Minibus & Jeep

A super jeep will not make the aurora appear. It makes more places reachable. The modified Land Rover Defenders and six-door Ford Excursions in this category run on 40 and 46 inch wheels, which puts them on gravel and mountain tracks that a 50-seat coach is stuck on the far side of. On a night when the one gap in the cloud sits up a track, that is the whole game. On a night when half of southwest Iceland is open sky, it buys a quieter group and a shorter wait at the roadside, which is worth something but not everything.

Coaches make the opposite trade. They are cheap, they are warm, and a few carry Wi-Fi and a toilet, which is less trivial than it sounds five hours into a January night. They are also slow to turn around and legally confined to sealed roads. Minibuses sit in between and are where most of this catalogue lives: sixteen to nineteen seats, a guide who talks with the group rather than at it through a microphone, and enough agility to change target twice in an evening.

Prices below are the lowest published adult rate for each departure, so a family of four will land higher. The median shared seat across all 60 Reykjavík departures we can price is 141 EUR, second cheapest of the nine destinations where we have enough departures to calculate one.

The spread is worth staring at. Sixty-eight euros at one end, 1,225 at the other, for the same phenomenon in the same sky on the same night. Eighteen times the price.

Price also fails to predict satisfaction. The cheapest departure in this list, a coach with no photographer and no ceremony around the hot chocolate, carries 4.8 out of 5. A four-hour super jeep at more than twice the money carries 4.1 across 271 reviews. Across all 36 departures and 9,060 reviews the weighted average is 4.6, and the scores below 4.5 turn up on coaches, jeeps and combinations in roughly equal measure. Whatever disappointed those travellers, it was not the vehicle. It was almost certainly the weather.

Nine of the 36 bolt a daylight tour onto the same night's hunt, usually at a discount on both halves, and they are the most misread products in the category. The pitch is efficiency. The reality is an eleven-hour day with a gap in the middle for a shower and dinner.

The pairings that work are the ones where the daylight half points the same way as the dark half. The Golden Circle does: Þingvellir, where the footpath drops into Almannagjá, a fissure on the western edge of the rift where the North American and Eurasian plates are pulling apart; the Geysir field, where Strokkur goes off every few minutes without anyone having to coax it; and Gullfoss, which uses up camera batteries. The Blue Lagoon combinations put you in 38-degree water at dusk and back on a bus by nine. And then there is the volcano version, which is the strangest thing on this page and the best argument Iceland has: a hike to an eruption site in the afternoon, the aurora the same night.

The one to think about twice is the eleven-hour version. If the sky closes at ten at night, you have spent an entire day to receive half a product.

Nearly every departure here says hotel pickup is included. In central Reykjavík that frequently means a numbered bus stop a few minutes' walk from your accommodation rather than your front door: the city restricts large coaches in the old centre, so operators use a network of designated stops instead. The stop number is on the voucher, and it is worth finding it in daylight. Pickup can start up to half an hour before the stated departure time and the bus does not wait, which is the most common way people miss an aurora tour they have already paid for. Smaller vehicles, meaning the jeeps, the private tours and most of the sixteen and nineteen-seat minibuses, do collect from the door.

Iceland's aurora season is set by darkness rather than by the sun. Reykjavík sits at 64°08′N, and from roughly mid-May to early August the sky never gets properly dark. Within the season, the question is how often the sky is usable multiplied by how many hours of real darkness there are to use it in.

December is the best month for a road hunt out of Reykjavík, which is worth saying loudly because it is the reverse of the advice that holds in Norway. In Tromsø, December is the worst month of the year. Iceland's cloud record barely moves across the season, so the darkness peak in midwinter arrives without a penalty attached, and it coincides with the months the Golden Circle combinations are at their most atmospheric.

September is the weakest, despite the best cloud figure of the year. There are 2.7 hours of astronomical darkness in a September night here, against 6.9 in December, and an eleven-hour combination tour in September spends its dark half in twilight.

One limit, stated because it argues against this ranking: it measures how much dark clear sky a month contains, not the chance the aurora does something inside it. Geomagnetic storms are close to twice as frequent at the equinoxes, favouring September and March. Even doubling September leaves it behind December here.