Island Influx

Welcoming almost two million visitors in 2016 alone, Iceland’s hotel industry is booming with outside investment. But amid the global influences, the country’s design community is working hard to retain its authenticity.

- Mikki Brammer

For those who have never visited Iceland, it’s easy to be suspicious of the hype that comes from anyone who has. Surely much of it is thanks to the sleight of hand that well-chosen Instagram filters can provide. But after a day or two exploring the island’s whimsical natural landscape, even the most hardened skeptic is likely to be a little bit enamored.

With hype comes tourism—lots of it—a boon for an economy that, less than ten years ago, was in a financial crisis so severe that its effects were felt throughout the world. Last year, hotels in the capital, Reykjavík, saw a year-round occupancy rate of 86 percent; by contrast, average occupancy in the United States was 66 percent. For a population of around 340,000, with a third in Reykjavík, the ever-increasing droves of visitors (1,792,200 in 2016, up from 488,600 in 2010) are significant.

A spate of new luxury hotels have popped up, and more are planned for the coming years (including an Ian Schrager Edition hotel) with the number of available rooms expected to double. Earlier this year, Icelandic hotelier Sigurlaug Sverrisdóttir opened ION City Hotel—the urban sibling to her much lauded rural ION Adventure hotel—on Reykjavík’s main pedestrian thoroughfare, Laugarvegur.

Having grown up on Iceland’s Snæfellsnes Peninsula, where she recalls using beached whale carcasses as trampolines, Sverrisdóttir says she’s definitely seen her home country change (for starters, you rarely see whales anymore). When she opened ION Adventure Hotel in 2013, it was one of very few boutique properties in Iceland. From her extensive travels working as a flight attendant, Sverrisdóttir saw the opportunity to bring a new standard of dwelling to her home country, which—especially outside the capital— really had only three-star accommodations.