Iceland is on many people’s bucket lists (probably yours too when you read this post), and the reasons are obvious. However, if, for any crazy reason, you still need a last push to choose Iceland as your next holiday destination, you can check our full Iceland itinerary here.
After this trip, we got even a bit obsessed with budgeting and planning because we realized that a well-planned trip could save us tons of money that we could use for our next trip.
Now, the goal of this post is to present you with a breakdown of our Iceland travel expenses for a week and a four-person trip. Of course, these prices can vary, but at least you can know how much other fellow travelers needed for a similar trip. If you have already made this trip, we would love to hear how much money you spent and the number of days so others can have more comparison points.
A quick comment is that we will not include flight tickets in this list. The flight prices depend strongly on the country you are flying from, the airline you choose, the amount of luggage you want to bring, and the season. For reference, we pay 110 € for two people (round trip), with only cabin bags flying directly with WIZZ from Dortmund, Germany, to Reykjavik and 270 € from Milan, Italy. A fun fact is that we have paid more for a trip to Spain than what we paid for this flight to Iceland. First, for this Iceland trip, we carefully chose the travel dates for a cheap flight from our respective countries. Second, we decided to fly from airports in other cities where the flights were more affordable than our local airport. Of course, when we do this, we always consider the extra we need to pay for moving to a different city. Therefore, the flight ticket from that city has to be cheaper than our local airport plus transportation. In this case, we also used some train coupons we had with DB (German national railway company), which made the trip to the airport almost free.
Some of the links on this post contain affiliate links. If you click through and purchase something, we may receive payment. Although all these recommendations are based on our personal experience.
| Price [4 people] | Comments | |
| Transportation from/to the airport | 78 €/$81 | We took the public transportation bus that includes a combination of bus 55+bus 1. You can check more in our post: “Best ways to get from Iceland International airport (Keflavik) to Reykjavik downtown“. |
| Rental Car | 480 €/500$ | We used Blue Car rental and took the car from their Reykjavik city office for 6 days. More info in our post: “Rental cars in Iceland airport and Reykjavik: Blue Car rental Iceland“. |
| Accommodation | 615 €/640$ | 7 nights throughout Iceland. You can find more details of each accommodation in our daily itinerary, which can be found here. |
| Food | 180 €/187$ | This was the point where we reduced most of our budget. Except for a few lunches, the rest of our meals were supermarket food and some other food we brought from home (upcoming post about this topic). You can find a bit more information about this in our post: “Money and currency in Iceland“. |
| Gas | 107 €/111$ | This was the price from August 2020, and for a total of around 2300 km. |
| Activities | 450 €/468$ | This includes whale watching and the Blue Lagoon. |
| Total | 1910 €/1987$ | |
| Price per person | 477 €/ 496$ |
Do you think ~ 500 €/$ + Flights is a good price to enjoy this wonderful country for a week?
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