The best northern lights tour in Reykjavik: nine ranked, one answer

Most rankings of aurora tours sort by price or by star rating. Both are the wrong first cut, because they compare tours that are doing genuinely different things.

The first question is whether the vehicle can change plan late in the evening. Icelandic cloud is patchy: on most nights part of the country is clear and the whole job of an aurora guide is knowing which part and being able to get there. A coach with eighty people cannot. A minibus with twelve can.

The second question is what else you are buying. Photographs you cannot take yourself. A lava tunnel before dark. A whale in the afternoon. Those are real reasons to pay more and they have nothing to do with your odds.

Ratings are the operators’ own numbers on GetYourGuide, shown as published. We do not write reviews and we do not average other people’s into a score of our own.

Twelve people instead of eighty, a guide whose job is to read the cloud map all evening, and a vehicle that can act on what they read. That is the entire argument and it costs twenty-three dollars more than the coach.

It has 3,126 reviews at 4.4, which for an aurora tour is a good score — these ratings are dragged down by nights when nothing appeared, which is nobody’s fault and shows up in every operator’s numbers on this coast.

The one weakness is that “small group” is not a regulated term. Read the listing for an actual number before you assume twelve.

The coach at $71 has 14,873 reviews, more than everything else on this page put together. Hot cocoa, cinnamon buns, a free repeat if the sky stays shut, and the cheapest seat in the city. It is a good night out. It also drives to a place decided at six in the evening and stays there.

The photography tour at $155 is rated 4.8 across 446 reviews, the highest score in Reykjavik. A photographer travels with the group, the portraits under the aurora are included, and there are Viking costumes if you want them. You are buying pictures you cannot take on a phone, and the reviews say people got them.

Nothing here is bad. Every tour on this page is rated 4.2 or higher by hundreds or thousands of people, in a category where a blank sky costs you a star through no fault of the operator.

But two things get bought for the wrong reason. The first is the cheapest coach seat, bought by someone who then discovers the vehicle cannot move when the cloud does. It is not a bad ticket; it is the wrong ticket for someone who came specifically for the aurora and has two nights.

The second is a fifteen-hour combination day bought by someone who wanted an aurora evening. By the time the aurora hunt starts you have been on a coach since eight in the morning, and standing in the cold at eleven at night is a different proposition when you are already exhausted.