This is a post that I’ve had in mind since February, when Iceland’s biggest tour operator massively dropped the ball on me. I say “biggest”. I don’t have figures to back that up but the buses are everywhere and so are the leaflets.
I first went to Iceland in December 2011 when there were only half a dozen airlines flying into Keflavik and there were two prominent tour companies ferrying tourists from Reykjavik to assorted beautiful places. Not as many beautiful places as nowadays. The one I went with was Iceland Excursions, operating name of multinational travel brand Gray Line. They had a sales office right in the heart of downtown Reykjavik and their buses started and ended their adventures in the huge car park next door. The second was Reykjavik Excursions, operating name of local company Kynnisferðir. These days, you’ll hardly even notice Gray Line, who’ve dropped their local name and moved most of their operations either to the suburbs or to the Bus Hostel. The downtown sales office is still there but it’s a bit of a ghost building these days. They have one airport bus leaving per hour and when you do see them, it’ll almost certainly be part of their new group, combined with Reykjavik Sightseeing and Airport Direct.
Reykjavik Excursions, hereafter simply called RE, has continued expanding and I don’t think it’s done them too many favours. Their Flybus buses sit by the door of the airport and as soon as one is full, another takes its place, pretty much 24/7. It has small city buses that pick up hundreds of tourists and deliver them to the huge BSI bus station and throughout morning and evening, one coachload after another will set out.
But they’re by no means the only players these days. GT Travel, formerly Guðmundur Tyrfingsson, has always been more of a charter company but you’ll see them around. I went out in April 2022 with Your Day Tours and this winter with Holiday Tours. Arctic Adventures have expanded from sticking mostly to the glacial regions to operating as many tours as any others as have Adventures.com. BusTravel Iceland, Iceland Travel and Tröll Expeditions have all appeared from somewhere in recent years and that’s to say nothing of the dozens of smaller companies you’ll see parked next to all the major attractions. Oh, and I missed Trex! Trex mostly operates buses to Þórsmörk and Landmannalaugar rather than tours but you’ll certainly see them around.
In some ways, therefore, it’s never been easier to experience Iceland. Wherever you want to go or whatever you want to do, there’s a tour company who will pick you up from outside your hotel and take you there and there’s now enough competition that you can be choosy about which of those tour companies you go with. Of course, this supply exists to keep up with demand. In 2011, tourism was still only Iceland’s third biggest industry. By 2019, tourism represented 35% of Iceland’s total exports of goods and services, with aluminium smelting in second place at 32% and fishing at 24%. Tourism dropped to 17% in 2021 but a global pandemic and worldwide lockdowns will have that effect. In 2012, there were 672,000 international visitors to Iceland. In 2022, that number was 1.7m and if it hadn’t been for COVID, it would have been higher – it plummeted to 490,00 in 2020 after reaching an all-time high of 2.3m in 2018. This, on a population on 1st January 2022 of 367,000 is both astonishing and horrifying. Last year, tourists outnumbered locals in Iceland by nearly five to one.
That’s why there are so many tour companies. There are so many tourists! Where once you could park in a lay-by scratched out of the black sand, there’s now a full-sized car park, with pay and display machines and tour buses parked on the road outside because they can’t get in. That pristine waterfall now has a couple of hundred people blocking all possible photo angles. A kiosk selling a few bits and pieces is now a mini-mall. Now you need to look beyond the usual tourist haunts to the new tourist haunts that have been created for the specific purpose of catering to too many visitors. I think I’ve done the post on this but at last count, there were ten geothermal baths in Iceland – the purpose-built overpriced variety catering to people like me, not natural hot springs used by the locals – and seven of those ten have opened since my first visit in 2011.
Back in 2011, it was plausible for tour buses to pick up from the doors of hotels. Now it’s barely an exaggeration to say one in every three buildings in central Reykjavik is a hotel and there are so many tourists that the industry has created a system of tourist bus stops within a short walk of practically every hotel, guesthouse and Airbnb, and hundreds of people gather at these bus stops to be crammed onto shuttle buses between about 7am and lunchtime and then it starts again between about 5 and 8pm.
Back in 2011, the tour companies still felt like friends and family. I left a neck cushion on an airport bus once. Gray Line replied within a couple of hours, had it delivered to the downtown office and I fetched it later that day. I saw the same tour guides multiple times. I got to know some of them – Matthias, who did my caving trip in 2012 and my Þórsmörk trip in 2013 is still a guide with them to this day. Back then, I felt like they could be my emergency contact in Iceland, the people who’d move heaven and earth to help me if anything bad happened.
Fast-forward to 2023. I had an evening trip booked with RE. They were picking me up from bus stop 3, delivering me to the BSI terminal and from there I would get on a bus bound for Laugavegur Fontana. After a warm bath, we would drive home hoping to see Northern Lights although the night was cloudy and we knew it wasn’t going to happen.
What actually happened was that I was picked up by the wrong shuttle – which had turned up before the shuttle I should have been on otherwise I wouldn’t have been there to get on it – and somehow by the time we’d driven straight to the BSI from a mile or two away, the tour bus had already left. Now, I see that they might be confused that their tourist was on the wrong shuttle but it arrived earlier than the one I should have been on and therefore I’d have definitely missed the bus on the shuttle I was meant for. I sprinted through the BSI to find no buses. I knew immediately that I was late but if your shuttle buses are late, you have to delay your tour buses.
So I was already annoyed but what pushed me over the edge was that one of the service team came out from behind the desk and headed upstairs, spying me standing there bewildered and said something along the lines of “The bus is gone. You are too late *shrug*”.
Such customer service! Many responsibility! Wow!
Honey, it’s not my fault! It’s your shuttle bus that got me here late! Even today, even in its depleted state, Gray Line would try to get hold of missing passengers before blithely heading off into the night. Gray Line would at the very least wait until all its shuttle buses had returned. So I went to the customer service desk and waited until someone appeared. Now followed the slowest process ever. It took a good twenty minutes for this good-hearted but dim woman to figure out what had happened and then get in touch with the driver. No, the bus wasn’t coming back for me. They could send me out with a private shuttle bus to catch up with them but it would be at least anothert en minutes before that happened and that meant it really wasn’t worth trying to get to the geothermal bath and as there were no Northern Lights, it really was a waste of time. They could rebook me for tomorrow, though. Except I knew – as the person who doesn’t work for this company – that this tour doesn’t run tomorrow. Today is the only slot I could possibly do. So she thought hard, screwed up her face and I watched the cogs turning, and she eventually came up with “I could book you onto a different tour?”. So we replaced it with the Sky Lagoon transfer tomorrow. That would cost more – and then the cog ticked on another notch – “but as a gesture of goodwill, we won’t charge you the extra”.
Even at the time, I felt the sarcasm coming up from the soles of my boots as I replied “Very generous of you”.
Because my original trip included a Northern Lights hunt and because I wouldn’t have seen them and that’s their policy, she also booked me onto an ordinary Northern Lights hunt for the day after tomorrow. That’s been standard procedure for years – if you don’t see Lights, you can have another go for free, but you don’t get the fun extras like the trip to Fontana or the whale watching or whatever, you just get the Lights. And finally, realising I’d arrived here somehow by shuttle bus, she arranged a minibus to take me home – or in this case, to wherever I might like to go within the city limits instead of the tour I should have been on. So I had a private minibus up to Laugadalslaug and at least got to sit in a hot tub in the dark while the sky turned into a dizzying swirl of snowflakes.
I’m not going to fault the second lady. She was incredibly slow and she kept disappearing into the back office with my phone or my confirmation for ages but she made an effort to fix things and if she’d been the first person I encountered, I’d have been annoyed that she hadn’t been quick enough to get the bus back but I wouldn’t have been incandescent. Failing your passenger by getting them to their tour late and leaving them behind is a huge black mark. The *shrug* was what made me decide I’m never travelling with Reykjavik Excursions again.
I mention the incident because 1) I’m still boiling over it four months later but 2) because I think it shows the difference between how a big tour company treats its customers now compared to how it might have done ten years ago. As demand grows and the money grows and the company grows, it begins more and more to treat the people sitting in its seats as disposable money dispensers and no more.
I’ll still go out and about with Gray Line. That’s getting harder because they simply don’t offer as many day tours as they used to. They’ve been edged out by the big powerful companies like RE and the dozens of upstarts and they were once the best tour company in the country. I suspect losing their big obvious prominent downtown location – the car park is now a labyrinth of shiny new shops – put the nail in their particular coffin. They did three or four, maybe more, Golden Circle tours a day – a full day one, an afternoon one, an evening one and maybe even a morning one. I’ll admit, there are still three departures but they’re all in the morning and I bet they don’t fill one executive coach, let alone the half-dozen that RE send out every day. A lot of their trips are just transfers – they’re not actually doing a tour of Perlan or the Lava Show or FlyOver and they’re definitely not guiding you around the Blue or Sky Lagoons. They don’t seem to do any of what I call the “Northern Lights and…” tours.
I’m a big proponent of day tours and if you’re trying to make up the environmental impact of your flight, a group tour is better than everyone doing it solo by hiring a car, plus you get a tour guide who can explain what you’re seeing and make sure you’re safe and sensible. But I don’t think the last decade has been particularly kind to either of Iceland’s biggest tour companies and the reality is that if I was there in the summer, I would take my tent and hire a car and in the winter, I’d probably end up using the newer and smaller companies. The day tour is not what it used to be and neither are the companies who operate them.