76% Drop In Tourism Last Year

Tourists who came to Iceland last year were 76% fewer than the year before, according to a new report from Landsbanki.

According to their report, some 2 million people visited Iceland in 2019, compared to about 478,000 last year. There have not been as few tourists in Iceland since 2010.

The greatest decrease in tourists came from Russia and the United States, where in both cases 89% fewer people from those countries visited Iceland. Danes, however, were somewhat less deterred, with only a 53% reduction and in fact the smallest reduction of any nationality.

Americans comprise some of the largest groups of tourists to visit Iceland, making their decreasing numbers felt especially in Iceland’s tourism industry. Landsbanki predicts that numbers will only improve slightly this year, as they forecast about 650,000 tourists to Iceland in 2021.

These predictions, of course, may be subject to change depending on the state of the pandemic in Iceland, and in the world at large, in the months to come.

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