If you’re planning to travel on a budget soon, I do not recommend Iceland. It’s easy to hack the basic travel, but life up the North is pretty pricey – especially food. Here’s a quick breakdown of the financials for this trip:

• Flight: $541.11 (-$731.11 in airline rewards)
• Hotel: $344
• Blue Lagoon + Transport to Reykjavik: $145
• Tours: $753.18
• Drinks: $85.21
• Food: $239.69
• Car Rental: $134.27
• Gas: $28.00
• Miscellaneous: $45.00
• Souvenirs: $6.11

5 Days in Iceland Total: $1,590.46

On the plus side, I had budgeted $3,000 for the trip in total because I had heard so many nightmare stories about the cost of Iceland. Adding in some pretrip purchases, my costs were still pretty low.

That being said, there are so many cheaper places I’ve been to that if your budget is tight, I’d probably go pretty much anywhere other than a Scandinavian country (like maybe… Niagara Falls. Or even Hawaii).

However, here at brokeGIRLrich we’re in the year of not being broke, though decidedly still not rich yet either. This really just means it was a good time to visit Iceland without stressing too much. Back to this vacation. Let’s start with the flights.

Flights

I booked the airline tickets for me and BFF #1. I was able to use rewards points from my Arrival+ card to totally cancel out the cost of my flight and erase $300 of the purchase from BFF #1’s flight. She paid me the regular cost of the flight and I applied that amount overall to my Iceland budget.

We flew Icelandair from Newark, NJ to Reykjavik. It was a direct, overnight flight. During our initial research that began about 4 months before our trip, we found some great deals with round trip tickets for under $300. However, by the time all our plans were set in stone and our respective vacation days were approved, prices had gone up.

I used Priceline to book our tickets and I gotta say, they really let us down. They did not mention the astronomic checked bag fees. Additionally, if you booked through Icelandair and paid in advance, those fees were a little lower ($50 a bag), instead of the $70 a bag we got hit with at check in.

It feels like a PF blogger fail. How could I have forgotten to double check for hidden fees?

Anyway, I regained my PF standing a little by complaining at check in that it’s pretty nuts to have such big bag fees and not to make sure they’re clearly communicated no matter where you book through and they waived my baggage fee for the flight to Iceland since I only had a duffle bag that was 2 pounds over the carry on limit. BFF was less lucky since she packed everything and the kitchen sink. We split her checked bag fee since it was pretty much my fault I’d missed this info somewhere along the way.

We sat in exit row seats on the way there. Extra leg room, but they didn’t recline. Definitely a fail for an overnight flight. On the way back, they put us all in separate seats spread throughout the plane, despite me requesting our seats together when I booked it. Another fail, Icelandair.

Honestly, I’d pay a little more to fly another airline, but if it’s a huge difference, stick to Icelandair – they did manage to get us there.

Flight Cost: $105 (stupid bag fees) 

Hotel

            So one of my favorite things about this trip was I went with two of my BFFs – one who usually doesn’t get to travel with us. And she’s a planner, bless her heart. She took care of finding our lodging.

We stayed right in the heart of downtown Reykjavik and the location was perfect. The price was a little steep. For four nights, four of us each paid $344. However, it turns out it’s not easy to find a spot for four people to sleep in the same room in Iceland.

We stayed at Alfred’s Apartments. It was centrally located and had a double bed and a couch that slept two of us. It also had a little kitchenette and a bathroom (with a sliding door – really, why do people ever put sliding doors on bathrooms?? Worst. Idea. Ever.).

If you’re on a budget and planning ahead, there are a lot of hostels in that area. For the typical hostel experience, you can get a good deal, but a lot of the hostels actually are set up with several beds and a bathroom in a private room. Those were slightly cheaper than what we paid, but they were all booked.

      Hotel Cost: $344

Airport to Reykjavik Transport & Blue Lagoon

You may think the Blue Lagoon is kind of a tacky tourist trap. I won’t even tell you you’re wrong, I’m just gonna tell you we were hell bent on doing it anyway. Everything we read suggested either doing it on your way from the airport or back to the airport since it’s at the midway point of the 40 minute journey from Keflavik Airport to downtown Reykjavik.

If you have other plans to hit the Blue Lagoon on a tour or driving yourself, you can get from the airport to downtown for about $20 per person. I have to say that I loved that we did it upon arrival though.

After a hellacious, sleepless night on the airplane, the three of us coming from New Jersey met up with our other friend flying in from DC and proceeded to kill two hours at a Dunkin Donuts in the airport until our shuttle time to the Blue Lagoon came up.

This Blue Lagoon ticket gave us entry, use of a locker and towel, a few mud mask and a free drink. We paid an additional $5 to store our large suitcases. We had a lot of back and forth about the right time to sign up for the shuttle to Reykjavik and went with three hours after we got there.

For us, three hours in the Blue Lagoon was really the right amount of time. I was a little unsure and worried we’d be rushed, but it was pretty much perfect. During that time we got dropped off, checked our large suitcases in, got changed and showered, wandered the lagoon, had our drink and took a bazillion pictures.

If you’re just there for the generic Blue Lagoon experience and to soak off the overnight airplane funk, that’s really a perfect amount of time. If you plan to eat in the Lava restaurant or pay extra for any of the massage experiences, I suspect you would want some more time, since three hours was literally perfect for everything we did.

   Airport Transfer & Blue Lagoon: $145 

Tours

I really think we nailed our Iceland itinerary, though in retrospect there are a few things I would change.

The first “tour” was pretty simple, it was $9.83 to ride the elevator to the top of Hallsgrimskirkja. I think we all expected to drop upon arrival at the hotel the first night, but we all seemed to find a second wind and explored downtown Reykyavik a little. We bought that pass to go to the top of the church and walked down to the water to check out the Sun Voyager statue too. That small cost was definitely worth it.

Hallsgrimskirkja Cost: $9.83

The next day was our best tour of the trip. We booked the Golden Circle of Iceland – Private Day Tour from Reykjavik. Guys, I cannot ever rave enough about how much I freaking love Viator when it comes to booking big tours when I travel. Even in my super tight budget years, if there was going to be one splurge, it was usually a Viator tour – and I have yet to be disappointed.

Anyway, back to Iceland. This tour was so awesome. We opted to pay a little more for the private tour so it was just us and our tour guide. Our tour guide was a guy named Sergei who was super fun and knew a ton about each of our stops. We stopped at this crazy picturesque stop overlooking one of Iceland’s Geothermal stations and he explained how Iceland gets it’s heat. We went to Geyser hot springs and Thingvellir National Park (the place where Icelands parliament started and where the American and Eurasian tectonic plates diverge). We went to Gullfoss waterfall, which was really cool. We had lunch at this amazing tomato greenhouse and drank tomato beer. We finished off the tour with a stop at Kerid crater, which was just ridiculously pretty.

Golden Circle Tour Cost: $249.35

The next day we went on the Into the Glacier tour and this is the only one I would’ve changed a little. Into the Glacier itself was super cool and you get to ride this crazy bus thing up onto a glacier and then go through these man made glacier caves. It’s really awesome. It is about two hours from Reykyavik though, so we booked the tour through Grey Line, which included the Into the Glacier tour, a stop at a hot spring and a stop at a waterfall on the way back.

If I were to do this again, I would’ve rented a car for the day and built our own itinerary around the Into the Glacier tour. Also, if you’ve already been in a glacier, maybe this wouldn’t be so exciting to you; however, none of us had been in a glacier, so we were pretty excited. BFF #1 called it her favorite stop of the trip.

Glacier Tour: $285

On day four, we stuck close to home and I had this crazy notion we should learn something about Icelandic history… so we went to Elfschool. How could Elfschool be anything but awesome? I wanted to go so much, I even paid an extra fee for all four of us so that we could go to a private session outside the normal session times.

Elfschool was a mistake. Do not go to Elfschool.

Here’s what the Elfschool website says about Elfschool:

            However, I should’ve looked at the TripAdvisor reviews:

Accurate.

Elfschool: $154

The day picked up though with a puffin tour. To be honest, I could’ve cared less about the puffins and my life would’ve been fine if we skipped this tour, but the others were real excited and after the nonsense that was Elfschool that I put them through, I sure wasn’t complaining.

And puffins are cute. I do also love boats.

Puffin Boat Tour: $55

    Tour Costs: $753.18

Drinks

Reykjavik is known for it’s wild nightlife.

We wouldn’t really know.

That being said, there was this poster outside this bar called Koffin that had these really ridiculous looking drinks, like… they were so ridiculous, were they real? It was like a drink in a bathtub and a box of popcorn and a can of soup and a Chinese box of noodles.

We walked past this poster for several days and wondered about it each day. After the debacle that was Elfschool, I promised I’d buy everyone a drink and so we went there and drank their ridiculous drinks. Mine was a vodka based drink that came in a candy bag. BFF #2 drank the can of soup drink. BFF#1 the popcorn drink. They were stupid expensive but worth it.

Fun budget fact, you can get a free shot in that bar by checking the chalkboard next to the bar and following the instructions on it. The bartender was actually really nice too.

   Drink Costs: $85.21

Food

Here’s where Iceland will kick your butt. Food is expensive. Accept it. Plan for it. And move on. That being said, I thought the damage would be way worse. My meals averaged out to $30 a meal – which isn’t awesome when it’s like pizza or soup (seriously, two different lunches were soup based and they were both $30ish).

But it is what it is.

We completely lucked out that BFF #2’s sister has like a sugar daddy who told her to take us all out for a nice dinner one night – so I didn’t have to pay for dinner that night, though BFF #2 and I did split an Icelandic sampler appetizer that I paid for that evening, so it kind of washed out that savings.

The food is literally painful to think about how much you’re paying for things. Accept it now instead of spending 45 minutes hangrily wandering around downtown convinced you can find cheaper food when really you won’t and you’ll just be angrier and hungrier 45 minutes later and extra defeated when you still pay $30 for pizza and a soda.

You could bring some food from home. We did pack snacks. We never bought breakfast. We easily could’ve picked up some bread and PB & J from the grocery store (FYI – peanut butter will run you like $8), but considering we had a bunch of tours scheduled with lunch stops, that didn’t really work out for us.

Despite all this, I don’t think that damage was all that bad for 5 days.

          Food Costs: $239.69

Car Rental & Gas

We did a 24 hour rental with ProCar to get from Reykyavik back to Keflavik airport. Our flight was at 5 PM that evening, so the three of us headed to New Jersey went on our own adventure for the day.

First, some info about the car rental. IMPORTANT PIECE OF INFO: PROCAR DOES NOT HAVE AN OFFICE AT KEFLAVIK AIRPORT. We learned this the hard way. The little packet of paper I kept checking for info had Keflavik Airport on it, but you actually return your car in the city of Keflavik and take a shuttle to the airport. We learned this the hard way because we got lost a few times on the way to the airport and cut it real close to our flight, and as we tried to find the correct car rental drop off in the airport and realized they were not there, I realized we were going to miss our flight.

A panicked stop at Avis and the wonderful woman there helped us contact the ProCar office in Keflavik and they sent their shuttle to the Avis to pick us up and have someone pick up the car and take back to their office and we managed to make our flight, but it was crazy stressful.

The ProCar folks also told me there was hotspot in the car that we could use for WiFi – so our Google maps would get us around Iceland, only to find when we were leaving at 6 AM the next morning the hotspot either didn’t work or we were too stupid to work it. This was even extra irritating because I asked the lady at the counter if I needed to know anything special to get the hotspot to work. Fortunately, there’s only like 1 big road in Iceland and I was able to screenshot everything we needed to get off it for the stops we wanted to see before we left our lodging in the morning.

We got dinged with an extra $70 charge to return the car to the airport instead of where we picked it up downtown.

Also, gas is crazy expensive. To fill up our car, it cost nearly $90.

I would recommend renting with a car rental company that definitely has an office right in the airport, especially if you plan to sightsee until real close to your flight.

That being said, I really wish we’d rented a car and done the glacier day on our own too. I loved our car rental day. It was my favorite day of the trip. We saw another waterfall, hiked into the middle of nowhere to go to a gorgeous hidden pool, saw the black sand beach at Vik (also known as Dragonstone for my GoT folks out there), petted some Icelandic horses and went to the tourist trap bridge where the American and Euroasian continents meet and stood with one foot in each continent. I loved every stop that day and the freedom to move at the speed we wanted.

           Rental Car & Gas Costs: $162.27 

Miscellaneous

When we arrived, I took $50 out of the ATM in Kroners. I used $20 to tip our tour guide on the first day. I used $5 for us to use the bathroom at one of the waterfalls. I spent $20 for us to park the rental car near our apartment the night we picked it up.

            Miscellaneous Costs: $45

Souvenirs

I collect shot glasses and had planned to grab one at the airport on our way out of town. The car rental return debacle ruined that though. I kept $5 in Kroner and BFF #1 gave me some of her coins to the tune of about $1.11, which I Venmoed her. Those are my Iceland souvenirs.

            Souvenir Costs: $6.11

Here are some key things you could do to knock the cost down if you’re set on seeing Iceland on a budget:

•             Book your flight way in advance.
•             Stay in a hostel – if you’re totally hostel squeamish, check out the ones that have private rooms.
•             Bring basic breakfast foods with you (granola bars, oatmeal).
•             Buy lunch meat or PB&J at a grocery store and make sure you actually eat it.
•             Live on the hot dog stand hotdogs (they’re $5 – but small).
•             Rent a car and sightsee on your own – Iceland is super easy to drive.This is really a cost saver if you can drive a manual car. They totally know to jack up the prices on Americans who need automatic.
•             Camp during the warmer months. You can even rent camping equipment there.

And, of course, there’s always credit card churning to live the five star life without the five star price. I churned my flight and the BFF’s flight for this one. Some of my favorite travel cards are:

•             Barclay Arrival+
•             Chase Sapphire
•             Barclay Cashforward (no annual fee)
•             Bank of America Travel Rewards (no annual fee)
•             American Express Delta Skymiles
•             United Mileage Plus

Where’s your next trip?