Iceland: Travel Tips — To Make Much of Time

The turquoise blue waters within the Viti Crater near Krafla Geothermal Power Station.

UPDATED: 1/16/2023

Note: Some links throughout our site are affiliate links, which means we may receive a small commission at no cost to you.

Here are some tips that will help when planning your own Iceland trip. Since we drove the Ring Road, these tips are geared for travel beyond the capital city, though some of these will still be useful there, too.

Car rentals: Highly recommend 4WD vehicles. If you want automatic (we did), check for that as the standard is manual and not all rental companies offer automatic. The best pricing as well as plenty of automatic options that we could find was through Reykjavik Rent-a-Car, who also had wonderful customer service when we had to email a bit related to a credit card decline (card marked it as suspected fraud) when we first booked and then later to update our arrival time.

Gas cards: I honestly found this whole thing confusing, but apparently a lot of gas station card machines can’t read US-issued credit cards. I had read online that the chips being placed in our cards were supposed to fix that, but it didn’t seem to for us. The alternative option is to purchase a gas card (basically like a gift card) once there at a gas station, and you can use it going forward. The key thing to be aware of is that the card is only good for that brand of gas, so try to be smart about where you fill up.

Click the image below to save this post to Pinterest!