Photo by Andrea Schaffer

In the first 6 months of 2014, 402.000 tourists came through Keflavík airport, 90.000 more than in the same period last year.

While this is good news, the Director General of the Icelandic Tourist Board, Ólöf Ýrr Atladóttir, told RÚV yesterday that it there were reasons for cautious optimism.

“I think that there has been too rapid an increase in tourists,” said Ólöf Ýrr. “I don’t think we’ve been able to meet the demands of this increase. I think it would be better for us to avoid our future guests being put off from visiting us and in order to avoid that and avoid bad reviews it would be better if this increase [in visitors] had been a little smaller. That way we could build ourselves up, get an overview of and a strategy for the future protection of our nature. We could manage to examine more closely the tourism sector, not just the hotel rooms but the careers, the education of people in the industry which is extremely important.”