How I ended up on the ice
I came to glaciers by accident, the way most of the best things happen. I was a situation photographer working the South Coast of Iceland in 2016, hired for a wedding that fell through two weeks before the date. The refund came on a Friday and I was in a car heading east by Sunday morning with a half-tank of fuel, a tent I had never tested, and a borrowed pair of crampons rattling in the trunk.
The first time I stepped onto Sólheimajökull I did not know what I was looking at, and I did not really understand it until the second season, or maybe the third. The thing about glacier ice is that it reads differently in every kind of light. In flat overcast the blue goes electric. In low sun the ridges turn into calligraphy. In rain it just looks grey and dangerous, which it often is. You learn to read the surface the way a sailor reads the sea, and you learn fast, because the weather does not give you long.
That was eight seasons ago. Since then I have worked on guides' boats across Jökulsárlón, joined heli-hike operations out of Franz Josef and Fox Glacier more times than I can count, walked the medial moraines of Vatnajökull in November and again in May, and watched three of the ice caves I photographed in 2019 collapse into rubble by 2023. Glaciers change. The honest ones on this site are the ones who tell you which way.
What this site actually is
GlacierIceTours.com is my working notebook. I have been on roughly two hundred glacier and ice cave tours across Iceland and New Zealand over the last eight seasons, including about a hundred and forty as a paying customer and the rest as a tag-along with operators I was considering for a commission. Every recommendation on this site comes out of that record.
The point of the site is narrow. I do not list every glacier tour on Earth. I list the ones I have actually done, the ones I would book again, and the honest reasons I would not book the others. When I write that a tour is worth the money, that is a real answer. When I write that a tour is a glorified bus ride with a photo stop, that is also a real answer, and I have written both kinds more than once.
I also write a lot about weather and cancellation risk, because that is the part of glacier travel that the booking pages never mention. that a meaningful percentage of glacier tours get cancelled. On Fox Glacier in winter the figure is brutal. On the Vatnajökull outlet glaciers in shoulder season it is also brutal. The weather decides, not you, and the operator you pick decides how that reality gets handled. I rank that as heavily as the scenery.
My review policy
Three rules, no exceptions.
No free tours. If I at the reviewing a tour, I pay for it the way you would, at the same price, on the same booking page. I have paid full price for my partner's ticket and for my own on the same trip so I could watch an operator handle a real group with real weather risk, not a hosted media visit. If an operator offers comped tickets in exchange for coverage, I decline and book through the regular channel. If I cannot afford the tour I want to cover, I do not cover it.
No sponsored placements. No operator pays to be ranked higher on this site. I do not accept payment for reviews, for inclusion in any list, or for edits to existing articles. When I link to an operator, that link is a normal Viator affiliate link, and it does not change the order of my recommendations. A bad tour I have flagged stays flagged even when its affiliate revenue is good.
Weather honesty over salesmanship. If the forecast is against you on a given day, I would rather you keep your money and try again tomorrow than burn it on a whiteout for the sake of a confirmation email. I say that knowing it costs me bookings. It is still the right answer.
How this site makes money
GlacierIceTours.com is funded by affiliate commissions from Viator, the booking platform, paid when readers book a tour through one of my links. The affiliate partner ID is P00299531. If you click through and book, Viator pays me a small percentage of the booking value. It does not change the price you pay, and it does not change my recommendations.
I have thought hard about whether affiliate revenue can corrupt the writing. The answer is that it can, which is why the no-free-tours and no-sponsored-placements rules exist. Those rules are the firewall. When the commission rate changes, or when Viator promotes a tour I do not rate highly, I do not move it up the list. When a small operator who is better at what they do offers a lower commission than a big brand, the small operator wins. The links exist because I have to pay the rent and keep the domain registered. The opinions stay mine.
I also run ads on a small number of pages, through GoatCounter analytics only and a privacy-friendly ad partner. I keep the ad load light on purpose. Pages that load fast and read clean are more useful than pages that pay well.
What I will not do
I will not run sponsored "best of" posts. I will not publish a list of "top 10 glacier tours" that quietly buries the small operators who actually run the best trips. I will not pretend a tour is safe when it is not. I will not soften a cancellation story because the operator's affiliate revenue is high. And I will not write about a glacier I have not stood on, which is why this site covers Vatnajökull and the two New Zealand West Coast glaciers and almost nothing else.
Get in touch
I read every email that comes in through the site, though I cannot always reply fast during the autumn shoulder season when I at the out on the ice. If you have a specific tour question, the relevant country page is usually the fastest way to find an answer. If you have a correction, a tip, or a tour you think I should cover, the contact page is the place for that. If your tour got cancelled and you want to know whether to rebook or refund, I have written about that too.
I will leave you with the line I keep coming back to, because it has saved me more wasted days than any piece of camera gear: the weather decides, not you. Plan for it, build spare days around it, and pick an operator who treats weather honestly when it turns. The rest is just logistics.
Last updated: July 2026 · Sven Lindqvist