"Iceland only gets bigger with an added destination in the North"

This summer a new route to Iceland opens when Niceair starts their international flights to Akureyri, the biggest city in the North of Iceland. Their virgin flight is on June 2nd from Akureyri to Copenhagen in Denmark. Over the summer there will be five flights weekly, two to Copenhagen, two to London and one to Tenerife in the Spanish Canary Islands.

"Next winter we will be adding two flights to Manchester, but  winter trips from England will be our biggest market," says Þorvaldur Lúðvík Sigurjónsson the CEO of Niceair. "This idea of connecting the North and the East of Iceland to Europe has been in the charts for a long time. We started looking into this, a group of people, and did a lot of research and also relied on previous data. To make a long story short, the data made a lot of sense. Around three years ago we really started to map out how exactly we were going to implement the idea. Now we have rented an airplane, have trained our flight attendants and are ready and set to fly on June 2nd to Copenhagen. Aside from Norlandair which flies to Greenland from Akureyri, this will be the first time an Icelandic airline connects with Europe from the North of our country."

Sigurjónsson says that his travel contacts in Britain, Switzerland, Germany and Scandinavia show a lot of interest in this new possibility of having a completely different area of the country more accessible to their customers. "We have been told that finally they have a new destination in Iceland, which opens up a lot of exciting tours and experiences for tourists that might have been in the Southern part of Iceland, but haven't seen this part of the country. Iceland only gets bigger with an added destination in the North."

"Usually people are not travelling much further than 150 km from their incoming airport. If that airport is in Keflavík, like is has been up to now, you are mostly going to be travelling in the South of Iceland. Being able to get a direct flight to a very different area of the country is a gamechanger, because no time is spent getting there from the South and all the days can be used in seeing all the sights and natural wonders in this part of the country." Sigurjónsson adds that in their research it was clear that tourists that planned a second trip to Iceland were looking at going directly to the countryside and seeing more of the country.