About This Site
An independent guide to Iceland's winter tours: aurora chases, natural ice caves, glacier hikes, Golden Circle and South Coast days, lagoons, whales, snowmobiles and multi-day packages, every one checked against the operator's own listing.
Björn Einarsson, the person behind the picks
I am an Icelander, and I have guided professionally here since 2020. Since 2022 my work has been on the South Coast and out into the glacier country of the south-east, the long road that runs past Seljalandsfoss and Skógafoss and Reynisfjara and eventually reaches Jökulsárlón. By my own count I have taken more than a thousand international visitors down it. That figure is mine, self-reported, and I would rather say so than dress it up as an audited statistic.
What I actually know is the winter version of this island. When a road closes and how long it stays shut. Why a cave that was spectacular in January is gone by April. Why the aurora tour that gets the four-star reviews is often the one with the better second-chance policy rather than the better minibus. How much you can genuinely fit into five hours of daylight, which is less than every itinerary you have read promises.
Experience and credentials
- Icelandic local, guiding professionally since 2020
- South Coast and glacier-country guiding since 2022 (these are two separate dates and I keep them separate)
- More than 1,000 international travellers guided, by my own count
- Working knowledge of winter road and weather calls, ice cave seasonality, aurora conditions and the logistics of a short winter day
- Reads every listing on this site in the original before anything is written about it
These credentials are my own professional record, supplied by me rather than certified by anyone else.
The thing I want to be clear about first
I do not run the tours on this site. Not one of them. They belong to BusTravel Iceland, Arctic Adventures, Troll Expeditions, Gray Line Iceland, Reykjavík Excursions, ICELANDIA, Mountaineers of Iceland, Elding, Special Tours, Nicetravel, DIVE.IS, Snowmobile.is, Guide to Iceland, Local Guide of Vatnajökull, Ice Explorers, Your Day Tours, Troll.is, Northern Lights Bus and David The Guide.
So when a page here says something in the first person, it means: this is what I have seen on that road, this is what I tell visitors, this is how I read that listing. It never means I was driving that bus. Plenty of affiliate sites blur that line and I would rather not, because the moment you cannot tell which parts are first-hand, none of the page is worth much.
How the checking actually works
The rules this site holds itself to, in plain language:
- Ratings are the platforms' own. When a card says "4.8 across 12,306 GetYourGuide reviews", that is the listing's current figure, read off the live page and attributed as such. Never rounded up, never estimated, never borrowed from a similar product.
- No printed prices. Tour prices move with date, season and currency, so no page here prints one. Every card routes to the operator's listing, where today's real price sits.
- A listing with no reviews says so. One multi-day package on this site has no published rating. Its card carries no star block and no rating markup, and it says plainly that there is nothing to judge it on yet. The alternative would have been to quietly use the operator's Tripadvisor score, which is a different thing entirely.
- Seasonal facts come from primary sources. Daylight hours, aurora windows, ice cave seasons, road closure rules and winter tyre dates come from the Icelandic Met Office, the Road Administration, safetravel.is and Visit Iceland, tracked internally with the date each was checked.
- Honesty about chance. The aurora is not a scheduled event. Natural ice caves are not a permanent attraction. Winter tours get cancelled. No page here claims otherwise, because no honest Icelandic operator does either.
- Disclosed affiliate model. We earn a commission when you book through our links, at no extra cost to you. It is disclosed in the footer of every page and set out fully on the disclosure page.
What this site is not
Not a tour operator. Not a booking platform. Not affiliated with Visit Iceland or any government body. The tours listed here are run by the operators named above and sold through their official GetYourGuide and Viator listings, and your booking, payment, changes and support all happen there, which is how it should be.
The commercial arrangement is straightforward and you should know it while reading: if you book through a link here, we earn a commission from the platform. That is why you will find pages on this site telling you to drive yourself to the Golden Circle and to skip Húsavík whale watching in January. A recommendation only means something if the site is willing to make the ones that cost it money.
Found a stale figure, or a listing that changed under us? Tell us. Fixing that quickly is the entire reputation of a site like this.