ABSTRACT

Often portrayed in both tourism and the popular imagination as a wild land of fire and ice (Sæþórsdóttir et al. 2011; Witze and Kanipe 2014), Iceland has become a nature-based tourism destination that has experienced extremely rapid growth in visitor arrivals since 2007. The tourist industry is economically significant and provided 12–13% of total exports between 1995 and 2009. However, since then, it has become a core economic sector and now earns over 25% of foreign exchange earnings (Statistics Iceland 2015).