Tourism in Iceland
economic significance
Tourism in Iceland has grown considerably in economic significance. In 2025, the tourism industry accounted for 8.8% of Iceland's GDP, while the country received just under 2.3 million foreign overnight visitors.
History
Services provided to foreign tourists were for a long time an insignificant part of the Icelandic economy, rarely contributing more than 2 percent to GDP, even long after the advent of international air travel. Until the early 1980s, the number of foreign visitors to Iceland increased slowly and erratically, never exceeding 80,000 in a single year, and for many years after that only barely kept pace with the increase in the number of Icelanders travelling to and from the country. This situation lasted until the turn of the century, when the annual number of visitors exceeded the total resident population for the first time, at around 300,000.
A few years later the Icelandic tourism industry started to experience a boom which to this day shows no signs of abating, as witnessed by the fact that the number of foreign visitors grew on average by 6 percent per year between 2003 and 2010, and by some 20 percent per year on average between 2010 and 2014. In 2015, this rapid increase has continued, with the number of foreign visitors already exceeding 1 million in the period January to October. According to the Icelandic Tourist Board, the total number of overnight stays by foreign visitors to Iceland grew from 595,000 in 2000 to 2.1 million in 2010, before rising to 4.4 million in 2014.
The number of people working in tourism-related industries in Iceland was 21,600 in 2014, representing nearly 12 percent of the total workforce, and tourism's direct contribution to GDP is now close to 5 percent.
Tourist demographics
Iceland is well known for its untouched nature and unique atmosphere.
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This entry incorporates text from “Tourism in Iceland” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.