[LOOKING FURTHER]
Tamara Kocan
Sustainability Lead
tamara@noRTHOFnORMAL.com
[Partners]
[People]
[Operations]
[Surplus]
[Tax]
Most travel is sold as a single number. You are told what a trip costs and very little about what that number buys, or who along the chain actually receives it.
This page is the breakdown.
Inspired by the way Economic Nutrition, a model built by the Canadian organisation Shorefast - sets out a company's finances the way a nutrition label sets out what is in a packet. The format is not ours. We have taken it because it is a better answer than a paragraph of reassurance.
For every ISK a client spends on a trip we plan:
payment goes to
74%
partners and suppliers
20%
accommodation
20%
guiding
20%
transport and fuel
10%
4%
boats, baths, entries, permits
12%
people
8%
trip design and research
4%
coordination
8%
operations
4%
payment and currency fees
2%
insurance and licensing
2%
systems, accounting, office
6%
NoN fund
6%
ending open-pen salmon farming in Icelandic fjords.
Partners and suppliers (74%)
Roughly three quarters of what you pay leaves us almost immediately. It goes to the guides, drivers, hotels, farms, boat operators, kitchens and mountain rescue-trained crews who actually run the days we have written down.
We buy from these partners at net rates — their market rate, less our commission. We do not run a markup on top of a markup. What that means in practice is that the money reaches the operator at close to full value, and that the operator can afford to pay properly.
That last part is not a small thing in Iceland. Wages here are set by collective agreement, not by whatever the market will tolerate. Entry-level pay in tourism under the 2026 agreements sits in the region of ISK 483,000–498,000 a month before overtime, and a guide with glacier or highland qualifications earns well above that. A cheap trip in Iceland is almost always a trip where someone in the chain is being squeezed. Usually it is the guide.
We travel the country to find these people and we go back. If a partner does not hold up on safety, on quality, or on how they treat the place and their staff, we stop selling them. That has happened.
A note on tips. Tipping is not customary in Iceland and no one on your trip is depending on it to make rent. If someone has been exceptional, say so, and tell us — it carries further than cash.
People (12%)
Icelandic employment is expensive by design. Paid parental leave for both parents. Pension contributions. Union-negotiated terms. Sick leave, holiday allowance, insurance. We do not treat any of that as overhead to be minimised, partly because we cannot, and mostly because we do not want to.
The people who plan your trip have spent years in this country and know which road closes first, which operator answers the phone at eleven at night, and which lodge is worth the detour in November. That knowledge is the product. It is not cheap to keep and we do not intend to.
Operations (8%)
Three things, roughly equally.
Technology. Systems, subscriptions, the connections to our partners and our own records. We use software to plan faster, not to answer for us. You will not be handed to a bot.
Office. A working space in Reykjavík, within reach of the airport route and the hotels our guests use, so we can meet people at the start and end of a trip rather than emailing them.
Marketing and outreach. Iceland is a small country a long way from most of its guests, and we are competing for attention with booking platforms that spend more on advertising in a week than we do in a year. Ours is a real cost. It is also a fraction of what the large players spend as a share of their revenue.
Certification is in here too. Vakinn Gold took two years and more than 130 criteria, and it is re-audited rather than self-declared. Staying certified costs money every year. We consider it the price of being able to make claims on this page.
NoN (6%)
Every tour puts money into a fund we do not control the story of. We publish what goes in, what goes out, and who received it. If a year's work fails, that gets published too.
We pick one issue at a time and stay on it — whaling, salmon farming, whatever is doing the most damage and has the fewest people fighting it. You can add to the fund directly if you want to. Most of it comes from trips like the one you are looking at.
