Reykjavík When Your Tour Gets Called Off
You have four hours of daylight, a gale outside and a refund pending. The Reykjavík plan-B day that locals actually use, and the two tours that still run.
By Björn Einarsson, Icelandic guide & winter tour specialist
Eight in the morning, a hotel lobby on Skólavörðustígur, eleven people in waterproofs holding a message that says their day tour has been cancelled. Outside, the wind is throwing rain up the street rather than down it. Somebody asks the receptionist what there is to do in Reykjavík, and the honest answer is: more than you think, but not what you had planned.
TL;DR: a cancelled day is not a wasted one. The two things that most often still run are the whale boats out of the Old Harbour and the lagoon transfers on the Reykjanes side. In the city itself, four hours of usable daylight goes further on foot than people expect, and the local answer to filthy weather has always been to get into hot water and stay there.
What should you not miss in Reykjavík on a day like this?
Three things carry a bad-weather day: a neighbourhood swimming pool, one good indoor hour at Hallgrímskirkja or Harpa, and a proper meal you were not planning to eat. Everything else is optional. The city is small enough that you can walk between all of them in a gale, and short enough on daylight that you should.
Reykjavík is a compact place. The stretch from Hallgrímskirkja down Skólavörðustígur to Laugavegur and out to the harbour is a twenty-five minute walk end to end, and every indoor thing worth doing sits on or near that line. That matters when the wind is up, because it means you are never more than a few minutes from a door.
The mistake is trying to replicate the tour you lost. You cannot see a glacier from the city, and driving out to half-substitute one in bad conditions is exactly the decision the operator just declined to make on your behalf. Take the day the city offers instead.
What still runs when the roads shut?
The Old Harbour whale boats and the geothermal lagoons on the Reykjanes side, most of the time. They are close, they do not depend on Route 1 being open, and the lagoons are indifferent to weather. Boats are the exception in a genuine sea storm, when the harbour stands down too.
| Activity | Usually runs in bad weather? | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Whale watching, Old Harbour | Often, unless the sea is bad | Three hours, departs from the city itself |
| Blue Lagoon with transfers | Usually | Short transfer, and the water does not care about wind |
| Sky Lagoon | Usually | Even closer to town |
| City pools and museums | Always | Indoors or geothermally heated |
| Raufarhólshellir lava tunnel | Almost always | Underground, half an hour from the city, year-round |
| South Coast and glacier days | First to be cancelled | Long exposed drives east |
| Northern lights | Weather-dependent by definition | You need a clear sky, not just an open road |
Whale watching from the Old Harbour runs all year in Faxaflói Bay, which surprises people who assume it is a summer thing. It is three hours, it leaves from a ten-minute walk from most of the city centre, and it is genuinely cold on deck, so wear everything. The whale watching tours category rates 4.4 across 7,181 reviews, and the Elding classic at 4.6 across 2,865 Viator reviews is available to check for your dates on Viator.
The other one worth knowing about is underground. Raufarhólshellir, the lava tunnel about half an hour east of the city, runs year-round and does not care what the sky is doing, which makes it the closest thing Iceland has to a weather-proof excursion; check the tour and its dates here if your morning has just been cancelled. It is a separate booking from anything on the main tour pages, and at 4.8 across 2,595 reviews it is better rated than most of what it is replacing.
How do you use four hours of daylight in a gale?
Front-load the outdoor bits. In December you get about 4 hours of usable light, and in January about 5.5, so put the walk, the church tower and the harbour into the light and save the museum and the pool for the dark. Reversing that order wastes the only bright hours you have.
| Roughly when | Do this | Why then |
|---|---|---|
| 11:00 to 12:00 | Hallgrímskirkja and the tower view | The light is at its best just after it arrives |
| 12:00 to 13:30 | Walk Skólavörðustígur and Laugavegur, eat | Shops and cafés are shelter as much as attraction |
| 13:30 to 15:00 | Old Harbour, Sun Voyager, the sea air | Still light, and this is where the boats go from |
| 15:00 to 16:30 | A museum, or Harpa's glass hall | The light is going anyway |
| 16:30 onwards | Swimming pool, then dinner | This is the local sequence, in that order |
Harpa is the reliable one on a wet afternoon. You can walk into the foyer without a ticket to anything and stand inside that glass honeycomb while the harbour weather goes sideways outside, and it costs nothing. Kolaportið, the weekend flea market, works the same way if your cancelled day happens to be a Saturday or Sunday.
Where do Icelanders actually go when the weather is foul?
To the pool. Every neighbourhood has a geothermally heated outdoor pool with hot tubs at different temperatures, they open early and close late, and a bus fare or a short walk gets you there. Sitting in 40°C water while sleet lands on your head is not endurance, it is the point.
This is the single most underrated thing in the city and the cheapest. Entry is a few hundred krónur rather than a lagoon ticket, the water is the same geothermal supply, and it is where locals actually are. Laugardalslaug is the big one with the most tubs. Sundhöllin is the handsome old indoor and outdoor one in the centre.
Learn the shower rule before you go: you wash thoroughly, without a swimsuit, before entering the water. It is not negotiable, the signs are explicit, and getting it wrong is the fastest way to be told off by a grandmother in your holiday.
If you want the lagoon version rather than the neighbourhood version, the Blue Lagoon tours rate 4.6 across 9,299 reviews, and the ICELANDIA admission with transfers at 4.6 across 5,072 GetYourGuide reviews is worth checking for the same afternoon, though note it needs two days' notice to cancel rather than the usual 24 hours.
Is the volcanic activity a problem for a city day?
No. The Reykjanes eruptions since December 2023 have been south-west of the city, none has closed Keflavík airport, and Reykjavík itself has never been under threat. The practical effect on a visitor is occasional precautionary closures at the Blue Lagoon, which are announced rather than discovered on arrival.
Check two pages before you set off, not ten. The official Reykjanes eruption status from safetravel.is is the authoritative one, and the Blue Lagoon's own seismic activity page says whether it is open today. Everything else you will read is somebody quoting one of those two, badly.
There is no viewing tour to book on a whim, and eruption sites are closed to the public when they are active. Anyone offering you a same-day trip to see lava is selling a walk to a hillside where you will see steam at best.
What does a plan-B day cost?
Less than the tour you lost, if you keep it local. A restaurant meal runs roughly 3,000 to 5,000 ISK, a beer roughly 1,200 to 1,500, and a bus fare roughly 500 to 1,000. A neighbourhood pool costs a fraction of a lagoon ticket and gives you the same water.
| Item | Rough range | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Restaurant meal | 3,000 to 5,000 ISK | Lunch menus are much cheaper than dinner |
| Beer | 1,200 to 1,500 ISK | Happy hours are a genuine local sport |
| City bus fare | 500 to 1,000 ISK | Cards accepted, no need for coins |
| Tap water | Free | Excellent, and bottled water here is a con |
| Tipping | Not expected | Service is included, nobody is offended |
Two spending notes that save real money. Tap water is superb, so refuse the bottle. And tipping is not part of the culture, so the number on the bill is the number you pay.
How do you rebook without wrecking the rest of the trip?
Rebook the same evening rather than the next morning, and move the cancelled tour forward rather than back. Everyone who lost today is booking tomorrow tonight, and popular winter departures do sell out, so being three hours quicker than the crowd genuinely matters.
If your itinerary has no spare day left to move into, that is the planning lesson rather than the weather's fault, and it is the argument made at length in the day the weather cancelled everything. The broader version of the same lesson sits in what I wish I knew before my first Iceland winter.
A cancelled day is also the moment to check whether you are dressed for the rest of the week, because most people discover their coat is wrong on exactly this kind of morning. The wet-denim version of that discovery is in why nobody wears jeans in Iceland, and how little light you are working with each day is set out in the Iceland daylight hours guide.
If the aurora is what got cancelled rather than the day tour, the retry rules are different and usually in your favour, which the northern lights tours page explains alongside the departures themselves. And the questions people send us most often after a cancellation are answered on the FAQ page.