Low Budget Iceland — How much does a bicycle trip cost?
Traveling to Iceland is on the bucket list of many travelers. Volcanos, glaciers, waterfalls, black sand beaches and horses. Those are just a few attractions on the versatile island. However, as it is a remote island close to the artic circle, travelling there isn’t cheap. In the last article I wrote about the preparation and our route of a bicycle trip to circumnavigate Iceland, as we did in summer 2021. One of the main reasons for taking the bike was the fact that we were students at this point. We needed to travel on a low budget to be able to see Iceland. In this blog post I will list all costs for the full circumnavigation in 33 days.
Transportation — 716€
Let’s start with the most expensive one. By choosing a bicycle, you will normally have lower costs for transportation as you don’t have to rent a car for example. Unfortunately, you need to take a ferry or plane to get to Iceland. That is not cheap.
When we talk about our trip, we often get the surprised responses when people hear that we took our bicycles with us on the plane. It needs some preparation to set up the bicycle correctly for the flight, but the booking process instead is much more easy. In general, you can add a bicycle as extra luggage during check out of flight booking process. We flew with Eurowings and paid 60€ per bike and route. This price can vary from airline to airline. The mother company of Eurowings, Lufthansa, charges 120€ per bike and route. The Scandinavian airline SAS, on the other hand, does not charge anything. As flight prices are very dynamic it always makes sense to use a comparison tool. I normally start looking there for possible connections and then check the price and availability always on the official airline website, where I also complete my booking. I’m doing this for several reasons. First, I don’t trust the comparison agencies that much if something goes wrong. Second, adding additional luggage and especially sport luggage isn’t always possible on these websites. To keeping it low budget we also decided to book the cheapest fare with hand luggage only and added one drop-off luggage in the check-out process for both of us.
Even though transportation is the highest component of our costs, we still saved a lot of money. Normally people rent a car or camper for their trip, and that can quickly go into the four-digit range. I made a comparison at the end of the article. If you worry about the condition of your own bicycle, it is also possible to rent mountain bikes for your trip in Iceland.
This leads to the following cost composition:
· Base fare: 2 x 220€ (Hamburg — Reykjavik)
· Bicycles: 2 x 120€
· Drop-off luggage: 1 x 56€
· Total costs: 716€
Accommodation — 476€
Our second largest cost factor was accommodation. Here we got surprised and disappointed as well. To be honest, we expected much more places where we could camp in the wild. We were so naive to believe that it is almost everywhere like in Scandinavia, as we traveled to Norway and Sweden the year before. There, the Allemansrätten (the freedom to roam) allows you to camp everywhere with your tend as long as you respect nature and neighborhoods. At the end we only spend 5 of 31 nights outside of a campground. Especially in the northern part there are fences everywhere for the pastures to the roadside. And there are pastures everywhere, so no chance. The good thing about the northern part: You will find campgrounds in good and daily achievable distances. What surprised us the most were the prices for the campgrounds. For two persons and one tent we paid 18€ in average. Staying in a solid room like a hotel or Airbnb starts normally by 100€ a night. Hence, it is possible to save a lot of money with camping.
Total costs: 476€
Groceries — 468€
In the third place, but only closely, are groceries. As Iceland doesn’t have many possibilities for farming, they need to import almost everything. This makes it more expensive as Scandinavian countries.. We are on a vegetarian diet so we save a lot of money by not buying meat. An interesting finding was that vegetarian or vegan supplemental products where cheaper than the original ones. For example, Violife produces cheese from vegetable oil and costs normally twice as much as dairy-based cheese in Germany. In Iceland it was the opposite.
Travelling with a bicycle can make it hard to eat healthy as you need a lot of calories, but we still tried to buy some vegetables overtime. And that’s where the cost-saving effect of being vegetarian is getting reduced. The prices for vegetables are very high as well. In the end, we paid about double compared to German prices.
Total costs: 468€
Pleasure food — 166€
During the tour we’ve cooked our own food the majority of time. But sometimes pleasure food like cake, ice cream, smoothies, etc. are important for your mental condition when you decide to challenge the forces of Iceland on a bicycle. I would count cookies and chocolate into this category as well, but these purchases are included in groceries. A cake normally costs around 7€ a piece. A main dish in a restaurant started at 15€.
Total costs: 166€
Activities — 57€
Iceland is famous for its geothermal activities. Therefore, you can find a lot of hot water coming to the surface. Almost every municipality has a swimming pool or a hot spring. We expected to find more natural hot springs, they are probably not all signposted. We spent some time at Vöx baths in Egilsstaðir, and in the swimming pools of Akureyri. This category can become more expensive easily if you decide to make a glacier tour or something similar. So, keep in mind to consider some extra budget for it.
Total costs: 57€
Health & Others — 40€
There are always costs that are not worth tracking in an individual category. In our case those were things like showers, laundry, mosquito hats.
Total costs: 40€
Useful App
Since 2017, I use the app TrabeePocket to keep track of my spending for all my trips. It is possible to create individual trips with the origin and period, to set a budget for multiple currencies and to create different categories. With this, you can insert all the daily expenses and getting an overlook of where the money goes. It needs some discipline to insert every expense, but if you do it instantly after a purchase it takes less than 45 seconds for one entry.
Cost summary
1932€ — That were our total costs for 32 days in Iceland. This makes 30€ a day per person.
Choosing a bicycle to travel through Iceland is definitely a low budget option. Other options in the same price range could be taking the bus or hitchhiking. If you want to have the comfort of a rental car, consider bringing a tent with you, as cars are much cheaper than campervans. However, we saw a lot of the latter. Friends of us were in Iceland at the same time as us, in August. They’ve booked the cheapest campervan possible (827€ for 8 days). Their total costs for 10 days have been 2450€. This makes 123€ a day per person. They published a blog post as well.
If you have any additional advise or feedback, please leave it in the comments.
To get more insights into our current adventures please visit our Instagram accounts @kaeptentobi and @freigereist.
