How to Plan an Iceland Trip Like an Icelander (And Why Your Spreadsheet Is Already in Trouble)

Tourist doing Iceland right.

You've spent weeks planning your dream Iceland itinerary. You have a colour-coded spreadsheet. You have pinned 47 waterfalls on Google Maps. You have a detailed schedule that states you will leave Reykjavík at 08:17, admire Waterfall no. 12 at 10:43, photograph Waterfall no. 13 at 11:26, and arrive at your accommodation by 17:52.

Cool. Now, close the spreadsheet. We will teach you how Icelanders travel in Iceland instead. At Refurinn Reykjavik Guesthouse, we don't claim to know exactly what Iceland will be doing tomorrow. Frankly, Iceland rarely tells us either. But we're always happy to help you figure out where the sunshine is, where the wind isn't, and which plans are worth abandoning. Sometimes the best day of your trip is the one you never planned in the first place

Important caveat:

Before you start copying everything Icelanders do, there is one notable exception: Do not look to Icelanders for guidance on how to dress for the weather. This is a skill that appears to have been entirely lost to the population. You may observe locals wearing shorts in 8°C temperatures, standing outside in a T-shirt during a gale, or insisting that weather, which would trigger emergency warnings elsewhere, is "actually quite nice."

You don’t want to do this. We can only assure you that dressing sensibly remains a better strategy than dressing like an Icelander.

Step One: Look Out the Window

This is the entire planning process. Icelanders don't wake up and say, "Today I shall drive 300 kilometres to see a particular waterfall." We wake up, look outside, check the weather forecast, look outside again because we don't entirely trust the forecast, and then decide what to do.

The weather is not a minor detail in Iceland. The weather is the project manager.

Let's say the forecast predicts sunshine in Snæfellsnes, rain in the South, wind that could relocate small children in the East. An Icelander looks at this information and says: "Guess we're going to Snæfellsnes." A tourist may look at the same forecast and says: "But according to my itinerary today is South Coast Day."

One of these people is about to have a much nicer day.

The Sunk Itinerary Fallacy

We see victims of the Sunk Itinerary Fallacy every day. The weather is terrible, visibility is twenty metres, and yet they continue south because the spreadsheet says they should. You spent three months planning a particular day, you must now spend six miserable hours driving through horizontal rain to execute it.

Many visitors arrive with an itinerary generated months earlier, through hours upon hours of exhausting research and ChatGPT prompts. And they've tried their very best to incorporate absolutely everything that people report having seen and visited here.

They usually begin with something like:

"Day 4: Drive the South Coast and visit six waterfalls, two glaciers, a black sand beach, a canyon and a charming village."

And look, we get it. For most visitors, Iceland is not a weekend getaway. It’s an expensive, remote island in the north Atlantic that you may not see yourself visiting twice (Iceland might change your mind about that, but we digress.) So, you want to see everything. All the sights. All the waterfalls. All the black sand beaches. All the hot springs. Recreate all the Instagram photos you have been admiring for months.

The thing is, Iceland is not a country to be devoured like an all-you-can-eat buffet in under thirty minutes. The people who leave happiest are rarely the people who saw the most, they’re the people who experienced the most.

Some of the best travel stories happen when plans fall apart. You take a different road. You stop in a village that wasn't on your list. You find a hot spring, a café, a beach, a mountain view, or a waterfall that nobody on social media told you about. Iceland rewards spontaneity far more than rigorous schedules. The goal of your Iceland trip is not to successfully execute a spreadsheet, anyway.

Ask yourself this:

Would you rather spend ten hours driving, rushing from attraction to attraction and collecting photographs? Or would you rather spend an hour wandering down a quiet trail where almost nobody else goes? Would you rather tick five waterfalls off a list? Or sit beside one and listen to it?

This is our suggestion: Try timit your driving time. Make longer stops instead. Take the side trail. Get out of the car and walk in nature. Put your feet in a cold mountain creek. Eat berries straight off the ground. Smell the birch trees. Run your hands over the thousand-year-old pillowy moss, covering the jagged lava rocks.

Stand still for a minute. Listen.

The goal is not to see everything. You won’t. Nobody does. The goal instead should be to REALLY see what you do get to see. Experience it. Feel it. Commit it to memory and let it change you.

Years from now, you won’t be able to remember whether you visited seventeen waterfalls or twenty-three. But you’ll remember the moment you stood alone in a landscape so beautiful it felt impossible. And that is the Iceland worth taking home.