Vestmannaeyjar day tour: who it suits
Who should book the guided Westman Islands day, who should spend that day on the South Coast instead, and how to see puffins without the ferry.
Vestmannaeyjar, the Westman Islands, sit off the South Coast, a short ferry from Landeyjahöfn. Heimaey is the only inhabited one: a fishing town of about four thousand people wrapped around a harbour, with a volcano that erupted in 1973 still warm on the edge of it. In summer the cliffs fill with puffins. It’s one of the more distinctive days you can have on the South Coast. It’s also an expensive one, and it isn’t for everyone.
What the day is
Southcoast Adventure’s Vestmannaeyjar - The Westman Islands is eight hours at €498 per person, daily from 1 May to 1 October. We no longer list the twelve-hour coach day from Reykjavík that this guide used to cover, so this is the guided option we have. It does not start in Reykjavík: you meet at Brú on road 249, or they pick you up from a nearby place to stay, and drive 25 minutes to the ferry. Minimum age six, and the ferry fare is not mentioned in the listing, so ask what it includes before you pay.
On the island the listing runs a RIB speedboat trip past the sea caves, lunch at a local restaurant, an easy walk up Eldfell and the Eldheimar museum, which is built around one of the houses dug out of the 1973 ash. The island’s set pieces are close together: the Eldfell lava that buried a third of the town, the puffin cliffs at Stórhöfði, and a view across to Surtsey, the island that rose out of the sea in 1963.
The good bits are genuinely good. The eruption story is one of the strangest in modern Europe: five thousand people evacuated overnight by fishing boat, a lava flow stopped from closing the harbour by pumping seawater onto it for months, half the town dug out of ash and rebuilt. You walk across it. And the puffins on Stórhöfði are close and numerous from around mid-April to August; you watch them come and go from the grass above the cliff.
The honest downsides
The price. €498 per person is a lot for one island, and it is nearly four times the price of a South Coast coach day. You also need your own way to the meeting point, which for most visitors means a hire car or a taxi.
The sea. Landeyjahöfn is a shallow harbour that silts up; when the swell is wrong the ferry is cancelled or rerouted, and the tour with it. You get a refund or a new date, but if it was your one spare day, it’s gone. A RIB trip in rough water is a wet, bumpy ride.
And it’s summer only. From October the departures stop and the puffins are long gone.
Who should skip it
If your trip is four nights or fewer, spend the day on the coast instead. BusTravel Iceland’s South Coast Small Group Tour, ten hours from €128, gives you the waterfalls, the glacier and the black beach, the things you came to Iceland for the first time to see. Vestmannaeyjar is a second-visit day, or a sixth-day day.
If it’s the puffins you want and not the island, you don’t need a ferry. Reykjavik Sailors’ Puffin Express leaves the Old Harbour for the islands in the bay, one hour from €59, in summer. Fewer birds and further away than Stórhöfði, but it’s an hour, not a day.
Our honest take
Take the Vestmannaeyjar tour if you have six or more nights, you’ve already done the South Coast, it’s between May and August, you’re happy to drive to Brú, and the story of a town that fought a volcano appeals to you as much as the birds and the boat. On those terms it’s one of the better days on our list, at a price.
Skip it if any of those aren’t true. The tradeoff is blunt: this is an eight-hour, weather-dependent, €498 day for one island. For the right person that’s fair. For a first-time visitor with four days, it’s the wrong use of one of them.
