be fit enough to paddle for up to three hours and climb between moving Zodiacs on the water. Regular exercise is recommended, because the fitter you are the more you will enjoy the experience. The more paddles you can do before the trip, the better. We recommend at least three outings prior to your voyage.

Polar regions

During summer the air temperature in the Antarctic Peninsula, Greenland and Spitsbergen are generally above freezing but can range from -4°C to +5°C / 24.8°F to 41°F. The water temperature in the polar regions is close to freezing and winds sweep off the glaciers, making paddling a chilling experience. In South Georgia, there are stronger winds and swells than in Antarctica. Scotland, Iceland, Norwegian coasts are warmer with water temperatures of around 12 °C/ 53.6°F.

Temperate regions

The northern waters are warmer than the polar regions but water temperatures of around 12 °C/ 53.6°F mean you may opt to wear your paddle jacket on a warm, sunny day or our dry suits on a cool day. Surf landings are not likely, but you must be capable of paddling in a small swell or wind chop, with winds up to 20 knots. With that being said, we will not paddle if wind conditions are too strong and there is no sheltered area for paddling.

Tropical regions

In Costa Rica and Panama, April is the end of the dry season. The shoulder season begins in May, bringing increased humidity. Afternoon rain showers are possible in May with temperatures ranging from 26-36 °C (80- 96 °F). Winds are generally light at this time of year. The water temperature ranges from 27 -29 °C. Surf landings are not likely, but be prepared to paddle in a small swell or wind chop, with winds up to 15 knots. Again, we will not paddle if wind conditions are too strong and there is no sheltered area for paddling.

The Sea Kayaking activity is available for an additional surcharge and includes guided excursions and kayaking equipment. Fares for this activity start from US$900, AU$1,250, £460 or €550. 

Prices are indicative only and are variable. They are calculated based on the days of voyage, ability to carry out the activity and exchange rates.

Top reasons to choose a Sea Kayaking holiday

See wildlife unobtrusively

Kayaking is one of the best ways to spot rare wildlife, from penguins to puffins.

Better access

Access intimate bays and coves that bigger crafts can’t reach.​

Knowledgeable guides

Our experienced sea kayak guides will help bring your chosen destination to life.

Become an expert

Hone your kayaking skills and gain a hobby for life!

Make friends

Become lifelong friends with your small group of like-minded adventurers.

Stay fit on your holiday

Being active every day on your holiday means you don’t have to feel guilty about being spoilt by our expert chefs!

Enhance your experience

Add another layer to your once-in-a-lifetime holiday and make the most out of your time in some of the most remote places on earth.

Have the time of your life exploring some of the wildest places on earth from the water.

Private Golden Circle and South Coast tour with 7+ Attractions

Private Snæfellsnes Peninsula with 6+ Attractions from Reykjavik

Private South Coast Day Tour with 6+ main attractions

Private Golden Circle Tour with 5+ attractions from Reykjavik

Private Northern Lights Tour From Reykjavik

Our guide to paddler ratio is 1:10 and we provide an accompanying safety Zodiac. There are 26 places available in Antarctica and tropical voyages, 20 in temperate regions, South Georgia and all Arctic trips except in Franz Josef Land where the maximum is 16 kayakers.

Kayakers must be 14 or over.

Sea kayaking is offered in place of regular shore excursions. We aim to paddle as often as possible. Depending on the voyage, we generally aim to paddle twice per day.

We will give you a drybag for extra clothing, binoculars and anything that needs to be kept dry. You should also carry a water bottle. We recommend bringing a waterproof camera or phone, or ensuring you have a good quality waterproof case.

If the weather changes during our outing we will head back to the ship and perhaps join a shore excursion. The ship’s captain, expedition leader and kayak guide always maintain close contact to ensure a safe paddling experience. We do not attempt to paddle too far away from the ship. The emphasis is on experiencing the destination rather than travelling long distances.

The kayaks are made with a hard plastic and are easily paddled in swell and conducting shore landings, and through small patches of brash ice. We manoeuvre around the larger ice chunks and floes.

Kayaking in the poles offers a unique wildlife viewing experience. In Antarctica, we have many opportunities to encounter penguins, seals and whales, and occasionally we may even spot leopard seals or orcas. In the Arctic, we’ll paddle under nesting bird colonies, past massive glaciers and around large icebergs, however we maintain a safe distance from polar bears and walruses. Our guides carry rifles and flare guns in the Arctic to ensure your safety against polar bears.

Kayakers in wild temperate regions will have a unique wildlife experience, with possible encounters with seals and basking sharks. You will have the opportunity to view some of the largest sea bird colonies in the northern hemisphere.

The superb wildlife-viewing opportunities are endless in the astonishingly biodiverse nature reserves we visit. Kayaks offer a unique opportunity to view marine and land mammals, coral reefs, tropical fish, sea birds and an astonishing range of rainforest birds. We will bring our snorkelling gear with us during our paddles and take advantage of any opportunities to view marine life up close.

In the unlikely event of a capsize, your experienced guide will assist by righting the kayak, stabilising it then pumping it out. Paddlers will re-enter with the guide’s help, or with a support Zodiac. With drysuits and warm clothing underneath you will be comfortable in cold water for up to half an hour. Note that the kayaks have separate compartments with bulkheads, which means they will float after a capsize.

No. Each kayaking place is for one person only. Passengers are unable to share a kayaking place as we customise the kayaks and dry suits for each individual kayaker at the beginning of each voyage.

Balcony Stateroom Superior

Deck:  4 & 6

Cabin and balcony combined size:  29.2m² – 35.2m² (314.3ft² – 378.9ft²)

Private en-suite (wheelchair accessible)

Private balcony

Full size window

Closet space

Room-controlled thermostat

42″ flat-screen TV

Cabin Inclusion

• 1 x 3-in-1 polar jacket per person (polar voyages only)

Some of these rooms are equipped with wheelchair accessible bathrooms.

*Please note mini bar items are chargeable in all cabins except Junior Suite and Captain’s Suite

10 Things Icelanders HATE About Tourism in Iceland

10. Party and Sex Tourism

9. careless driving because of the northern lights, 8. camping in inappropriate places, 7. defecating anywhere and everywhere, 6. not showering before entering pools, 5. hotels rising all over central reykjavik, 4. people criticizing our food.

• 3. Rising Prices in Iceland

2. Nature Pass or Entry Fees?

1. vandalism in iceland.

Discover how tourism in Iceland has affected the local population. Although travelers have provided Icelanders with many benefits, they've also caused many problems. Find out what Icelanders hate most about tourists and why they're so friendly to visitors despite these problems. Learn what you should avoid doing in Iceland.

• Find out  What to Do & Where to Go in Iceland
• Discover the  Top 11 Tips for Travelling in Iceland
• Get to know the ins and outs of Travel Etiquette in Iceland  

Iceland has experienced an ongoing tourism boom sparked by its currency plummeting after the bank crash in 2008, which suddenly made it much cheaper for foreigners to visit our beautiful country.

First of all, let me stress that this has been positive in many ways. With this growth, many new tourism jobs have been created, helping Iceland get out of the recession and greatly benefiting the people of Iceland . There are also many more people, making Reykjavik and other cities feel lively and fun. Unfortunately, though, for every upside, there's a downside.

Top Adventure Tours in Iceland

Best ice cave tour in vatnajokull glacier starting from jokulsarlon glacier lagoon, inside the volcano thrihnukagigur tour with transfer from reykjavik, small group tour of snaefellsnes national park with transfer from reykjavik.

You may be wondering whether Icelanders are friendly or if they hate American tourists. Of course, Icelanders don't hate tourists. Iceland has been voted the friendliest country to visit in the world! Still, since tourism has grown so fast in Iceland, rapid changes happened very quickly to our society, and not all of them have been good. 

With the overall number of Iceland tourists increasing, the number of bad tourists amid the crowd of good tourists has grown, too. Since people tend to focus on what's wrong, the newspapers are filled with stories about Iceland's tourism problems.

So here is a list of the worst things associated with the Icelandic tourism boom. Hopefully, this article will enlighten you on Iceland's dos and don'ts.

Iceland, and perhaps Reykjavik in particular, has a reputation for being a great place to party. Reykjavik’s  nightlife is notorious, and we do indeed encourage people to check out the great nightlife.

For many years, Iceland has been known for its beautiful women, inspiring many men to visit the country and try their luck with them. But note that Iceland is the most gender-equal country in the world! This equality means that the women are strong and independent—and don't want to be regarded as a piece of meat. Feminism is very strong in Iceland, and the objectification of women is heavily frowned upon.

This combination of pretty women and hardcore nightlife seems somewhat incomprehensible to some tourists who come to Iceland looking for a crazy party place like Ibiza, where music blares 24/7 and people party in the streets. Foreigners on bachelor and bachelorette party trips sometimes come to Iceland thinking it's normal to be drunk on the streets in the middle of the day (it's not).

As an example, the other day, I was waiting for a to-go lunch in a café (that turns into a bar/nightclub during late nights and weekends), surrounded by people of all ages (including kids), when in stormed a few loud and brassy tourists who ordered shots and flirted outrageously with the locals. They even bought shots for a couple of girls (who were having coffee). The girls declined and were visibly uncomfortable when the tourists continued talking to them until the group eventually left.

The guys were probably very decent guys, but they were terrible at reading the room. In Iceland, it's just as likely for girls to hit on guys as for guys to hit on girls—but it's more likely if you stay classy, charming, and respectful!

Don't harass people or show them disrespect.

If you are coming to Iceland for a bachelor party, consider planning your trip around fun activities and nature instead of binge drinking. There are plenty to choose from, such as river rafting , snorkeling , glacier hiking , or snowmobiling .

Maybe this confusion has something to do with Iceland's relaxed attitude towards nudity and sex —best portrayed with the recent #FreeTheNipple campaign, which is fighting for more equality amongst the sexes.

There's nothing wrong with having a few beers and striking up a conversation with the locals—but we recommend soaking up the nature and culture in the daytime and leaving most of the drinking and partying to evenings and weekends. And, obviously, treat people honestly and respectfully!

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From late September to March, we can see one of the most beautiful wonders of nature, the northern lights . These dancing (mostly) green lights in the sky can be seen on nights when there are no clouds.

The less light pollution there is, the better you'll be able to appreciate their beauty. We love that tourists in Iceland come to see the aurora borealis. We don't love it when they get distracted looking for them while driving. That can be dangerous both for the driver and whoever is driving on the same road as them. It's not uncommon for some travelers to crash or accidentally drive off-road, damaging their rental car and the local environment.

Whenever the lights are intense, you can see them. There's no need to be on the road looking for them, neglecting road safety and other cars. If the northern lights are out, you'll see them. 

Top Northern Lights Tours & Holidays

Photo by Pavel Brodsky

Some travelers have been found camping in parking lots and residential areas. As you might imagine, it's illegal to camp in Iceland on someone's private property without permission, and the same applies to camping within city borders outside of designated camping areas.

Camping areas in Iceland are usually cheap (around 7.50 USD to 11.50 USD per person), sometimes even free. They provide essential services such as bathrooms, showers, and cooking facilities. There's also someone looking after the area and making sure it's kept clean.

Do camp at designated camping areas, or make sure you are not camping illegally.

Those people camping illegally in public places, such as on children's school grounds, have left the area a lot worse for wear, full of trash and even human waste. If you are camping, make sure you're at a campsite, which can be found all over the country. Don't try to camp on private property. You wouldn't want random people camping in your garden or outside your office, would you?

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This sounds like a joke, right? Unfortunately, it's true. There have been several news reports about people who decide not to go to public bathrooms for some reason. Instead, they do their business in nature or outside private houses and buildings. As you would guess, they often don't clean up after themselves or hide their "leftovers."

This also goes hand in hand with camping in areas with no bathroom facilities. The travel industry in Iceland has grown so fast that there are perhaps not enough public bathrooms available to people, and some tourists complain about this. The tourism industry is very aware of the issues—and solutions are in the works.

Nonetheless, bathrooms are always free to use. Doing business with the establishments that provide them is encouraged and always appreciated. If you need to use the toilet, just ask politely at the nearest gasoline station, bar, shop, restaurant, or campsite.

Bring plastic bags with you and pick up your poop.

If you are camping in the middle of nowhere and there are no bathrooms around, pick it up with a bag and throw it away in the nearest trash bin (just as you would do while walking your dog). Nobody comes to Iceland to marvel at left-behind poop, leftover food, or toilet paper flying around. That goes for banana peels, too (even though they're biodegradable).

Sometimes people have the best intentions but manage to do more harm than good. Recently one traveler wanted to get rid of his “business” by setting fire to the paper he used. He had read that was the best way to get rid of your toilet paper. Unfortunately, he'd done his business close to very dry and delicate moss, which caught fire.

Don't start any open fires in the wild Icelandic environment.

Setting fire to your toilet paper can be tricky when it's windy, and the fire can quickly spread. A much better solution is to carry small bags with you when you're outdoors.

And there's simply no excuse for those that urinate (or defecate) on the streets or next to buildings. If you're caught, you'll have to pay a fine, no matter how drunk you are or how late at night it is.

Public swimming is a huge part of Icelandic culture, and we take it seriously. There are several public pools in Reykjavik and elsewhere around the country . These heated pools attract a lot of Icelanders year-round, and everyone is welcome.

One important rule is that everyone must shower before getting into the pool. That doesn't mean you can shower at the hotel and come straight to the pool. Everyone has to shower completely naked when they get to the pool facility. Yes, that's right. You have to shower naked in front of a bunch of strangers.

We even have a pool attendant who will ensure no one gets into the water before showering. If you're unsure, there are instructions on how to shower and which body parts deserve special attention. You can bring your own soap, but it's usually provided.

When tourists try to get into a pool without showering—accidentally or otherwise—it will upset us. If the pool attendant catches you, they'll lead you to the shower and make sure that you shower thoroughly. You'll shower nude, but you must have your swimwear on to get into the water.

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Photo by Daniele Buso

This problem lies with city planning and the government rather than individual travelers. The rapid tourism boom in Iceland means that many new hotels are being built in downtown Reykjavik, and sometimes they replace buildings that contribute to the city's character.

Some people in Iceland feel as if downtown Reykjavik is turning into a cluster of hotels, and soon there won't be any attractions left for tourists and locals to enjoy in the city. Icelanders also think that many hotels in Reykjavik are being built rapidly without considering their architectural beauty. It's not a tourist problem, but rather a city planning issue.

Top Reykjavik Tours

Photo from Wikimedia, Creative Commons, by the blanz . No edits were made

Historically, people in Iceland had to fight for survival, as finding food and storing it was a challenge without modern conveniences. They had to eat what they could find, so they ate sharks, sheep's heads, horses, and puffins, to name just a few unusual dishes. Eating was a matter of survival, not something they did for pleasure or curiosity.

Today, we still love our traditional Icelandic food , even though tourists may find it different. So don't criticize us for what we eat; be respectful of our culture. An excellent way to win an Icelander's respect is by trying some of our traditional dishes, like fermented shark or foal's meat.

3. Rising Prices in Iceland

Due to the tourism boom, the cost of living in Iceland is rising. The demand for services is much higher, and the prices for tourism services, such as accommodations, tours, and restaurants, are going up. The same applies to standard drinks like beer and coffee.

It's becoming more and more expensive for Icelanders to live and travel in their own country. We hope we won't have the same tourism problems in Iceland that we've seen in Venice or Barcelona, for example.

Iceland is a small country with a small population. Nature is wild, and we like to keep it that way—historically, there haven't been any entrance fees to national parks and other attractions. Everything was raw and real, so there were hardly any safety measures besides signs and a little rope around the attractions; narrow dirt paths were usually enough to reach any waterfall or hot spring .

With increased tourism in Iceland, all this has to change; Iceland needs infrastructure to deal with the millions of tourists that visit each year. Thousands of people visit Gullfoss waterfall and Geysir each day, so wooden paths have been put up to protect the vulnerable nature in the area. This has also started happening at many other popular tourist attractions.

Maintaining these paths and looking after the area costs money, so the idea of creating a nature pass or charging an entry fee to some (or all) attractions in the country has come up. However, nothing has been decided about the best way to tackle this.

People are upset about possibly having to pay for traveling around the country, as it has always been free, even though it would be a small price to pay to protect our natural environment.

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The worst thing about the growth in tourism in Iceland is the increase in vandalism.

Most vandalism is done by people who don't know any better, so read on and be informed. There are many things you shouldn't do in Iceland's natural areas. You wouldn't break off a piece of coral in the Great Barrier Reef, paint graffiti on the Great Pyramid of Giza, or pick flowers at Versailles.

The Icelandic people are very proud and protective of the natural environment. Unspoiled wild nature is the biggest attraction in Iceland, and Icelanders want to keep it that way. Respect our natural attractions, and we'll respect you! 

Here are some tips for helping us to preserve our precious wild places.

Off-road driving is strictly forbidden and punishable with heavy fines. Driving off-road damages delicate ecosystems. It can take decades for the environment to recover, even if it's “just sand.”

The Icelandic moss is delicate—don't pick it up. Icelandic moss is incredibly thick and soft, so it's tempting to lie in it, but it's also highly delicate, and it takes hundreds of years to grow back. People unaware of that may waltz over it, kicking it up and ruining it—or even picking it up for photos! That photo opportunity means that you've destroyed a piece of the Icelandic landscape.

The most recent case saw a group of tourists picking up the moss to insulate their tents at the National Park and UNESCO World Heritage Site at Thingvellir , leaving ugly bare spots on the ground.

Don't litter. This should be a given, right? Bring a plastic bag or some small container for your cigarette butts, chewing gum, leftover food, and toilet paper (and your poop, too!).

Don't throw coins into lakes or hot springs. There's one gorge in Thingvellir National Park called Peningagja (Money Rift) covered with coins from around the world, and this is the only place where it's acceptable to throw coins.

Some people have thrown coins in hot springs at the Geysir area, waterfalls, or the pool at Reykholt , which is the same as littering and spoiling the natural environment. Just because somebody else did it doesn't make it OK for you to do it, too.

Don't make cairns! Cairns are human-made stacks of rocks. You can find big, old, well-constructed cairns in the countryside, made for people to find their way from hill to hill when hiking in thick fog. These old cairns are easily distinguishable from small, tourist-made cairns.

Small cairns in groups are made by uninformed travelers and ruin the land underneath. The photo below shows an area that used to be green and is now mostly brown. Local people had cleared the area, but the cairns sprung up again in just a few hours. If you see one, kick it down instead of making your own.

Don't jeopardize Icelandic nature or historical places for art. In 2015, artist Marco Evaristti used the Strokkur geyser for his “artwork” by putting red (fruit) dye in the hot spring.

The nation was divided, but many people were furious over this stunt, despite the dye apparently being all-natural and not harmful to the environment. There are no traces left of the color now (as far as we know!). He was arrested and received a fine but left the country without paying it, which also angered many locals.

A plane wreck on the sands in South Iceland has also been painted with graffiti. Although it's not a part of nature, this wreck is beloved by people, as it looks so dramatic in its location and offers excellent photo opportunities.

And another artist, Julian von Bismarck, had a gallery exhibition where he was showing photos of Icelandic nature that had been spray-painted with words like "crater" and "lava." People saw the graffiti and wondered who had done it. The culprit was only found by accident when an Icelandic man went to his gallery exhibition in Berlin.

Hopefully, you've learned more about how to treat Icelandic nature from this article. Make sure you prepare yourself for the country by reading up on it and dressing according to the weather. We don't want you to get lost in nature (and need one of the rescue squads to come and save you).

If you feel like you need more tips about what you should and shouldn't do in Iceland, read our articles about the dumbest things to do in Iceland and how to pack for Iceland . And feel free to give us tips on what we shouldn't do in your home country!

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Travel and tourism in Iceland - statistics & facts

Profile of visitors in iceland, how does tourism contribute to the icelandic economy, key insights.

Detailed statistics

Inbound tourism volume in Iceland 1950-2021

Growth rate of inbound tourism volume in Iceland 2010-2022

Contribution of tourism spending to Icelandic GDP 2010-2021, by type

Editor’s Picks Current statistics on this topic

Current statistics on this topic.

Passenger Air Transport

Market share of selected airlines at airports in Iceland 2022

Accommodation

Number of arrivals in tourist accommodation Iceland 2010-2021

Travel, Tourism & Hospitality

Related topics

Air transport.

• Air transportation industry in Europe
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Cruise tourism

• Cruise industry in Europe
• Cruise industry in the United States
• Cruise industry worldwide

Online travel

• Online travel market
• Digitalization of the travel industry
• Digital nomads

Recommended statistics

Regional overview.

• Premium Statistic Evaluation of the tourism infrastructure in the Nordic countries 2021
• Premium Statistic Evaluation of the tourism enabling environment in the Nordic countries 2021
• Premium Statistic Evaluation of the tourism policy and conditions in the Nordic countries 2021
• Premium Statistic Evaluation of the tourism demand drivers in the Nordic countries 2021
• Premium Statistic Evaluation of the tourism sustainability in the Nordic countries 2021

Evaluation of the tourism infrastructure in the Nordic countries 2021

Rating of the infrastructure for tourism in the Nordic countries in 2021, based on the Travel and Tourism Development Index

Evaluation of the tourism enabling environment in the Nordic countries 2021

Rating of the enabling environment for tourism in the Nordic countries in 2021, based on the Travel and Tourism Development Index

Evaluation of the tourism policy and conditions in the Nordic countries 2021

Rating of the travel and tourism policy and conditions in the Nordic countries in 2021, based on the Travel and Tourism Development Index

Evaluation of the tourism demand drivers in the Nordic countries 2021

Rating of the travel and tourism demand drivers in the Nordic countries in 2021, based on the Travel and Tourism Development Index

Evaluation of the tourism sustainability in the Nordic countries 2021

Rating of the travel and tourism sustainability in the Nordic countries in 2021, based on the Travel and Tourism Development Index

Economic impact

• Basic Statistic Total tourism contribution to GDP in Iceland 2019-2021
• Basic Statistic Total tourism contribution to employment in Iceland 2019-2021
• Premium Statistic Contribution of tourism spending to Icelandic GDP 2010-2021, by type
• Premium Statistic Tourism intensity in Iceland 2010-2021
• Premium Statistic Expenditure of Icelandic households on package holidays 2010-2022

Total tourism contribution to GDP in Iceland 2019-2021

Total contribution of travel and tourism to gross domestic product in Iceland from 2019 to 2021 (in billion ISK)

Total tourism contribution to employment in Iceland 2019-2021

Number of jobs in travel and tourism in Iceland from 2019 to 2021 (in 1,000s)

Tourism expenditure as share of gross domestic product in Iceland from 2010 to 2021, by type

Tourism intensity in Iceland 2010-2021

Average number of inbound and domestic visitors per inhabitant in Iceland from 2010 to 2021

Expenditure of Icelandic households on package holidays 2010-2022

Household consumption of package holidays in Iceland from 2010 to 2022 (in billion ISK)

International tourism

• Premium Statistic Inbound tourism volume in Iceland 1950-2021
• Premium Statistic International tourism volume in Iceland 2012-2021, by point of entry
• Premium Statistic Overnight visitor arrivals in Iceland 2010-2022
• Premium Statistic Main countries of origin among inbound passengers at Keflavik Airport in Iceland 2022
• Premium Statistic Share of inbound passengers at Keflavik Airport in Iceland 2022, by purpose
• Premium Statistic Average length of stay of overnight visitors in Iceland 2022, by country of origin
• Premium Statistic Inbound cruise ship passengers in Iceland 2010-2022

Number of international visitor arrivals in Iceland from 1950 to 2021 (in 1,000s)

International tourism volume in Iceland 2012-2021, by point of entry

Number of international tourists who arrived in Iceland from 2012 to 2021, by point of entry (in 1,000s)

Overnight visitor arrivals in Iceland 2010-2022

Number of tourist arrivals to accommodation establishments in Iceland from 2010 to 2022 (in 1,000s)

Main countries of origin among inbound passengers at Keflavik Airport in Iceland 2022

Leading nationalities among international travelers who arrived at Keflavik Airport in Iceland in 2022 (in 1,000s)

Share of inbound passengers at Keflavik Airport in Iceland 2022, by purpose

Distribution of international travelers who arrived at Keflavik Airport in Iceland in 2022, by travel purpose

Average length of stay of overnight visitors in Iceland 2022, by country of origin

Average number of nights spent by international tourists in Iceland in 2022, by nationality

Inbound cruise ship passengers in Iceland 2010-2022

Number of international cruise ship visitors in Iceland from 2010 to 2022 (in 1,000s)

Domestic tourism

• Premium Statistic Domestic overnight tourism volume in Iceland 2010-2022
• Basic Statistic Overnights by domestic guests in lodgings in Iceland 2010-2022
• Basic Statistic Domestic tourism spending in Iceland 2019-2021

Domestic overnight tourism volume in Iceland 2010-2022

Number of domestic tourist arrivals to accommodation establishments in Iceland from 2010 to 2022 (in 1,000s)

Overnights by domestic guests in lodgings in Iceland 2010-2022

Number of overnight stays by domestic tourists in accommodation establishments in Iceland from 2010 to 2022 (in millions)

Domestic tourism spending in Iceland 2019-2021

Expenditure of domestic tourists in Iceland from 2019 to 2021 (in billion ISK)

• Premium Statistic Monthly hotel offer in Iceland 2019-2022
• Premium Statistic Hotel offer in Iceland 2022, by region
• Premium Statistic Hotel capacity in Iceland 2022, by region
• Premium Statistic Hotel room occupancy in Iceland 2010-2022
• Premium Statistic Hotel room occupancy in Iceland 2022, by region

Monthly hotel offer in Iceland 2019-2022

Number of hotels in Iceland from January 2019 to December 2022

Hotel offer in Iceland 2022, by region

Number of hotels in Iceland in 2022, by region

Hotel capacity in Iceland 2022, by region

Number of rooms offered by hotels in Iceland in 2022, by region

Hotel room occupancy in Iceland 2010-2022

Room occupancy rate of hotels in Iceland from 2010 to 2022

Hotel room occupancy in Iceland 2022, by region

Room occupancy rate of hotels in Iceland in 2022, by region

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About Iceland

Visa information, geography of iceland, general information, the northern lights, volcanic eruptions, sustainable travel, iceland academy, plan your trip, how to get there, accommodation, things to do, map your journey, getting around, visitor numbers, carbon footprint, destinations, the regions, scenic routes, national parks, trip suggestions, towns & villages, inspiration, food and beverages, lbgt+ travel, sustainable travel in iceland.

Icelandic nature is fragile, and so are Iceland's tiny communities and economy in comparison. With tourism being a fast-growing industry in Iceland, it’s crucial to encourage sustainable travel. Therefore, sustainability is a serious matter, but it doesn’t mean we have to stop doing fun things or enjoying life while traveling.

Six tips for a climate-friendly trip to Iceland

Perhaps nowhere underscores the importance of protecting nature like Iceland. While the island’s smattering of volcanos and glaciers make clear the overwhelming power of nature, much of the country’s most striking sites are also surprisingly delicate.

The greenhouse revolution in Iceland

It may be surprising to learn that fresh Icelandic vegetables are available year-round, the quality is outstanding, the products are clean, and even carbon neutral. So how do the vegetable farmers in Iceland manage to do it in the cold climate and even offer competitive prices?

Sustainability certifications and projects

The environmental and quality certifications, ecolabels and declarations help you choose services and products that meet certain sustainability, environmental or communal health standards.

Sustainability travel tips

One of the best ways to visit Iceland sustainably is by visiting the regions, staying for longer, and traveling slowly during the off-season.  Take your time to explore the island, rather than hurrying from sight to sight, trying to do as much as possible in a short time

Public transport

Want to travel in Iceland without a car? Although Iceland has no trains, it is possible to explore the country by bus, ferry, and plane. To do so, it is advisable to plan in advance, especially when traveling during the wintertime.

Icelandic beer - Wild ideas at the arctic circle

Once operating in the shadows, Icelandic beer production has been flourishing in the last three decades. Commercial and microbreweries scattered all over the country, surprise and delight inhabitants as well as visitors with their daring creations, good craftsmanship, and hearty hospitality.

Cycling in Iceland

Travelling around Iceland on two wheels is both challenging and rewarding. There is no better way to experience the beauty of Iceland than from the saddle of your bicycle. But the weather is unpredictable and the distances you'll need to cover can be long.

The Reykjavík Triangle of Hot Resorts

Discover these world-class world spa resorts all within an easy drive of Reykjavík: Sky Lagoon, Blue Lagoon, and Hvammsvík Hot Springs. Submerge yourself in stunning landscapes and rejuvenating geothermal waters for an essential Icelandic experience.

Get inspired

Further articles that might also interest you.

Iceland on a budget

Safe travel in Iceland

Camping in Iceland

The Westfjords Way

The Diamond Circle

Arctic Coast Way

Icelandic bakery guide

Hiking in Iceland

Hiking with a towel - six baths to soak in

Money latest: These are the most in-demand holiday destinations this year

Welcome back to our Money blog, where we bring you all the latest consumer and personal finance news and tips. This week we're kicking off by talking about holidays (seeing as the sun has finally come out), and we're answering a reader's Money Problem on an undeclared management fee.

Monday 6 May 2024 18:30, UK

• Bank of England 'not yet ready to cut interest rates'
• GoFundMe and loan sharks: How Britain's poorest are burying their loved ones in 2024
• The most in-demand holiday destinations this year

Essential reads

• Money Problem: My daughter discovered undeclared £600 management fee after buying her flat - can we complain?
• Cinema first is back - so should movie lovers unsubscribe? 
• 10 biggest mistakes people make in job interviews I Tell us your job interview mistakes/stories/tips in the comments box
• Train strikes in May - everything you need to know

Ask a question or make a comment

Qantas is being forced to pay a £53m penalty along with £20m in compensation to passengers following a legal battle over tickets it sold for cancelled flights. 

The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) sued Qantas last summer, alleging the airline had broken consumer law when it sold tickets for more than 8,000 flights without disclosing they had been cancelled. 

One case saw the airline selling tickets for a Sydney to San Francisco flight some 40 days after it had been cancelled, the ACCC said. 

More than 86,000 customers will share the compensation pot, and will be contacted over the next two months.

Gina Cass-Gottlieb, chair of the ACCC, said the airline's behaviour was "egregious and unacceptable".

"Many consumers will have made holiday, business and travel plans after booking on a phantom flight that had been cancelled," she said.

"We expect that this penalty, if accepted by the court, will send a strong deterrence message to other companies."

Qantas's chief executive Vanessa Hudsons said the agreement was a "step forward" to "restoring confidence" in the airline. 

She said the administrative failings were caused by COVID, and that the airline was "sincerely sorry". 

If you'll be affected by the M25 closure this weekend, it's worth noting that an alternative diversion route could slap you with an unexpected ULEZ charge. 

The M25 will be closed in both directions between Junctions 9 and 10 in Surrey from 9pm on Friday until 6am on Monday. 

Official diversion routes will take drivers on A roads crossing from Surrey into London's ULEZ area, but there will be no enforcement action for anyone taking the official route who does not meet the ULEZ requirements.

However, National Highways has warned anyone ignoring diversion signs in an attempt to find shorter alternative routes will be liable for the £12.50 daily ULEZ fee.

Of course, this does not apply to cars that meet the low emission standards.

The ULEZ was expanded to cover every borough of London last year. 

The UK economy would be better off if there were fewer buy-to-let landlords, the country's biggest investment company has said.

Legal and General Investment Management (LGIM) told The Telegraph that "unscrupulous" landlords were "taking people's deposits and giving them a bad experience". 

Bill Hughes, global head of real assets at L&G, said the rental sector needs an overhaul as too many buy-to-let landlords have been "suboptimal and substandard". 

L&G has built a portfolio of 10,000 build-to-rent homes in the last eight years, and predicts traditional landlords will gradually be replaced by purpose-built rental properties managed by institutions.

Single-sex toilets will be legally required in all new restaurants, bars, offices and shopping centres, the government has announced. 

It is set to change building regulations later this year to make it compulsory for premises to provide separate facilities for men and women. 

The move follows an increase in the use of gender-neutral toilets. 

The UK has installed a record number of public electric car chargers this year, figures show. 

Nearly 6,000 new chargers were installed in the first three months of the year, according to Zapmap analysis of government data. 

Some 1,500 of these were rapid chargers. 

A common concern among those hesitant to switch to electric vehicles is range anxiety or the fear of not being able to find a charger. 

By Emily Mee , Money team

Scroll through GoFundMe and it won't be long before you see them.

There's a widow left with her husband's financial struggles. Three young siblings trying to raise funds for their mum's send-off after her sudden death. A 25-year-old domestic violence victim whose family want to give her the send-off she deserves. 

There are scores of pages like this as an apparently increasing number of Britons struggle with funeral costs.

These costs have risen 126% in the last two decades, according to a recent report from SunLife. 

Where families would once have paid £1,835 for a basic funeral, they are now looking at costs of £4,141 on average. 

"People can't afford to bury their dead," says Pastor Mick Fleming, who runs the charity Church On The Street. 

He frequently spends his time helping families pay for funerals and providing his services as a minister for free, although he says there is simply too much demand for his small charity to help everyone. 

Government or local authority grants are available to help families with funeral costs, but Pastor Mick says these can come too late as undertakers will often require a partial payment upfront. 

There's an even darker side to this, too. 

"What we're now seeing is people who are poor can't walk into the bank and get a bank loan - the economy's tough at the minute," Pastor Mick says. 

"They can't get legitimate access to money so they can't borrow it and pay a decent standard rate back, so they have to go to loan sharks."

Many then find it impossible to pay the loan back and face threats from the criminals who lent them the money, says Pastor Mick.

He recalls: "There was a middle-aged lady, she had to borrow the money to bury her son. 

"She couldn't pay the money back so then she started to get threatened and intimidated. People turning up at the house. 

"It was pretty horrendous. She was getting suicidal. She was heartbroken already and she just couldn't get the money together."

The pastor says he was able to negotiate on her behalf - something he is now having to do as part of his charity work - but "you can't do that for everybody". 

A funeral without a service

The number of funeral-related fundraisers increased by 22% on GoFundMe last year, figures shared with Sky News reveal. 

Individual donations to these fundraisers increased by almost 400,000.

Many of these are trying to avoid their loved one being given a public health funeral, which is what happens if families are unwilling or unable to pay. 

Local authorities are legally obliged to carry out funerals in this case, but they are given little guidance from the government on what this should entail - meaning each council will have its own policy on what is or isn't included. 

In some cases, a service will not be offered and a person will be cremated or buried without the presence of family members. 

Other times, the family may be allowed to attend but they might not be able to get involved in the service. 

Generally, people will be cremated, unless they have asked not to be for religious or cultural reasons. 

Those who are buried will often have a grave with no marker, or they may be placed in a communal grave. 

"For someone that's lost a child or a husband or a wife or any loved one where you just haven't been able to provide closure, there's a sense of guilt that goes with it," Pastor Mick says.

As long as funeral costs remain eye-wateringly high, families across the country will be dealing with that guilt. 

This week will see the Bank of England announce its latest interest rates decision - and experts believe borrowers will have to wait longer to see rates come down. 

Policymakers appear set to hold out for stronger signs the cost-of-living crisis has abated, with economists widely expecting the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) to keep rates at the current level of 5.25%. 

Rates have been held at this level since August last year. 

At the last meeting in March, just one member of the MPC voted for rates to be cut by 0.25 percentage points, but the remaining eight members voted for no change.

Philip Shaw, chief economist at Investec, said: "This broad direction illustrates that collectively the committee is moving gradually towards a rate cut.

"It seems unlikely though to be ready to bite the bullet just yet and the Bank rate looks set to remain on hold at 5.25% for the sixth consecutive meeting."

Andrew Goodwin, chief UK economist for Oxford Economics, said data on services inflation and private sector regular pay growth has "likely extinguished any remaining hopes of a move in May".

As for whether rates could be cut in June or August, he said it is likely to be a "close call". 

Economists at HSBC are also expecting the first rate cut to come in June.

Interest rates are used as a tool to help bring down UK inflation. 

The brewing giant has announced it will invest £39m in revamping 600 of its pubs across the UK - a move that will create more than 1,000 new jobs. 

The investment plan will also see pubs in its retail arm, Star Pubs & Bars, revitalised to appeal to those working from home. 

Sixty-two pubs will be reopened this year and 94 sites are set for full refurbishments. 

The remaining pubs will receive varying upgrades. 

Heineken said it wanted to "broaden each pub's use and appeal" in response to an increase in people working from home, giving customers more reason to visit throughout the day.

The refurbished pubs will have dividing screens to create separate areas for different types of customers. 

Lawson Mountstevens, chief executive at Star Pubs & Bars, said: "Fundamentally, the changes in people's working habits means that in a lot of these suburban locations, you've got more people who are around those areas a lot more.

"It's not rocket science. Those people are looking for pubs of a certain standard."

Aldi remained the cheapest supermarket last month, new analysis shows. 

The retailer has won the crown of cheapest supermarket every month so far this year, according to research by Which?. 

An average basket of 67 popular groceries cost £112.90 - more than £30 cheaper than the most expensive supermarket, Waitrose. 

A basket of comparable items in Waitrose would cost £144.13 on average. 

Here is the breakdown for each supermarket... 

• Aldi - £112.90
• Lidl - £115.23 
• Asda - £126.98
• Tesco - £128.17 
• Sainsbury's - £131.02 
• Morrisons - £134.87 
• Ocado - £136.86 
• Waitrose - £144.13. 

Food price inflation has slowed to 4.5%, its lowest level since February 2022. 

Despite being the most expensive, Waitrose and Ocado were the only grocers to win new shoppers in the first three months of the year, according to research by Kantar. 

Every Monday we get an expert to answer your money problems or consumer disputes. Find out how to submit yours at the bottom of this post. Today's question is...

"My daughter recently bought a flat and has since learnt there is an extra £600 a year management fee that was not declared by the vendor during the sales process. We have been told that the vendor was heavily involved in negotiating the management contract. Can we complain?" J Mills

Serena Amani, managing director at Monarch Solicitors , has this advice...

The general principle when buying a property is "buyer beware", which means the onus is on the buyer to perform their due diligence before contracting to purchase.

The buyer's conveyancing solicitor interrogates the contractual documentation and raises relevant enquiries to ensure the full facts and obligations are available to the buyer to make an informed decision.

In this situation, it appears the seller has failed to disclose the management fee - we assume relating to the services provided to the estate.

We can't give specific advice as we don't have access to the contractual documentation. However, we would suggest:

• To check if the obligation to pay a management fee is set out in the lease if it is a leasehold property, or the transfer deed if it is a freehold property. These documents should contain what services are provided and what the related charges are. The most common scenario is that of a leasehold flat. In this situation the services shall be set out under the service charges section. Generally, there is a provision that allows a management company to charge a management fee as a percentage of the overall service charge bill which is shared among all the leaseholders based on the size of their apartment.
• If the obligation to pay the management fee is in the contract and your conveyancer failed to notify you of this obligation, there is a potential negligence claim against the conveyancer which can be pursued through their complaints process and escalated to the legal ombudsman.
• In the rare instance that the management fee is not stipulated in the contract, then you may wish to contact the management company to obtain certified accounts for the services provided and ask them on what contractual basis they are charging a management fee. Management companies are obliged by statute to provide this information.
• If there is no contractual basis or the fees are unreasonable then you may consider bringing a claim before the property tribunal. The tribunal has the power to make a ruling on the reasonability of the management fees. It should be noted that it can be a long and arduous process and legal fees are not always recoverable even if successful.
• Where a seller has supplied misleading information about a property that materially influenced the decision to purchase the property, this could give rise to a claim for misrepresentation. Likewise, intentional concealment of this information during the sales process could constitute a breach of contract or misrepresentation. 

For more specific advice, you may wish to contact a property lawyer experienced in the conveyancing process and service charge disputes.

This feature is not intended as financial advice - the aim is to give an overview of the things you should think about.  Submit your dilemma or consumer dispute via - and please leave your contact details as we cannot follow up consumer disputes without them.

• The form above - make sure you leave a phone number or email address
• Email [email protected] with the subject line "Money blog"
• WhatsApp us  here .

The long-awaited arrival of the sun in the last few days may have got you thinking ahead to the summer... which for many means holidays.

New analysis sent to the Money team has revealed the holiday resorts that Britons have been searching for over the last few months - although it's not a particularly sun-soaked destination that has come out on top.

Amsterdam is the most in-demand holiday destination for the UK, according to a study by Desert Safari Dubai Tours. 

The company looked at Google search data over the past 12 months to find which holiday destinations were most popular in the UK, using terms such as "holidays to", "flights to" and "trips to". 

Some 57,507 searches were carried out each month for trips to Amsterdam. 

The second most in-demand was Dubai , with an average of 52,544 monthly searches. 

Here is the rest of the list...

• New York - 51,169 
• Paris - 43,326 
• Tenerife - 43,305
• Barcelona - 41,664
• Dublin - 38,801
• Gran Canaria - 33,907
• Milan - 28,549
• Istanbul - 28,097

Meanwhile, data from holiday booking site Expedia suggests Britons are chasing the sun over the summer. 

Its trending destination data shows a 50% increase in searches for mainland Greece - while its islands of Santorini and Corfu remain popular. 

Interest is also surging in Mediterranean gem Malta (up 25%), seen as a more affordable destination. 

Searches are also up 50% for Albania , which has seen a surge in interest due to social media. 

The short-haul hotspot of Tunis has seen searches rocket by 130%. 

We're back for another week of consumer news, personal finance tips and all the latest on the economy.

This is how the week in the Money blog is shaping up...

Today : Every week we ask industry experts to answer your Money Problems . Today, a Money blog reader believes they may have been misled when buying their flat - but what can they do?

Tuesday : This week's  Basically...  explains everything you need to know about the Bank of England, ahead of Thursday's base rate decision. 

Wednesday : We speak to the chef at Tom Kerridge's two-starred pub The Hand And Flowers in Buckinghamshire for his Cheap Eats.

Thursday : It's decision day for the Bank of England, and while interest rates are expected to be held at 5.25%, we may learn more about when a cut will come.  Savings Champion  founder Anna Bowes will be back with her weekly insight into the savings market.

Friday : We will be getting the latest GDP figures on this day - which could signal the UK is no longer in recession. Plus, we'll have everything you need to know about the mortgage market this week with the guys from Moneyfacts.

Running every weekday, Money features a morning markets round-up from the  Sky News business team  and regular updates and analysis from our business, City and economic correspondents, editors and presenters -  Ed Conway ,  Mark Kleinman ,  Ian King ,  Paul Kelso  and  Adele Robinson .

You'll also be able to stream  Business Live with Ian King  weekdays at 11.30am and 4.30pm.

Bookmark  news.sky.com/money  and check back from 8am, and through the day, each weekday.

The Money team is Emily Mee, Bhvishya Patel, Jess Sharp, Katie Williams, Brad Young and Ollie Cooper, with sub-editing by Isobel Souster. The blog is edited by Jimmy Rice.

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