Glacier trips are available in Iceland the year round. But tours in wintertime depend on the weather and a nice ten hour day trip can easily change to a 24-hour marathon tour if conditions are not right. PIC jesusisland
A recent highly unscientific poll made by team Total Iceland among tourists on a packed glacier trip suggests that over half of the 60 people or so in that particular group came to Iceland on their own and made little or no plans ahead.
Which begs the question, should you book your Iceland trip or trips beforehand through a travel agent or a tour operator or just go completely commando; i.e. on your own and let the puzzles fall where they may?
In our humble opinion, and team Total Iceland has but its own opinion, this depends on how long you plan on staying.
Naturally, if you are adventurous by nature you go commando. This is fine and dandy with plenty of time and especially over summertime. Very possible at other times but if time is short your best bet is to book beforehand.
The reason for this is that over wintertime, even if tour operators tell you otherwise, tours are fewer and far between and the tourist industry as a whole is in low gear. You might just show up and find your favorite trip has waiting lists. Worse still, a bad weather day and we have a lot of those, can make joke of all your plans in an instant outside of the summer months.
Best case: you arrive without planning anything and try to haggle about prices for specific trips when you get here. Good luck with that as tour operators here would rather go empty than taking on passengers not paying the whole set price. In the event you will not gain by taking that route.
Overall, it is hard to recommend one or the other. Showing up and taking your chances is much more fun because then you go where life takes you but it´s also sad to arrive and find all the best trips are booked to the hilt.
Team Total Iceland recommends skipping the winter shit altogether. Take your skimpy ass over here in summertime and let life decide.
