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by ixtli
2550 days ago
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I hate to sound cynical but the reason it seems like everyone knows someone who's gone to Iceland in the past 5 years is because the government has been heavily subsidizing flights and hotels to this exact end. There really was no other outcome :( Also the government only needs to levy a 1000 USD fine on a few people in order to stop a lot of this because the American press will seize on it immediately. |
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WOW air, the budget airline that was offering cheap flights from the US is now bankrupt. They were able to offer the flights so cheap because they were operating at a loss trying to take market share away from Icelandair.
The biggest problem has been the government's inability to control the tourism industry, which more or less runs amok, taking all of the profit and contributing little back other than general tax revenue.
Members of parliment have proposed various solutions to deal with tourism, but most often there is no agreement, and no concrete actions put into place.
Basically there are laws that prevent the government from taxing people differently, so it's illegal to tax tourists different than locals, so it becomes difficult to take advantage of tourism money for government to create facilities, hire people, build infrastructure, etc.
It's happening, but it's not what it could be.
Various "nature pass" fees have been proposed, hotel taxes, flight taxes, etc.. but no matter what the idea is someone is always against it, which has made curbing the situation hard.
With WOW air just disappearing recently, the economy is still adjusting to that.