British Airways Starting Flights To Iceland

Yes! Iceland is on my travel bucket list and I had noticed the same thing that you mentioned - not a lot of great ways to redeem miles to get there.

One way that I'm sure you know about but I didn't see mentioned is that you can use United miles to book a flight on SAS to Norway (and then continuing on)

while i think this is exciting for Europeans, for US travelers this is a major detour... i'd rather suffer on WOW air.

Delta offers seasonal (summer) service via B757 JFK/KEF. Iceland Air recently announced partnership with jetBlue.

BA operated to KEF in the past (out of LGW around 2006 or so IIRC), but the route did abysmally and they cut it after about a year.

I went to Iceland last month and it was amazing. I'm already thinking of going in summer(may be no this summer). This is a good opportunity though wowair is not bad, esp the flight from BOS was not full when I went and every passenger had a row of 3 seats for him/herself. I'm intrigued by United/SAS through Norway as Norway is also on my list to places to go.

Iceland has only been remotely affordable for the past 5 years or so since their economy collapsed and the Krona's value was cut in half. While it's still comparitively expense i'm sure affordability has helped increase foreign tourism.

Iceland is a great place to go, but if you're from the US you're much better off taking the 4-5 hour direct route from BOS than going all the way through the UK.

...also you'll pay more in taxes on a reward ticket on BA than you would for the entire flight on WOW or Icelandair

I have trouble identifying the most valuable program for myself. I have Amex Everyday Preferred, and I also want to have either Chase or Citi, but I don't know which one to choose. The first question is that is it still worth to hold Avios points even though it devalued its program? I mean for short flies. I know it has fuel charge. However, I also feel that Singapore program is not lucrative enough for me because I'm not a big spender. The last question is that is there any cards other than Amex provide Aeroplan transfer? Could you give me some suggestions please? Thank you very much!!!

Please, be honest, you didn´t go to Iceland and Portugal. It has been almost a year since you allegedly went there and we haven´t seen any signs of those reports. Instead of going to KEF, you went to KGF (Karaganda Sary-Arka, Kazakhstan) from POR (Pori, Finland) and you are ashamed to blame those people from PointsPros.

@Dan @Sriki I would more than recommend doing it. SAS however does fly to Oslo from Newark and flies with an A330 with a brand new cabin with direct aisle access in Biz vis a vis Uniteds ex-continental 752.

It's KEFlavik airport you doozy , not Rekjavik . God , does anybody ever know anything about aviation in the media ?

Commenter Ben is right. Lucky, I know you like to piss on Delta, but they're worth a bullet point on your list of airlines serving Iceland from the USA, at least! (I'd say since you can redeem miles on Delta and they flight nonstop from the United States, it's by far the best way to get to Iceland on miles... who wants to fly all the way to London and double back another third of the way?)

From NYC, I barely even find it worth forking out the extra 30k AA miles to upgrade from off-peak coach to biz class on an award flight to London. I'm certainly not gonna overshoot Iceland by a thousand miles, hang out at Heathrow waiting for a connection, and then backtrack another thousand miles. I'd rather pay cash and spend 4-5 hours non-stop in coach.

Surprised the service is from LHR not LGW. As you mentioned most of their leisure destinations are from LGW. I personally think most O&D traffic on this route will be from the UK. Of course there is some demand from North America for this route, but with Icelandair’s and Wow’s competitive fares from many cities in NA in addition to Icelandair’s code share agreement with jetBlue, and the fact that this destination is mostly leisure focused I do not see how this would justify the use of one of BA’s expensive slots at LHR.

I visited Reykjavik last year and agree it is a cool place to visit. I flew Icelandair due to their stop over policy, where one can stopover in Iceland for a few days in route to Europe. Sometimes a cheap fare and flexible stopover can make forgoing some useful points worth it.

The more service options to Iceland the better. Love Icelandair, but since they cut ties with AS, it's not possible for me to use points. It's nice to have a point option for spontaneous trips.

Lucky,
I was really looking forward to your TR for Iceland, but I guess it's not going to happen. Could you please go again, but this time give us a TR?

I believe BA used to fly to KEF, so this is a nice thing to see. However, I can't imagine flying to KEF from LHR when I could fly from SEA directly from KEF on Icelandair no matter how cruddy the pitch and that I need to pay for the food. I'm a fan of the direct routing these days. Then again, I flew from SEA to LHR to CPH to SFJ a few years ago because it was the best routing I could manage with miles.

I recommend that your readers leave the KEF/REY area and go west and north. There is a lot of Iceland worth seeing.

@ Mr_Tudball -- Can still publish the original trip report, hopefully. Have another trip report rolling out tomorrow, at least. 🙂

@ Makalo -- Starwood Preferred Guest (and their AmEx) is also a transfer partner with Aeroplan. Singapore KrisFlyer is a great program, depending on what you're trying to do, given that their program is one of the few ways to book a premium cabin award on Singapore flights. Citi and Chase are both great products, I guess it depends which categories you spend most in, since their bonus categories might be the deciding factor.

"I’m......frankly a bit surprised it took British Airways this long to add such a service."

More of a 'relaunch' rather than 'add'. Most recently, BA served KEF between 2006 and 2008.

You're excited about the Club Europe offering?

" Reykjavik is only a roughly two hour flight from London..." Ben did you even read the screenshots of the BA pages you took? It's 3hours 15 mins.

As this is a leisure destination I wonder if the TV series Fortitude, filmed in Iceland, has any impact?

Also is the Icelandic economy picking up? If so maybe it will pick up traffic originating in Iceland and connecting through Heathrow to the east and south of the world?