Golden Circle Full-Day Tour review

Who it’s for

First trip to Iceland, three or four days in Reykjavík, and the Golden Circle is the day you have already decided to give it. That is the person this tour is built for. It also suits solo travellers, because a big coach is the one vehicle where nobody notices you are on your own, and it suits anyone arriving by ship: the pickup list includes Skarfabakki cruise terminal, and Giuseppe from Italy wrote that they took his group back to the MSC ship directly.

It is the wrong tour for you if you count crowds as a cost. This is a full-size coach with fixed photo-stop timings, and at Strokkur in July you will be one of several hundred people on the same gravel. If that is the deal-breaker, the nineteen-seat minibus is the same loop with a fifth of the people. Under-2s are not accepted.

The day in order

Departures leave from Bus Stop 12 on Þórunnartún at Höfðatorg, or you can take the pickup option, which covers 23 hotels and bus stops including City Hall, Hilton Nordica, BSÍ and Hallgrímskirkja. The running order is anticlockwise, which is the opposite of most tours on this loop and the reason you get Gullfoss before the coach wave rather than after it.

1. About 40 minutes out of the city on Route 1, over the heath and down into the south.
2. Hveragirði, a 15-minute comfort break. Toilets, coffee, nothing more.
3. Kerið crater, 20 minutes — enough for the rim walk, not enough to go down to the water and back in a hurry.
4. Gullfoss, 45 minutes. The Hvítá drops 11 m then 21 m into a crevice 32 m deep. The upper car park is the flat approach; the lower path is stairs.
5. Geysir and Strokkur, 80 minutes, including lunch at your own cost. Strokkur goes every 6 to 10 minutes, usually 15 to 20 metres.
6. Þingvellir, a 45-minute walk through Almannagjá, the fissure where the Alþingi met from 930.
7. About an hour back into Reykjavík.

One line in the small print is worth reading twice. Kerið is dropped from any departure at 12:00 or later. Same price, three stops instead of four. If the crater is part of why you booked, take a morning departure, and check which tours stop where before you pay.

What the reviews keep saying

Nearly 27,000 ratings is a big enough sample that the pattern is not noise, and the pattern is guides. Michael from Australia wrote that Saga “brought a fantastic mix of knowledge, energy and passion for her country and its history”. Anne from Germany said Andrea was “extremely polite and courteous and taught us a lot about the country and its people”. Peter from Austria listed the guide, the driver and the stops in one breath. When a tour this size holds 4.8, it is almost always because the guiding is consistent rather than because the route is unusual, and the route here is not unusual at all.

The complaints are quieter and mostly structural: the size of the group, the fixed clock, the lunch scrum. Nobody sensible reviews a coach tour badly because it is a coach tour, but if you already know that sixty people is your limit, believe yourself.

Is it worth the money?

Drive it yourself and the sights still cost nothing: Þingvellir and Geysir charge a fee to park a car, Kerið charges a small fee a head because the crater is private land, and Gullfoss charges nothing at all. That is the whole gate bill for a day out, which is why I keep saying a tour is not selling access. For one or two people, the cheapest seat of the eight buys you 230 to 300 km of someone else’s driving in weather you cannot predict, and that is decent value. For four adults with a rental car already booked, the sums flip, and I say so at length in tour versus self-drive. The rest of the ladder, from this coach up to the private jeep, is laid out on the prices page.

Check dates

Departures run year-round. In June to August book several days ahead; from November the timetable thins and the light does too, which is its own argument for letting somebody else drive — see the loop in winter.

Frequently asked questions