Iceland Family Holidays & Breaks

Take the Family is a travel agency specialising in active, adventure and luxury holidays. Your personal travel advisor will create the perfect Iceland holiday for your family, with expert advice and dedicated support throughout.

Choose Iceland for your family holiday

Take the Family is a specialist UK-based family travel agency that can create a family holiday in Iceland that ticks all your boxes.

Why visit Iceland as a family?

Iceland is one of the world’s most awe-inspiring places – even the most blasé of children will be intrigued and enchanted by its dramatic landscapes of forests, glaciers, lava formations, waterfalls, volatile geysers and bubbling mud pools.

Discover this vast natural playground characterised by the purity of its air and its abundance of space – the perfect setting for outdoor pursuits ranging from horse-trekking to swimming in geothermal pools, as well as certain kookier activities running the gamut from lava caving or snorkelling between tectonic plates to elf-spotting.

Book your family holiday to Iceland

Book a family holiday in Iceland with Take the Family and enjoy a trip that will create memories to last a lifetime. Contact one of our travel advisors now and let's discuss your dream Icelandic adventure.

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Things to do in Iceland with kids

Iceland Outdoor Activities and Adventures

Geothermal pools

Bathe in a geothermal pool – it's part of daily life in Iceland. Pools around Reykjavik include the Laugardalslaug thermal baths, with the country’s largest outdoor swimming pool, an 86m waterslide, mud baths, steam baths and treatments. Or the most famous geothermal spa is the Blue Lagoon near Reykjavik, where black sand and lava fields surround a 5,000m2 pool with an average temperature of 37°c, rich in mineral salts and algae.

Horse-trekking

Go horse-trekking on a pure-bred Viking horse. Exclusive to Iceland – they’re the perfect size for children and have a gentle temperament and smooth gait. Tours of the countryside can include highlands and sandy beaches.

Wildlife spotting

Head to the north for whale-watching and more around Akureyri (nearby Húsavík is Europe’s whale-watching capital), or travel by converted schooner to Flatey Island with its puffins. Húsavík also has a whale museum. See our feature on the best things to do in north Iceland with kids.

Iceland Natural Attractions

Geysers

Ooh and aaah at the country's dramatic geysers. Geysir, 125km from Reykjavik, was the original erupting hot spring that gave its name to the very word ‘geyser’; though it’s now inactive, nearby Stokkur still projects boiling water up to a height of 35m every 10 minutes, and its surroundings boast bubbling pools, steam vents and springs turned psychedelic colours by algae and mineral deposits.

Gullfoss

Marvel at Gullfoss (‘Golden Falls’) waterfall about 150km north-east of Reykjavik. Together with the geysers and Thingvellir (a UNESCO listed National Park around Iceland’s largest natural lake), this forms the popular ‘Golden Circle Circuit’.

Vatnajokull National Park

Discover Vatnajokull National Park, Europe’s biggest, packed with grazing reindeer and natural wonders including Iceland’s highest mountain, Öræfajökull, its country’s most active volcano, Grímsvötn, and Europe’s most powerful waterfall, Dentifoss. There are shorter hiking routes for families. On the edge of the national park, visit spectacular Jökulsárlón glacier lagoon, Iceland's top sight.

Iceland History and Culture

Perlan

Head for Perlan, a domed building with spectacular 360° views over Reykjavik, and for the Saga Museum retelling Iceland’s rich history as recorded in the sagas through historical tableaux. In summer, there’s living history on offer at the Arbæjarsafn Rejkjavik Museum, with historic buildings brought here from around the island hosting farming and crafts demonstrations, food tastings, and the like.

Elf spotting

Spot elves – if you’re clairvoyant. Many Icelanders believe in a ‘hidden world’, to which their country’s otherworldly lava landscape lends itself – many rock stacks and formations are said to be trolls petrified for committing bad deeds. (Look out, too, for the alfhol or wooden elfhouses in most Icelanders’ gardens).

A Viking pony in eastern Iceland

Icelandic Food: What families can eat in Iceland

Icelandic cuisine

Food in Iceland embraces lots of fish and also lamb from the sheep that graze the mountains. You might also see dolphin, puffin, reindeer and horse on some menus.

Seafood

Seafood in Iceland includes lobster, shrimp, herring, haddock, plaice and halibut, as well as hákarl – rotten shark meat often washed down with brennivín, a local schnapps.

Dairy

Icelanders also eat a lot of dairy products, including skyr (like yogurt) and mysa (whey), plus wild berries and traditional breads and pastries.

Hot dogs

Don’t miss a hot dog from Baejarins Beztu, a tiny kiosk that is such a local institution that Bill Clinton came here when he was in town – the Full Monty includes mustard, ketchup, and raw and fried onions.

The Northern Lights over a pagan monument

When to go to Iceland with kids

The best time to visit Iceland with kids depends on what you want to do. Despite its name, Iceland has a temperate climate because of the Gulf Stream, with fairly mild winters and cool summers. January, surprisingly, can be warmer in some areas of the country than in New York. This all means that Iceland is a year-round destination for family holidays,

Winter Holidays in Iceland

Some outdoor pursuits in Iceland (the likes of glacier hiking, ice climbing, ice caving and snowmobiling) come into their own in winter (although some are possible year-round), and you might also be lucky enough to see the Northern Lights (read our feature on an Iceland family holiday in winter).

Spring and Summer Holidays in Iceland

Spring brings the beginning of longer days (which culminate in the ‘midnight sun’ – 24-hour daylight – in the height of summer) and of the main travel season – scroll down for our features on Iceland with kids in summer.

Spring and autumn are both also good times for festivals – locals load up on culture when the days are shorter.

An ice cave in Iceland

How to get to Iceland from the UK

Flights from the UK to Iceland

There are direct UK to Reykjavik flights taking 2–3 hours from London and some regional airports, or you can also fly to Akureyri, seasonally, from London or Manchester.

Transport Options in Iceland

Internal flights

Once you’re in Iceland, overland travel can be difficult if not impossible in winter, so if you need to go any distance you’ll be reliant on internal flights.

Car hire

Because of the terrain, there are no trains here, so to explore you’ll need to hire a car – or, at least in the case of some of the most popular natural attractions, join a tour. You can also hire motorhomes, but the road conditions here can be on the rough side. We can include motorhome or car hire in the bespoke family holiday we create for you.

All this said, this is a smallish country, measuring only about 500km across, so you won’t ever be covering vast distances, even if you do choose to branch out from the capital.

Iceland

Hilton Reykjavik Nordica

Stracta Hotel Hella

Hotel Reykjavík Centrum

Brimnes Bungalows

Vestri Pétursey

Iceland Self-Drive Family Adventure

Iceland Family Journey: Geysers, Glaciers & Fjords

Iceland Family Adventure Fly-drive