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.
Kaupthing Bank (www.kaupthing.com) is a northern European bank offering integrated financial services to companies, institutional investors and individuals. These services include corporate banking, investment banking, capital markets services, asset management and comprehensive wealth management for private banking clients.
Kaupthing Bank was formed by the merger of Kaupthing and Búnaðarbanki Íslands in 2003 and is the largest bank in Iceland. The bank operates in ten countries, including all the Nordic countries (Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, Norway and Sweden), Luxembourg, Switzerland, the UK and the US. The bank is the eighth largest bank in the Nordic countries in terms of market capitalization and it employs over 2,500 people and maintains 36 retail branches in Iceland.
In recent years, Kaupthing Bank has been one of the fastest growing financial groups in Europe. The Bank’s expansion has been achieved through sound organic growth and a number of strategic acquisitions. The most recent acquisitions are those of FIH Erhvervsbank in Denmark in 2004 and in 2005 the UK bank Singer & Friedlander, now Kaupthing Singer & Friedlander. The aim of this growth is to further enhance the Bank’s ability to provide comprehensive services to its client base in the UK, Scandinavia and elsewhere in northern Europe.
As of December 31st 2006, the bank had a total assets of €42.9 billion. In 2006, it ranked number 1,006 on Forbes Global 2000, which is an annual ranking of top 2000 corporations in the world by Forbes magazine. The same year, it ranked number 177 (up by 34 seats from 2005) on the list of the world's largest banks composed annually by the international finance magazine The Banker.
In 2006, Kaupthing Bank had net earnings of €971 million, compared with €659 million in 2005. About 70% of the operating profit originated outside of Iceland (30% in Iceland, 34% in the UK, 26% in Scandinavia, 8% in Luxembourg and 2% in other countries).