Reykjavík Grapevine - 06.01.2012, Page 28

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The Reykjavík Grapevine
Issue 1 — 2012 Seriously, read these thoughts. They are most inspiring
and/or thought provoking. 20.91
Average price for a 3 room apartment (90 sqm)
in Reykjavík, in millions. Up from 19.35 in 2010.
Iceland | Travel
pioneering Iceland’s Wild West
Arctic Adventures Founder and CEO Torfi G. Yngvason interviewed
Words
Anna Andersen
photo
Alísa Kalyanova
When Torfi G. Yngvason started
working at a river rafting company
in 2001, Iceland was host to 300.000
tourists annually—compared to
540.000 today—and hardly any of
them were going rafting.
“There’s been a huge increase in tour-
ists since I started, but the main thing is
that these 300.000 people were different
than the folks we see today,” Torfi tells
me. “The big change happened when
the budget airlines, like Iceland Ex-
press, started flying to Iceland and put-
ting pressure on Icelandair’s monopoly.
That’s when we got a new target market.
We kind of got our people to Iceland.”
Torfi is talking about the younger
and more adventurous tourist that he
has spent the last seven years cater-
ing to—from offering tonnes of action
packed tours though Arctic Adventures
to bringing downtown Reykjavík its first
hostel.
BORN RAFTING
In 2005, Torfi and his friend Jón Heiðar
Andrésson were working at different
rafting companies when they decided to
buy and merge them into a single com-
pany. “So rafting was the big ticket when
we started and it’s still kind of one of the
big tickets,” Torfi tells me.
In fact, they are still taking people
rafting on Hvítá River from the same
base that one of the companies they
bought had been using since 1983.
“You could say that in our early years
we were mainly selling rafting to Ice-
landers,” Torfi says. Rafting is one of the
few tours that Icelanders go on. Forty
percent of rafters are Icelanders, and
since 1983, they’ve taken 150.000 Ice-
landers, which is roughly half of today’s
population.
Torfi and Jón Heiðar used this cred-
ibility in rafting as a launch pad to create
the ultimate adventure company, which
now offers more than 136 different tours.
Arctic Adventures was the first to offer
many of these tours—like snorkelling Sil-
fra and rock climbing—and it is still the
only company offering other tours—like
sea kayaking out of Reykjavík.
It is Torfi’s job to dream up the tours.
When they issued their first brochure in
2005, Torfi says the tours reflected their
own talents and interests. “We looked
at ourselves and the crew that we hired
and someone said, ‘I’m a pretty good sea
kayaker, can we put that tour in there.’
Someone else said, ‘I’m interested in div-
ing, can we put a diving tour in there.’
So we made the brochure based on tal-
ents that were available and things we
thought were interesting,” Torfi says.
When they started there were few
requirements from the State. “We were
running tours that you would need ten
years of experience in New Zealand and
this and this many tours under supervi-
sion,” he says. “It was like the Wild West
and in many ways it’s still like that. When
we started we just did anything that
caught our fancy.”
GROWING Up
Torfi says their growing pains had noth-
ing to do with selling the tours, though it
wasn’t always smooth sailing. After re-
turning from a world tour in 2005, Torfi
had seen that there were always two
things you could do in any city: a bike
tour and a walking tour.
“I thought it was a shoe in,” he says.
So they created a biking tour called,
‘Reykjavík on wheels,’ and bought all the
bikes and helmets, which he says was
one of the biggest investments in their
early years, and they created a walking
tour called, ‘Reykjavík Panoramic,’ which
was a hike up Esja mountain.
“We printed these tours in our bro-
chure, 50.000 copies, and I’m not exag-
gerating, we didn’t sell a single bike or
mountain hiking tour in the first year,”
Torfi says.
“In the second year we didn’t sell any
bike tours, but we got some people to go
hiking. By the third year, we had taken
200 people on the hike and nobody had
made it to the top except one Argen-
tinean couple. They had purchased the
cheapest tour from Arctic Rafting—we
were still called Arctic Rafting at the
time—and that was the Esja tour, the
hike. They went all the way to the top
because they thought they were hik-
ing to the boats and would have to raft
down again. They were the only clients
to make it to the top and then we took
the tours off the brochure.”
Torfi says the market just hadn’t
taken the leap in 2008. “We were a bit
ahead of our time with something that
was very established elsewhere,” he
says. “Now there are more people com-
ing to Iceland—more active, young peo-
ple that might have gone to a cheaper
destination to do these activities.”
Torfi was twenty years old when he
became CEO of the company, and he
says their growing pains mostly involved
growing up and learning to be disci-
plined in running the company, which
grew from seven employees to 127 in
just seven seasons. “It was growing up
in a company that grew faster than you,”
he says.
During the first few years, they would
simply close the office when the sum-
mer season was over. “You guided in
May, June, July, August, and September.
Then you put bindings on snowboards in
October, November and December, and
a bit into January,” Torfi says, “and then
you explore the world from January un-
til May—spend the season skiing in the
Alps or kayak or climbing in Asia.”
Torfi says they knew how to guide,
which parts of Iceland we wanted to
show, and what they wanted to do, but
they had to learn the business aspect of
running the company, going from some-
thing that was just for fun to an enter-
prise with lots of people counting on
them for jobs and salaries.
“We’re still learning—learning about
finances, human resources—stuff that
we didn’t know anything about,” he
says, “but I don’t think you can start an
Adventure company any other way. You
have to start with that, and then learn
the boring stuff.”
LOOKING AHEAD
Arctic Adventures now has bureaus in
four foreign countries, a hostel and an
outdoors store in Reykjavík, and they are
expanding around the country with hubs
all over Iceland. They are in the pro-
cess of building Akureyri’s first hostel:
Akureyri Backpackers.
He says Arctic Adventures plans to
continue growing their day tour and ac-
tivity business, but to focus on expand-
ing tourism outside of the 100-kilometre
radius around Reykjavík. For instance,
they are focusing a lot on Skaftafell,
which is Europe’s largest national park
and contains Vatnajökull, which is also
Europe’s largest glacier.
Believing that most people come to
visit Iceland rather than Reykjavík, Torfi
says the biggest problem that the tour-
ism industry is facing is a lack of infra-
structure outside of Reykjavík.
“Tourism is growing around Reykja-
vík, but the countryside is sold out,” he
says. “Infrastructure and accommoda-
tion is not being built at the same speed
as in Reykjavík. We need to more beds,
restaurants, pathways, and toilets.”
This brings us to the topic of how
to accommodate for the ever-growing
number of tourists coming to Iceland
and wanting to see its unspoiled nature.
It has long been debated whether Ice-
land should start charging entrance to
its popular natural attractions.
“We’re not going to become Bhu-
tan, with its quota on tourists,” he says.
“We have to face the fact that we live in
Europe and we have an agreement that
people can come here, and that they are
one of our biggest sources of revenue.”
Thus, Torfi believes that Iceland
should focus its efforts on develop-
ing the country’s tourism industry. “If
you like things to be really rustic, some
things will change, but this is still the
way that will have the least economic
impact. If we’re going to match the
forecasted 12 percent growth in tour-
ism revenue with aluminium smelters,
we are going to have to build one every
year, and aluminium smelters come with
power plants,” he says.
“It’s a question of which you prefer—
pathways in Skaftafell and ropes at Gull-
foss or another aluminium smelter? You
have to think of it in these terms. This
has miniscule environmental impact.
We can make money from Iceland as it
is today by wrapping it up in a way that
people don’t ruin it when they visit.”.
“We printed these tours
in our brochure, 50.000
copies, and I’m not
exaggerating, we didn’t sell
a single bike or mountain
hiking tour in the first
year”