Does a visitor need to rent a car months and months in advance of their visit to Iceland. I’m planning to be there in September 2025.
Some places I’ve visited have a shortage of rental cars and I thought that might be the case for Iceland.
Is Blue the recommended rental company?
Thank you.
I would get it booked now as you don't have to pay until a few days before. Yes, cars get booked out. We were there again last September and the car I had rented about 6 months prior was not available when we arrived.
Blue is often recommended and I used to recommend them. We have rented them on 5 trips, and the first 4 were great, but the last trip it was atrocious. Long story short, we were given a car with big dents, scratches all over, filthy dirty inside, would randomly just die, and it had 103,000 km on it. We did not get the car we reserved, and were given one that they said was comparable, yet on their website the one we were given was a lower price, so obviously not comparable. To finish it off, I emailed them when we got home and the GM included other people there in the email back to me, and one guy did not pay attention that my name was part of it and said I had no idea what I was talking about and that I was wrong. The GM did nothing about that even after I brought that to his attention. So yeah, I am not a fan of them anymore.
On our upcoming 8th trip this summer, we are headed up to Akureyri so are renting there, not at KEF, but the next time we will go with Lotus.
You might want to try www.AutoEurope.com. This is a well-regarded broker for the big car rental agencies ( ie Hertz, Avis, Budget, Sixt etc.) which discounts their rental prices and has some guidance on the insurance options.
I used Lotus when I was there last year and would recommend it.
We used Blue Car Rental and were very impressed. Easy to deal with and reasonably priced, and simple pick up / drop off at the Keflavik airport. Helpful staff too.
Be sure to load up on every available liability waiver - even if you don't do that normally, make the investment to do so in Iceland. Even in September the weather and roads can be hectic there (lots of knicks, abrasions, damage can happen even to careful drivers). When we dropped our car off with minor knicks from the rocks, sand etc. they said to just drop the keys off no questions asked since we invested in full liability waiver on top of the standard insurance.
I'd suggest reserving well in advance. There's no upside to waiting (Blue offers fully refundable rentals up to 24 hours prior to your reservation).
I'd give a lot of thought to getting the class of car I want. It's not true that you must have 4WD there, except in the winter. But I was glad to have a car with oversize wheels for additional ground clearance. Even if you only have paved roads on your plan, there are some unpaved waterfall parking lots, and they are not in particularly good shape. We stayed at a B & B that failed to tell us that they were 30 minutes from the nearest paved road! (They told us after we were there that their local Pandemic customers loved the feeling of "the way it used to be", because they don't leave paved roads very much anymore.)
You need several kinds of extra insurance, like wind-blown gravel. And you car may/should have a sticker on the door windows warning you to hold the door with two hands WHENEVER you open it.
Caveat: It's been many years since I visited Iceland (hoping to go back in 2026) and when I was there, I did not rent a car. That said:
Islands (even big ones) often have limited supplies of rental cars. Islands that are popular often run out of available rental cars (or they get priced through the roof) during their busy seasons. I seem to have a fetish for islands - I've been to a lot of them, and in some places I've been, yep, rental cars were scarce, nearly (or completely) impossible to find on short notice, and if available came at eye-watering prices. Prices for lots of things in Iceland are already eye-watering even on the best days. I've learned many lessons about rental cars, especially in remote islands: one of them is to get the car months in advance (and pre-pay for the rental if you can...it helps guarantee that the car you reserved is actually there for you when you show up, rather than putting you in a classic Seinfeld episode).
Others may prefer to "wing it" but I prefer less uncertainty, less drama, and more boring predictability when it comes to basic logistics on a trip. I'd nail down that car rental ASAP. Good luck.
I agree, get the car reserved now. On the trip that we had the horrid experience with Blue, I had booked the car at the beginning of April, right when we decided to go. Our trip was late September, and when we arrived, they did not have the car we reserved. So yes, even in September there is still a high demand for vehicles and you still may not get what you reserved.
Our Iceland rental was several years ago now, but we used Hertz, renting in Reykjavik. More recently, a year and a half ago, we used Hertz in Norway, with the best price and pick-up location. We don’t usually rent from Hertz elsewhere, but they’ve been our rental company in Scandinavia.
