Welcome to Iceland Guest - Your Online Travel Guide.

Iceland Guest is an information website for your travel to Iceland. On this site you can get all the tourist information you need for your vacation in Iceland. We hope that you will find this online travel guide useful in planning your holidays in Iceland.

About Iceland
Iceland is a refreshingly unconventional travel destination. The Icelandic nature is unspoilt, exotic and mystical with its spouting geysers, active volcanoes, tumbling waterfalls, towering mountains, vast lava plains and magical lakes. Iceland’s fjords, glaciers and highland plains present visitors with some of the most beautiful and enchanting places they will ever see, as well as a rare feeling of utter tranquillity.

For travelers on a quest for action, Iceland’s pristine nature offers great potential for outdoor activities such as snowmobiling, horse riding, cave exploring, hiking, swimming, skiing, river rafting, kayaking and mountain safaris on modified four-wheel drives, to name but a few. Iceland supports a surprisingly diverse Nordic flora and fauna and is an ideal place for ornithology enthusiasts, while also offering some of the world’s best whale watching destinations.

About Reykjavik
Reykjavík sometimes feels like a cosmopolitan capital and a tiny seaside village - all wrapped up in one. But Reykjavík has the best of both worlds; the qualities of a modern, forward-looking society complemented by a close connection to Iceland‚s beautiful and unspoilt nature.

Reykjavík’s legendary nightlife is bolstered by plentiful cultural and social happenings in addition to an abundance of first-class restaurants. The size of Reykjavik city centre is also limited enough to allow for easy navigation by foot. Reykjavík has been described as a young and daring city that is characterized by strong contrasts. Conveniently small, clean and safe, it is more or less free from the major problems that haunt many other capitals. Big city events are frequent, the winter lights festival finished recently with thousands of participants and more tourist at this time of the year than we are used to.

in Focus

17.4.2007

Still Little Price Reduction at Restaurants

Still Little Price Reduction at Restaurants According to the Public Federation of Iceland (ASÍ), the VAT reduction and abolition of excise taxes on groceries from March 1 have delivered good results in price reduction at supermarkets, but not in restaurants.

“They are not delivering results,” Henný Hinz, project leader at ASÍ told Morgunbladid. She explained the seven percent VAT reduction should have resulted in an almost nine percent drop in restaurant prices, but they have only dropped by 3.2 percent.

“We wanted to see more reduction in the last measurements of the consumer price index. […] The change in VAT should have been visible in consumer prices,” Hinz said.

“Most had hoped people would react this month, but nothing is happening and that is very regrettable,” Hinz concluded. At this time last month reports revealed that restaurants had not lowered their prices as much as they should have.

There is no legal way to enforce price reductions despite the VAT cut and abolition of excise taxes.

According to ASÍ’s research, not all supermarket chains have reduced their prices equally; 10-11 reduced their prices the least, by 4.4 percent, while 11-11 reduced their prices the most, by 8.5 percent.

But Hinz said it may take a few months for the VAT reduction and abolition of excise taxes to deliver full results and she said she is happy with how much prices have been lowered already.

ASÍ investigated by how much the supermarket chains Hagkaup, Nóatún, Kjarval, 10-11 and 11-11 had reduced their prices between March 1 and February 1.

Source: Iceland Review (www.icelandreview.com).

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