Iceland Tourism Statistics by Year

Through most of the 2000s Iceland was a niche destination, receiving between three and five hundred thousand foreign visitors a year. Two events changed that. The financial crisis of 2008 roughly halved the value of the króna, making a famously expensive country suddenly affordable. Then in April 2010 the Eyjafjallajökull eruption closed European airspace for a week and gave Iceland saturation media coverage. The government and the tourism industry answered with the Inspired by Iceland campaign, and arrivals began to climb.

What followed was one of the fastest tourism booms any country has recorded. Foreign arrivals grew by around twenty percent a year for eight consecutive years, from under five hundred thousand in 2010 to 2,315,925 in 2018. Low-cost carriers, above all WOW air, opened dozens of routes to North America and Europe, and Keflavík became a transatlantic hub. Hotel construction raced to keep up, and by the late 2010s tourism had overtaken fishing and aluminium as Iceland's largest export earner.

The boom ended in two stages. WOW air collapsed in March 2019 and arrivals fell by about fourteen percent that year. The pandemic then cut 2020 to under half a million visitors, the lowest total since 2010. Recovery was unusually fast once borders reopened: 2022 recovered most of the lost ground and 2023 reached 79% of the 2019 level. Since then the market has plateaued at a little over 2.2 million foreign visitors a year, with growth coming from the shoulder seasons and from longer stays rather than from more arrivals.

For a country of under four hundred thousand people, these numbers mean more than five tourists per resident each year, among the highest ratios in the world. The table above gives every year since 2003 with the change on the year before. Years marked as partial include only the months published so far, and their year-over-year figures compare the same months of the previous year.