Thiscaveat is especially important for those months and flights where the lowest prices were found at the last minute – a month or single weeks before departure. The lowest prices in such a situation were indeed very low, but they applied only to single dates of departure and return. On the other hand, prices for other days were sometimes even many times higher. If you have predetermined departure dates, hunt for a good price, but don’t count on the lowest ones.
Airfares are a large part of the total cost of a trip to Iceland. How much they are and how these prices are shaped are presented in the article When – and for how much – are the cheapest flights to Iceland. However, collecting and comparing prices is quite a complicated process, so for all clarity, below we present accurate information on HOW we collect this data.
Unfortunately, as always, the devil is in the details and the analysis of such an interesting topic could be conducted endlessly. At the same time, it is known, after all, that the situation in 2025 will probably not very accurately repeat that of 2024 or ’23. Therefore, when drawing conclusions from this study , it is worth looking at general price levels and their trends, rather than specific week numbers or exact prices. Nevertheless, it is certainly worth understanding exactly how we are doing this study (present tense, as we are still collecting more prices and will publish an update to the article in a while) in order to get the most benefit from it.
We study flights for about a week, shorter than 10h and without independent transfers
As in the headline – in our study we adopted three important criteria limiting the pool of flights whose prices we present.
First of all, we do not combine the cheapest departure for a given month with the cheapest arrival, but choose a pair that gives us a trip for about a week. To be precise: for 4 to 10 days. This is the most popular length of a trip to Iceland, but if you can extend your trip as much as you like, you have a better chance of finding super-low prices. In addition, we reject flights lasting more than 10 hours. OK – sometimes we accept flights of up to 12 hours if the price is really attractive. However, we never accept more than 1 connecting flight. Long flights with multiple connecting flights are very tiring, de facto reduce our “net time” of the trip considerably, and often involve additional costs of the trip itself. Just eating at airports can cost us a lot, and if an overnight stay is required, then the cost of travel increases “catastrophically”.We also reject all flights that require an independent transfer at a connecting flight. The idea is that you then have to collect your luggage and re-transfer it yourself. You are then realizing two completely separate flights that (formally) have nothing in common. Even if no change of airport is required, such a transfer not only makes the trip longer and more unpleasant, but is also a major risk factor. After all, each leg of such a trip can be canceled or moved to a completely different time by the airline. Any flight can also simply be late. And transferring on your own means that the responsibility for making it to your connecting flight falls entirely on you. If you accept this risk then sometimes you can find better prices (especially for travel with luggage), but we strongly advise against this strategy.
We only present the single lowest available price
Usually there are several or even a dozen different flights available at fairly similar prices. However, as a rule, in our survey we select and present only the one lowest one. Not some average of prices, not their median, dominant or other “measure of central tendency,” but simply the lowest of the available prices.
Therefore, if in a given week and for a given month of departure we managed to find a flight for 500 PLN, the chart will show just 500 PLN, regardless of whether there were many flights at this price or just this one. It is also irrelevant here whether the prices of other flights were, for example, between 520 and 580 PLN or between 850 and 1390 PLN. In our survey and on the chart, we will show only that one PLN 500 anyway.
Thiscaveat is especially important for those months and flights where the lowest prices were found at the last minute – a month or single weeks before departure. The lowest prices in such a situation were indeed very low, but they applied only to single dates of departure and return. On the other hand, prices for other days were sometimes even many times higher. If you have predetermined departure dates, hunt for a good price, but don’t count on the lowest ones.
We compare the prices of all carriers
As we mentioned in the introduction, the prices for a flight without luggage were practically always the lowest with one of the so-called low-cost carriers, that is, de facto with Wizzair and sometimes, although clearly less often, with Play Airlines. However, with the prices for a flight with luggage were sometimes different. For each month of departure, for flights with baggage, in more than half of the cases the lowest price was offered by SAS or Lufthansa, i.e. the most traditional airlines. These flights take longer and require a connecting flight, but first of all they are sometimes even half the price of the “low-cost” carriers, and secondly they do not arrive at midnight.
Unfortunately, an important, and rather inconvenient, feature of all cheap flights from Poland to Iceland is that they arrive at around midnight. In contrast, the return flight starts around midnight and ends in Poland in the morning. Meanwhile, traditional carriers almost always take off and arrive during the day. Sometimes it’s worth taking these differences into account, as overnight flights can make the overall organization of an on-site trip more difficult.
Check prices on different days of the week
On the Internet you can find various opinions on what day of the week it is best to look for low flight prices. This is supposed to be related, on the one hand, to the launch of new promotions by airlines, and, on the other hand, to the uploading or release of new prices or entire price lists. Unfortunately, in detail, these opinions are not consistent or homogeneous. Some people recommend checking prices on Wednesday just after midnight, others on Monday or Sunday. In addition, such opinions are basically never backed up by anything more than the assertion that “I know it” or that “it always works for me.” We do not deny such opinions; it is certainly good to be one of the first customers to “catch on” to such a new promotional price list. But in our survey, we didn’t notice that the prices somehow particularly depended on the day of the week we check them. It seems that when an airline releases a new promotion, such tickets tend to sell out within a few days rather than a few hours. So it’s certainly important to look for tickets in the right period, but we didn’t see the day of the week (or the hour!) play a role here. We also don’t see a correlation between prices and whether we check them in incognito mode and via VPN, or just, plain and simple, without any additional ‘anonymization’. And yet, as the study shows, it’s not as if the lines are dictating higher and higher prices to us as a result…. There may be lines that try to manage the prices they offer in this way, but if so, it looks like today’s standard privacy protections built into popular browsers thwart their efforts very effectively.
We use a price comparison engine
One thing that works as well as possible is to use a convenient price comparison engine. We recommend Kayak, but there are, of course, more similar solutions. With a search engine, it is much easier to quickly and efficiently find the best price for the flight you are interested in. Comparing prices on your own at two low-cost airlines and several traditional ones would be a lot of work. Besides, there’s a chance that the aforementioned mechanism for inflating prices for returning customers works just when you check prices repeatedly directly on the carrier’s website. It’s possible that the search engine acts as a kind of anonymizing filter here.
What about the months not presented in the survey
Due to limited resources, we decided not to survey every month of the year. But we see no reason why the “missing” months should not resemble their neighbors included in the survey. If you are looking for tickets for April, their prices will certainly behave similarly to those of March and May. They will probably be some sort of their average or resultant. Similarly, if you are interested in November – check the prices of October and December. The only exception here is probably July, which does not resemble its “neighbors” at all. According to our observations, flight prices for June behave more like those for May, and prices for August and September behave more like those for October (and overall similar to May). July should be some indication of late-June and August prices, but from our observations, it rather seems that just this month is exceptional, the only one, besieged and simply the most expensive.
What about tickets for flights with hand luggage only
For the sake of transparency of the results, we also decided not to track the prices of tickets for flights with hand luggage. On the one hand, this was driven precisely by the transparency of the results and saving the time needed to conduct the survey. On the other, the belief that the prices of such tickets would be somewhere between those for a flight without luggage and those for a flight with checked baggage. From the third, finally, that the surcharges for hand luggage, like tickets for a flight without luggage, actually apply only to the so-called low-cost airlines, and at the same time are relatively fixed (for a flight between selected airports). If you are looking for tickets for a flight with hand luggage alone, you still have to look for them in the same period when tickets for a flight without luggage are cheapest. However, be careful that the price for a flight with a cabin suitcase does not turn out to be higher than the price for a flight with checked baggage. Because such a situation is as possible – not with the same carrier, of course, but, for example, with a traditional competitor. In addition, if you are flying in several people, it seems to be a better idea to buy tickets with checked baggage for some people, and tickets without baggage for the rest, than to buy tickets with hand luggage for everyone. According to our observations, it will usually be cheaper that way.
