The country is the product.
We would like to keep it.
Six of them. Each one has something attached that you can check, because a value with no evidence behind it is just a sentence.
[WHO WE ARE]
Our Values
The country is the product.
Say the cost out loud
We measured our own emissions before we said anything about them. The 2022 baseline covers Scope 1 and 2 and the awkward parts of Scope 3 — staff commutes, business flights, landfilled and composted waste, fuel in the office cars — because leaving those out would have produced a flattering number and a useless one. We publish where your money goes for the same reason.
Then we let someone else check. Vakinn Gold, awarded in 2020: two years of work, more than 130 criteria, covering staff training and safety as well as environmental impact and how we treat the communities we work in. Independently audited, and renewed rather than framed.
If you are vetting an Icelandic partner on someone's behalf, that is the straight answer to the question you are actually asking.
Roughly three quarters of what you pay leaves us and goes to the guides, drivers, hotels, farms and boat crews who run the days. We buy at net rates and we do not build a second margin on top.
A cheap trip in Iceland is nearly always one where somebody in the chain is absorbing the cost. Usually it is the guide.
Fewer places, longer
We will suggest staying in one region rather than crossing the country, avoiding domestic flights, and keeping the same guide and vehicle throughout. We plan around empty legs and we house guides in the same hotels as guests so nobody drives twice.
That is quieter travel and lower emissions, and it is also simply the better trip. The two are not usually in tension.
Most of what we sell cannot be manufactured. The weather, the ice, the quiet, the water you can drink straight from the ground. None of it comes back once it is gone.
Langjökull retreated 150 metres between 2020 and 2024. Scientists expect most Icelandic glaciers to be gone within one to two hundred years. We are not going to tell you that flying here is free of consequence. What we can do is be honest about the cost, keep cutting it where it is real to cut, and turn down the trips that are not good for the places they would run through.
