Who Actually Runs These Iceland Tours
A handful of Icelandic companies run most departures, and GetYourGuide and Viator resell them. That is why one tour shows up under four names at four prices.
By Björn Einarsson, Icelandic guide & winter tour specialist
Two people stopped me outside a hotel on Laugavegur last winter holding up their phones, one screen each, asking which of the two tours was better. It was the same tour. Same operator, same pickup time, same coach. Two different websites, two different names for it, and a price gap between them big enough that they had assumed one must be a downgrade.
TL;DR: a fairly small number of real Icelandic companies run almost every departure out of Reykjavík. GetYourGuide and Viator do not run tours, they resell them, which is why the same product appears repeatedly under different titles at different prices. There is no single "best tour company for Iceland", because the honest answer changes by category. Learn to find the operator's name on a listing, read the review count as carefully as the score, and you will pick better than any top-ten list will pick for you. And yes, this site earns a commission when you book. That is stated plainly below.
What is the best tour company for Iceland?
There isn't one, and anybody who names a single winner is guessing or being paid. Iceland's tour market splits by category, and the companies that are strong at aurora buses are not the ones that are strong at glacier ice or diving. The useful question is which operator is best at the specific thing you want to do.
I have watched this question get answered badly for years. A blog names one company as the best in Iceland, and that company happens to run the largest affiliate programme. The real quality picture is far more granular. A coach operator with hundreds of drivers can be excellent at moving four hundred people to the South Coast and mediocre at a small-group aurora chase, because those are different businesses that happen to share a garage.
Across the tours we track, the highest-rated categories are not the most-booked ones, and the lowest-rated category is the one where nature makes the promise instead of the company.
| Category | Rating across all listings | Flagship product and operator |
|---|---|---|
| Silfra snorkelling | 4.9 across 10,897 | Silfra: Snorkeling Between Tectonic Plates, DIVE.IS |
| South Coast day tours | 4.8 across 20,757 | Waterfalls, Black Sand & Glacier, BusTravel Iceland |
| Multi-day winter packages | 4.8 across 1,146 | 3-Day Ice Cave and Northern Lights, Troll Expeditions |
| Glacier hiking | 4.7 across 3,013 | Sólheimajökull Blue Ice, Arctic Adventures |
| Golden Circle | 4.6 across 9,939 | Golden Circle Classic, Gray Line |
| Blue Lagoon transfers | 4.6 across 9,299 | Admission with Transfers, ICELANDIA |
| Whale watching | 4.4 across 7,181 | The Original Classic, Elding |
| Ice caves | 4.4 across 4,774 | Jökulsárlón: Vatnajökull Ice Cave |
| Snowmobiling | 4.4 across 713 | Langjökull from Gullfoss, Mountaineers of Iceland |
| Northern lights | 4.2 across 19,497 | Bus Tour with Hot Cocoa, 4.3 across 14,847 GYG reviews |
Look at the bottom row. Aurora tours score lowest across nearly twenty thousand reviews, and it is not because those operators are worse. It is because the sky fails to perform and people rate the sky. Anyone naming a "best northern lights company" is selling you a weather forecast.
Who are the companies actually running the departures?
Most Reykjavík winter departures come from a group of Icelandic operators you can name on one page: BusTravel Iceland, Arctic Adventures, Troll Expeditions, Gray Line Iceland, Reykjavík Excursions, ICELANDIA, Mountaineers of Iceland, Elding, Special Tours, DIVE.IS and a handful of smaller specialists. They own the vehicles, employ the guides and hold the permits.
That last part is the bit that matters. Running a glacier trip in Iceland means vehicles, insurance, trained guides and, for ice caves, one of the roughly thirty permits that exist for that work. You cannot spin one up for a season. So the pool of companies stays fairly stable from winter to winter, even as the number of listings you can see online keeps growing.
Which is why, if a natural blue ice cave is the reason you are coming, the choice is narrower than the search results suggest: the four departures on our Vatnajökull ice cave tours page come from a small set of permit holders, and picking between them is really a choice of vehicle, group size and how far east you are willing to sleep.
Alongside the big coach operators sit the specialists. Elding does whale watching out of the old harbour. DIVE.IS does Silfra. Mountaineers of Iceland does Langjökull snowmobiles. Local Guide of Vatnajökull and Ice Explorers work the glacier east. Smaller names like Nicetravel, Your Day Tours, Northern Lights Bus and David The Guide run their own vehicles too, usually with fewer departures and smaller groups.
Names you will also meet online, like Guide to Iceland and Troll.is, sit somewhere between a brand and a shopfront depending on which product you are looking at. If that sounds confusing, it is, and it is the reason the next section exists.
If GetYourGuide and Viator do not run tours, what do they do?
They are marketplaces. They take the operator's product, list it, handle your payment, hold the reviews and manage the cancellation terms. The guide who meets you at 08:30 works for the Icelandic operator, not for the website you paid. This distinction explains almost every confusion travellers have about Iceland tours.
Think of it the way you already think about hotel booking sites. Booking a room through an online agent does not mean the agent owns the hotel. GetYourGuide and Viator compete on interface, review volume and cancellation policy. The actual product, the coach and the guide and the route, is the operator's.
| The Icelandic operator | The marketplace | |
|---|---|---|
| Owns the vehicle and employs the guide | Yes | No |
| Decides the route and the stops | Yes | No |
| Cancels for weather | Yes, this is their call | No, they pass it on |
| Takes your payment | No | Yes |
| Holds the reviews you are reading | No | Yes |
| Sets the cancellation window | Negotiated | Displayed and enforced |
| Who you complain to first | Second | First |
Two practical consequences follow. If the weather kills your day, the decision is made in Iceland by the operator, usually early in the morning after they have looked at road.is and the wind forecast, and the marketplace simply relays it. And if a booking goes wrong administratively, the marketplace is the one holding your money, so that is where the refund conversation starts. I wrote about how one of those cancelled days actually plays out in the day the weather cancelled everything.
Why does the same tour appear four times at four prices?
Because one operator sells the same seat through several channels at once, and each channel prices, titles and bundles it slightly differently. Different commission, different currency handling, different inclusions like a hotel pickup or a headset. The coach is identical. The listing is not.
This is where people waste money and, more often, waste an hour of comparison for nothing. The tells that two listings are the same product: same duration, same departure time, same stop list in the same order, same operator name buried in the details. If all four of those match, you are looking at one tour.
What can genuinely differ between two listings of the same departure is the cancellation window, whether hotel pickup is included or extra, whether entrance fees are bundled, and the group size the listing is sold at. Those are worth checking. The photograph on the card is not, because both marketplaces are usually running the operator's own image library.
How do you find the operator's name on a listing?
Scroll past the marketing to the small print. Both marketplaces name the company running the activity somewhere on the product page, usually low down near the meeting-point and cancellation details, under a label like activity provider or supplier. If a listing makes that name hard to find, that itself is information.
Once you have the name, search it. You are looking for a company with an Icelandic address, a fleet, and a website that lists the same tour with the same duration. That takes two minutes and tells you more than an hour of reading star ratings.
There is one more check I would add, which almost nobody does: look at whether the operator runs that category as its main business or as a sideline. A company whose entire fleet is glacier vehicles is going to be better at glacier days than a general coach company adding one. That is why the glacier hiking tours category is dominated by mountain specialists rather than by the big bus fleets.
Why does review count matter as much as the score?
Because a 5.0 from 40 people is noise and a 4.7 from 3,000 is a measurement. Small review counts are easy to skew, and early reviews skew positive. Once a product passes a few thousand reviews the score stops moving much, and what you are reading is the real average experience, complaints included.
Here is how I read the bands when I look at a listing, and it is the single most useful habit I can pass on.
| Review count | What the score is worth | What I do with it |
|---|---|---|
| Under 100 | Almost nothing. One bad week moves it a full point | Read every negative review individually |
| 100 to 500 | A hint. Fine for a new small-group specialist | Check the dates. Are they recent? |
| 500 to 2,000 | Reliable for a niche product | Compare against the category average |
| 2,000 to 10,000 | A real measurement of a mainstream product | Trust the score, read recent reviews for drift |
| Over 10,000 | The operator's actual standard, at scale | A 4.3 here beats a 4.9 from 60 people |
Apply that and the aurora numbers stop looking alarming. The most-booked bus run holds 4.3 across 14,847 GetYourGuide reviews, which for a product whose main deliverable is controlled by solar activity is a strong result, not a weak one. The full picture of why is in what a northern lights tour is actually like.
The reverse also holds. If you want the single highest-satisfaction experience in our whole set, it is not the famous one. The Silfra snorkelling category sits at 4.9 across 10,897 reviews, the DIVE.IS product alone carries 4.9 across 5,119 Viator reviews, and it is available to check for your dates on Viator. Nothing else we track is rated that highly at that volume.
How does this site make money, and why should you trust it?
We are an independent affiliate guide, not an operator and not a booking platform. When you follow a link from this site to GetYourGuide or Viator and book, we earn a commission from them. You pay the same price either way. That is the whole business model, stated plainly.
I would rather say that in the middle of an article than bury it in a footer, because it is the context you need to read anything on this site. It also explains the one thing we deliberately do not do: name a best company. A single "winner" would earn more clicks. It would also be false, and the moment you arrive in Reykjavík and find the reality is category-by-category, you would know it was false.
What we do instead is publish the real rating and the real review count next to every recommendation, name the operator where we know it, and say when a category scores badly. The northern lights category averaging 4.2 is on this site in the same size text as Silfra's 4.9. There is more on who writes this and why on the about page.
So how should you actually choose?
Pick the experience first, then the operator, then the listing. Decide what you want to do, check which operator specialises in that category, find their product on whichever marketplace gives you the better cancellation terms, and book it early in your trip so weather has room to move it.
The order matters. People do it backwards, starting from a "best company" list, and end up booking a mediocre version of the wrong activity from a company that is genuinely good at something else. Start from the thing you actually want to stand in front of.
Two practical guardrails. Book the weather-dependent things in the first days of your trip, because a free retry is worthless on your last night, and that applies most of all to the northern lights tours, where the widely booked runs write a free retry night into their own terms. And whatever you book, check conditions yourself on the morning: safetravel.is is the official channel, and the 112 Iceland app is free. If you are still deciding between booking anything at all and driving yourself, the trade-offs are laid out in self-drive versus guided tours in Iceland in winter, and the honest answer there also depends on the category.
The industry is smaller than it looks from a search results page. Once you can see through the shopfronts to the twenty-odd companies actually turning the key in the ignition, the whole thing gets a lot easier to judge.